Texas may seem an unlikely point of origin for an ice skater, but the Lone Star State recently welcomed home native son Paul Wylie (MBA ’00), winner of the silver medal in men’s figure skating at the 1992 Winter Olympics. Wylie, now a marketing executive for Walt Disney Studios, was the guest of honor at the Dallas Figure Skating Club’s sixtieth anniversary celebration last September, according to the Dallas Morning News (September 23, 2001). At the event, Wylie recalled numerous 4:30 a.m. sessions of skating and hockey as a boy at Dallas’s old Fair Park Coliseum ice rink. “In those days,” he observed, “skating in Dallas was a pretty unusual thing.”

All that hard work eventually led to his Olympic moment at Albertville, France. It was a breakthrough for his career, said Wylie, who felt fortunate to have even made the team. “I was the guy who should have been left at home and forgotten about. Albertville was really a watershed.” He expressed great admiration for the current crop of skaters preparing for February’s Games in Salt Lake City, particularly their mastery of the quadruple jump. “I tried three times to do a quad and decided that it was probably going to lead me to injury,” said Wylie, who skated professionally before entering HBS. “Part of skating is knowing your strengths.”