Background and career
Kristine Tsuya Yamaguchi (born July 12, 1971) is an American former competitive figure skater, author and philanthropist. A former competitor in women's singles, Yamaguchi is the 1992 Olympic champion, a two-time World champion (1991 and 1992), and the 1992 U.S. champion. In 1992, she became the first Asian American to win a gold medal in a Winter Olympic competition. As a pairs skater with Rudy Galindo, she is the 1988 World Junior champion and a two-time national champion (1989 and 1990). After Yamaguchi retired from competition in 1992, she performed in shows and participated in the professional competition circuit. She won the World Professional Figure Skating Championships four times in her career (1992, 1994, 1996 and 1997). In 2005, Yamaguchi was inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame, and in 2008, she became the celebrity champion in the sixth season of Dancing with the Stars. Yamaguchi is an author and has published five books. Dream Big, Little Pig!, for which she received the Gelett Burgess Children's Book Award, appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Yamaguchi was born on July 12, 1971, in Hayward, California, to Jim Yamaguchi, a dentist, and Carole (née Doi), a medical secretary. Yamaguchi is Sansei (a third-generation descendant of Japanese emigrants). Her paternal grandparents and maternal great-grandparents emigrated to the United States from Japan, originating from Wakayama Prefecture and Saga Prefecture. Yamaguchi's grandparents were sent to an internment camp during World War II, where her mother was born. Her maternal grandfather, George A. Doi, was in the U.S. Army and fought in Germany and France during World War II during the time his family was interned at the Heart Mountain and Amache camps. Research done in 2010 by Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for the PBS series Faces of America showed that Yamaguchi's heritage can be traced back to Wakayama and Saga prefectures in Japan and that her paternal grandfather, Tatsuichi Yamaguchi, emigrated to Hawaii in 1899. Yamaguchi and her siblings, Brett and Lori, grew up in Fremont, California. In order to accommodate her training schedule, Yamaguchi was home-schooled for her first two years of high school, but attended Mission San Jose High School for her junior and senior years, where she graduated.
Yamaguchi was born with bi-lateral clubfoot, resulting in treatment with the Ponseti method during her early years: she wore a series of leg casting for most of the first year of her life, followed by corrective shoes and bracing. She became interested in ice skating at age 4 or 5 after seeing Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill in the Ice Follies and Ice Capades, and doctors encouraged skating as a form of physical therapy. From sixth grade on, Yamaguchi practiced from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. before school and sometimes after school. Her mother would drive her to the rink every morning at 4 a.m. and wait for her to finish. She would also accompany Yamaguchi to several competitions a month.
In 1986, Yamaguchi won the junior title at the U.S. championships with Rudy Galindo. Two years later, Yamaguchi won the singles and, with Galindo, the pairs titles at the 1988 World Junior Championships; Galindo had won the 1987 World Junior Championship in singles. In 1989 Yamaguchi and Galindo won the senior pairs title at the U.S. Championships. They won the title again in 1990. As a pairs team, Yamaguchi and Galindo were unusual in that they were both accomplished singles skaters, which allowed them to consistently perform difficult elements like side by side triple flip jumps, which even twenty years later would still be considered a very difficult pair element. They also jumped and spun in opposite directions, Yamaguchi counter-clockwise, and Galindo clockwise, which gave them an unusual look on the ice. In 1990, Yamaguchi decided to focus solely on singles. Galindo went on to have a successful singles career as well, winning the 1996 U.S. championships and the 1996 World bronze medal.
Yamaguchi won her first major international gold medal in figure skating at the 1990 Goodwill Games.
In 1991, Yamaguchi moved to Edmonton, Alberta, to train with coach Christy Ness. There, she took psychology courses at the University of Alberta. The same year, Yamaguchi placed second to Tonya Harding at the U.S. championships, her third consecutive silver medal at Nationals, with a free skate that included a fall on a triple Salchow but also six clean triple jumps. The following month in Munich, Germany, Yamaguchi won the 1991 World Championships. That year, the American ladies team, consisting of Yamaguchi, Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, became the only national ladies team to have its members sweep the Worlds podium until the 2021 World Figure Skating Championships, when Anna Shcherbakova, Elizaveta Tuktamysheva and Alexandra Trusova swept the podium representing FSR.
