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Ryan Jahnke skates to music from the ballet "Cinderella." Two years ago, with a miniature glass slipper in hand and reading from a scroll made of parchment, Jahnke dropped to one knee and proposed marriage to his girlfriend.
She said yes. But when it came to Jahnke and skating, the fairy tales belonged to the other guys.
That was until mid-January, when Jahnke stunned many people in the figure skating world by finishing third at the U.S. national championships to renowned skaters Michael Weiss and Tim Goebel, both Olympians. That earned Jahnke a place in the 2003 Figure Skating World Championships that begin Monday morning in Washington with men's qualifying.
"It was a huge deal," said Jahnke, after a recent practice session at World Arena, where he has trained with longtime coach Diana Ronayne. ". . . It was an incredible experience. It was new and it was exciting. I wouldn't say it was planned. But it's not that it wasn't a possibility." Still, as he prepares to compete as a decided underdog against the world's elite, Jahnke admits, "It's hard to describe how I got here."
In Jahnke's case, both fate and futility led to this fairy tale.
Jahnke (pronounced Yahnkey), whose father is a Detroit attorney and mother a junior high school youth group director, moved to Colorado Springs when Ronayne did in 1999 after she was hired as Ice Hall skating director.
Jahnke has been skating at the elite level for 13 years. This was his sixth senior national championship competition. He never finished higher than fifth, in 2000.
Myriad frustrations led Jahnke to almost quit the sport when he failed to make the 2002 U.S. Olympic Team.
Years before, he sat down and signed an actual contract with himself that he'd give serious thought to retiring if he didn't make the team. Thinking that he hadn't reached his potential, Jahnke carried on. A year later, it paid off.
In January in Dallas, Jahnke was sixth and a forgotten man going into the long program. Then strange things started happening: Johnny Weir, a...