Olympian Scott Hamilton Finds Faith Amid Life’s Challenges and Triumphs
Movieguide® Contributor
Olympic gold medalist Scott Hamilton is reflecting on his relationship with God and looking back at where life has taken him.
“When I started training away from home, this is where it really got real,” the ice skater said in a recent episode of Green Room. “I went to this place in Illinois called The Wagon Wheel, and there was a skater there who was the most popular woman athlete in the world at the time. Her name was Janet Lynn.”
“Her spirit on the ice was so strong and so attractive…and she loved Jesus, and she was very evangelistic in her sort of her skating life, and she would she would try to like bring everybody she could to Jesus,” he said. “… Everybody wanted to be like Janet. So everybody had their Bibles and everybody would go to her church…and since the Wagon Wheel was a lodge, it was a hotel and the basement of this lodge was the dorms where all the skaters lived.”
Hamilton wanted to “fit in,” so he picked up the Bible from his bedside table and began to read it. He remembered the font was small, and it took him a while to read it.
“I was just sort of trying to figure out who I was, this 14-year-old kid sharing a dorm room with 18, 21-year-old guys and growing up too fast, and it was just all the stuff, and it was just like I don’t understand, but I think there’s definitely something there because I feel it in my being. There’s something there,” he said.
“I was feeling kind of isolated you know,” the skater recalled. “Just sort of like at odds, and I went out for a walk…they had like a small golf course, and they had these horse stables and they would do these rides, and so the rides would go through these horse trails, and we’d always walk the horse trails, and there was this big rock that was kind of at the convergence of some of the trails, and I just climbed up on the rock, and I just remember just repeating time and time again — I just so wanted to be in relationship…it was so innocent in its time and it was on my heart — I just I repeated probably for an hour ‘Unite. Be as one.’”
And that was the start of Hamilton’s relationship with God.
“It’s funny because some days, I’m talking to 5,000 people, and I just feel like there’s one person maybe out of those 5,000 that just absolutely needed to hear whatever the Lord gives me to say,” Hamilton said…
READ MORE: WHY FORMER OLYMPIAN SCOTT HAMILTON SPEAKS ‘WHATEVER THE LORD GIVES ME TO SAY’
As Hamilton got older, he still held onto his beliefs but wasn’t walking very close to the Lord.
“You get to a point where life gets out of balance, where you become all about career and your…inter-personal relationships really struggle and suffer, so I had to balance all of that out, and then health issues kind of got in the way a little bit you know,” the cancer survivor said. “So I was at the peak — pretty much what I thought was the peak — of my professional career, and I was diagnosed with cancer.”
Hamilton just toured 50 cities when he got the news.
“That was where the fork in the road really happened…My mom lasted two years with her cancer, and she died, and I just felt like well now, if I’m able to get past this, I have a second chance at life,” he said. “What do I want it to look like?”
“That’s where I really felt without understanding it at the time [that] the Lord was just absolutely just saying, ‘I am giving you a little time out, and I really want you to just be quiet, still, and I’m going to start working on you in a really profound way’… I got to a point where I realized that the way I was living and the what and how I was living and just how I was with other people was just sort of surface…I was not living the way that I was supposed to, organically, legitimately, authentically, I was not living. I was sort of reacting to my environment,” he recalled.
Once he realized that, he made the sudden decision to pack his car up and travel. He spent time in several U.S. states and eventually met his wife Tracie, who encouraged him in his walk with God.
The couple eventually married and had four kids. Today, Hamilton is an author, speaker, TV broadcaster and humanitarian. In 2014, he founded the Scott Hamilton CARES Foundation to fund cancer research.
He told Fox News, “I went from fundraiser to activist because I realized that there needs to be a better way of not only treating cancer but also preparing a patient for the journey. I was not prepared. I was blindsided, like most people are. And so I needed to figure out a way to not only give people the information they needed, but the support they needed.”
“I never would’ve thought to dream that one day I would found a cancer organization that’s actually going to have impact and save lives,” he said earlier this year. “I never would’ve thought to dream that an Olympic gold medal experience would’ve allowed me to give so much back to my sport and help create a platform to give careers to so many of the greatest skaters in the history of the sport. And to have my children and just how amazing they are, and my wife and how amazing she is? I never would’ve thought to dream any of it.”
