American figure skater who earned the World Championship in skating in 1983 and a Silver Medal at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. After her Olympic performance, she became a professional skater. A cool beauty, she is often compared to Grace Kelly.
At age 13 Sumners decided skating was more important than school. Finishing high school through correspondence courses and never attending college, Sumner trained with a vengeance and abstained from adolescent social life. While skating brilliantly at the Olympics with the world watching, she was so excited she didn’t realize that in the last 60 seconds of her performance she missed a crucial double axel jump – a mistake that cost her the gold medal. “The three years leading up to the Olympics I couldn’t do anything wrong. They turned me into something I wasn’t, and then I didn’t win the gold medal. The whole year before the Olympics, all anybody talked about was that I was going to win the gold medal at 19 and I’d be worth millions, be a star, be famous. It was hard to keep it out of my mind. They put words in my mouth. It was one of the unhappiest times of my life. I try not to think about it.” Prior to the games at Sarajevo, she was featured as the Campbell Soup girl in national advertisements.
Jaded by the rigors and glitz of Olympic training, she became the star of “Disney On Ice” after her silver medal and sported an income in the ballpark of seven figures. Sumner’s new goal is to pursue acting, and her future is methodically calculated by Rosalyn Sumners, Inc., a corporation that includes a lawyer, accountant, agent and manager.
In 1985, Sumners bought a house in her home town of Edmonds, Washington, where, after 38 weeks of touring with Disney, she retreats into her summer sanctuary.
Link to Wikipedia biography