Fairfax's Tommy Steenberg, 17, Breaks Into Spotlight At Skating Championships
So it was for two area men competing in the rarified air of the U.S. National Figure Skating Championships here last week. While McLean’s Michael Weiss has made his mark as a star over the past decade, and at age 29 is ready to retire from the amateur sport, another area veteran, Derrek Dellmore, has also competed for years and this time, at age 27, came in 12th overall, and is nearing the end of his amateur career. But on the other end of the age spectrum comes 17-year-old Woodson High School junior Tommy Steenberg, who excited the giant crowd at the Savvis Arena in downtown St. Louis with an energetic and flawless performance, albeit outside the view of national TV cameras. On Saturday, in his free style program, he drew loud cheers and, as he said later, his “hit double figures” with the number of stuffed animals tossed to him on the ice. Two years younger than any of the other 17 competitors in the senior men’s championships, he was elated at his first-ever performance at that level, and when it was all over, he wound up 13th. While Weiss and Dellmore are winding down, Tommy is just getting started. His goal is to make the U.S. Olympic team in 2010, and he will be doing a lot of competing, nationally and internationally, between now and then. Steenberg got back Sunday from St. Louis, and welcomed an interview with the News-Press at his home Fairfax Ice Arena haunts on Tuesday. Not involved in this year’s Olympics or World Championships, he’s got some time off from competition now to work on his skills, but that does not mean he’ll be letting up on his intense schedule. “I love it. It is what I want to do,” he said of his schedule, which leaves him little time for anything else besides his high school classes. “No one is pressuring me into this. I am driven by my own desire to succeed.” Tommy is on the ice by 1 p.m. every day for about three hours, overall, and then does another two hours three times a week of off-the-ice weight training and conditioning, including a lot of jump roping. Still, he’s an outstanding student, and was honored for that at the National Championships, too, one of a handful of the competitors there who were called out during a special ceremony to receive a recognition of their academic achievement. He’s on the National Honor Society and Spanish Honor Society and enjoys most his Advanced Placement English literature class. The son of a military family with an older sister and younger brother, Tommy has lived and trained in Fairfax the last six and a half years, and plans to stay here from now on. He was only five when he first discovered his interest in ice skating while watching the 1994 Winter Olympics from Norway. He taped the skating and played it back repeatedly, imitating the spins and moves in front of the TV in the living room. His parents decided that better than knocking over the furniture, he should play out what they thought, at first, was a “phase” by enrolling him at a local ice skating rink. That “phase” has grown into his skating headliner status at a very young age. He won his first international Grand Prix as a junior in Tallin, Estonia, last year, and this year finished fourth in the U.S. Eastern sectional in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, last November to qualify for the Nationals last week. He’d been to the Nationals twice before as a junior competitor, so he was familiar with the ambiance. But he’d still never skated in front of an audience as big as was assembled there for the senior men’s competitions. Surprisingly to him, he didn’t find it that intimidating. “I’m sure it will be the more is at stake in the future,” he said. “But for now, I was just happy to be there, and very happy with how well I did.” Most of his Woodson classmates know of his skating exploits, although few, he conceded, know the significance of them in the skating world. “Most don’t really follow it that closely,” he said. But they think it “is a cool little extra thing that I do,” and he is respected for it. He doesn’t have time to watch much TV, so doesn’t have any favorite shows. But he is looking forward to watching the “Skating With the Celebrities” reality show coming up. As for movies, he’s for anything scary or funny, and when it comes to food, it’s all about ice cream and Chinese. He admires Emily Hughes’ “power and confidence” on the ice, and for his own development, he’s specializing during the off season on his “triple axels” and “quads.” Autographs now are easy to get. But he won’t promise that in four years.
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ST. LOUIS, Mo. — You had to be there to see it, because for as much coverage as major television gives figure skating, it always focuses on the front-runners, leaving many rising stars and second-tier competitors completely out of the eye of the general public.