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Thanks for sharing. That's what I most worry about with young athletes that are pushed hard, that they will feel trapped. I hope Kelly doesn't feel that way, she seems happy, but she's so young still, at that age most kids just want to please their parents.
I found an article about the "Brutal costs of raising the worlds 631st best tennis player."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-08-28/costs-of-noah-rubin-becoming-the-world-s-631st-best-tennis-player
I feel like the following quotes could easily be applied to young ski athletes:
"What were they spending on me? Absurd numbers, and I was still young and they didn't know what potential I had. It's putting down a lot of money for something that may never be." Noah says of his parents. "They've put a lot of money into it, hundreds of thousands of dollars. I mean, if you want to be good there's no happy medium. Money will be spent."
Noah hopes a long pro career will allow him to pay back his parents for all their financial and personal sacrifices. The junior Wimbledon title was a first installment.
"Both parents, but especially my dad, hid a lot of the negative effects of what my tennis was doing to him,” Noah says. "When I won Wimbledon, my feeling of happiness was more for him than anything else."
The only difference is that Kelly is the first young girl to be raised in this manner so she'll get to reap all the benefits that come from being so far ahead of the competition. It was definitely a sound investment choice by her parents, not many people are trying to produce freestyle female skiers.
Unfortunately it kind of pulls the rug out from under any older girls who thought they might have a shot at making it. She's going to dominate in exactly the same way that Shaun White did for so long, until a new generation of young girls, given the same time investment and resources, can be raised up.