Innocence Lost

Last week at "An Evening with Champions," Eliot House's nationally broadcast figure-skating show, Kelly O'Grady glided onto the ice. One of an impressive roster of skaters that included world champions, Olympic medalists and even Eliot House students, O'Grady skated a great routine, graceful and original. She has been skating in Evening with Champions for the past five years. Nothing unusual for Evening with Champions-except that Kelly O'Grady is seven years old.

Yes, that means she first performed in Evening with Champions when she was two years old. And lest you believe it's not possible, there are numerous witnesses in the senior class who remember her performances at the ages of three and four, when she sailed across the ice with the aplomb of someone...er, four times her age.

Watching the second-grader fly across the rink was enough to give many of the hundreds of people who saw the show a moment's pause. One had to wonder whether Kelly O'Grady, talented as she may be, might have lacked, at the age of two, a deep interest in becoming a figure-skater. It was also hard not to imagine that had her parents been more interested in gymnastics, or classical music, we wouldn't instead be watching the young champion training for the Summer instead of the Winter Games, or fiddling away in Carnegie Hall.

As children, we might have been jealous of Kelly O'Grady. But as adults, our admiration for her is twinged, not with jealousy but with pity. Certain kinds of performances demand skills that do require training at the age of three. The problem is that the champion involved has little or no choice about whether he or she actually wants to become a champion.

One of the secrets to the Soviet Union's repeated success in various Olympic sports was that the country's state-run system allowed the government to go into preschools and scout out children with particularly good motor and balancing skills-and then, after interviewing the children's parents to see if their body types were conducive to a particular sport, to begin training the children immediately. It's easy to use this fact as a way of showing the failure of communism to recognize personal liberties. But all we have to do is create a market for such performers in America to achieve similar results.

You probably remeber Dominique Moceanu, the 14-year-old gymnast who was part of the goldmedal-winning American team in 1996. As of two days ago, she has settled a lawsuit she had filed against her parents for squandering her earnings. Few people have sympathy for a child who sues her parents, especially over money. But the teenage gymnast-who argued that she had no access to her earnings because she is under 18-may have had a point. Moceanu's parents, having transplanted themselves to Houston when Dominique was 10 so that she could train with a coach there, stopped working after the 1996 Olympics, apparently living solely off their daughter's earnings. The talent was hers, but the choices that went with it were not.

Only a handful of us at Harvard are internationally competitive athletes. Yet our school's greatest claim to fame is that we are all, in some way or another, very, very good at being young and exceptional. Having distinguished ourselves somehow by age 18, we have all become accustomed to hearing our elders say things like "Can you believe she did that at her age?" Unfortunately, it's the "at her age" qualifier that's particularly hard to drop. With all the child prodigies in the world, it's surprising we don't hear from more of them later in life. It's rare, for example, to see renowned artists whose work was first exhibited when they were teenagers. Maybe most of them, having published their major works by 16, get burned out. Or maybe their stuff was only slightly impressive to begin with, outside of the fact that they did it "at their age."

The problem lies in the fact that adulthood requires making conscious decisions. Those of us who were thrown out on the ice at age two-those who, as the saying goes, were asked to jump and answered "How high?"-run a tremendous risk of finding ourselves, 20 years later, too old to be impressive and lacking the more important skill of being able to make our own decisions. Perhaps this explains the anxieties of so many seniors who, four years ago entered Harvard as the nation's most promising young adults and who now find themselves facing graduation while helplessly searching for something to do with their lives.

But "An Evening with Champions" is not your ordinary figure-skating show. Organized by Eliot House students, it's a benefit whose proceeds go to The Jimmy Fund, to help children suffering from cancer. Although adults suffer from various kinds of cancer far more than children do, the fund specifically asks us to direct our help toward children. Why? Children suffering from cancer are not any less deserving of their pain than affected adults are. But children facing potentially terminal illnesses move our hearts all the more because they have not yet even had a chance to decide what they want to make of themselves, or what kind of people they want to be. When we give to The Jimmy Fund, we are fighting for a cure because we want to give them that chance-the chance, that is, to become something more than children.

Figure-skating, like other sports, is said to build poise and grace, but it is also said to build confidence. When Kelly O'Grady stops being a seven-year-old figure-skating phenomenon, let's hope she takes the confidence she learned on the ice to pursue her own dreams, and to figure out what she wants to do with the rest of her long, long life.