Coach Brodeur looked up past the scoreboard, past the sponsor banners and the dusty championship flags, to the long white banner that hung above the penalty box, and read it in a voice that cracked in the cold air. “Agnes Lindqvist. Winter Olympic Games. Sapporo, nineteen seventy two. Bronze medal, speed skating, five hundred meters.” The rink had gone absolutely silent. The little skaters on the ice had stopped in their tracks, with their sticks resting on their knees. I am Agnes Lindqvist, seventy nine years old, and I stood by the boards in my wool coat with the five small colored rings pinned to my collar, and I could feel my cheeks burning.
In 1972, I was twenty seven years old and I skated for the United States on a team that had been funded by a bake sale and a church raffle. I took a bronze medal in a race that lasted forty four seconds. I came home to Minneapolis and taught children to skate at this very rink for thirty years, sharpening blades in the back room for a dollar a pair. The little rings on my collar were given to me by my teammates, and I wear them to every game, because I have never learned how to stop loving the ice.
The rink manager, a rumpled man in his sixties named Gus, came out from the office with a coffee cup and stopped short in the doorway. “Agnes,” he said. “Agnes, what is happening?” A line of parents along the glass had turned from the ice to the boards. A grandfather in a Vikings cap began to cry without any noise. One of the little skaters, a girl in a pink helmet no older than seven, lifted her stick and pointed at the banner with the tip. “That is a real lady?” she whispered, loud enough that everyone heard.
A set of five small rings on a wool collar gave one retired skater ten minutes on the ice to bring a young coach back to the banner in Minneapolis.
I gave my terms with a laugh that echoed against the glass. “Coach, nobody has been hurt. You are a young man who loves his rink and wanted to keep it orderly. I would only ask that you let me have ten minutes on the ice with your children. Not to teach. Only to skate. And then I would ask that you take that banner down, give it a good dusting, and hang it again where the families can see it when they come in. Banners are not meant to be hung over a penalty box.”
Brodeur removed his whistle and held it limply in his hand. “Miss Lindqvist, I have coached here for four years,” he said, and his voice shook. “I put my own team in the penalty box under that banner. I have looked at your name, I swear, a thousand times.” His eyes were wet. “My daughter is a skater. She wants to go to the Olympics, and I told the woman who actually did it to leave the ice because she was in the way.” He bent his head. “You must think I am the worst coach in the state.”
But in his mortification, Brodeur did a thing he would regret. He lunged forward, tore the little rings from my collar, and skated to the exit gate, babbling that he would take them to the office and verify their authenticity. Three paces from the boards, a mother in a puffy coat stepped across the gate, with her arms crossed over her chest. Gus came shuffling out in his slippers to close the second gap. The grandfather in the Vikings cap rose in front of the bench, and the whole line of parents along the glass shifted, one body, to block the aisle.
Brodeur stopped on the rubber matting, with the rings clutched in his fist and a wall of faces turned toward him. The little girl in the pink helmet, who had followed on her blades, looked up at him with large and serious eyes. “Coach,” she said, “that is not yours.” It was the plainest thing anyone had said all day. Brodeur knelt on one knee in front of her, and then he turned and held the pin out to me, with both hands, like a boy returning a borrowed glove. I pinned it back on my collar.
The consequences were wonderful. That evening, I laced up an old pair of figure skates that Gus had found in the lost and found, and I took ten slow laps around the rink while two hundred children and their parents lined the boards and clapped. The banner came down, was dusted, and went up again beside the front doors. Brodeur started a Saturday morning clinic for beginners and called it by my name. His daughter and I skated a lap together, hand in hand, and she told me she planned to win the gold.
In the name of my husband Nils, who passed in 2015, I started the Nils Lindqvist Fund. It pays for skates, lessons and ice time for children who could not otherwise afford them, in Hennepin, Ramsey and Anoka counties. In the first year we fitted one hundred and twelve children with their first pair of skates and funded forty eight seasons of lessons. One was a ten year old boy from Brooklyn Park who had never seen a frozen pond, and who stood on the ice with his arms spread, shouting that he was flying.
Every Saturday at nine, I sit on the bench by the boards with a thermos of coffee and watch the beginners wobble across the ice in their rented skates. This winter, Brodeur skated over to my bench in the middle of a lesson, and offered me his gloved hand. “Miss Lindqvist,” he said, “the children want a lap.” I took his hand. Together we glided out onto the ice, one old woman in a wool coat and one embarrassed young coach, with fifty tiny skaters circling behind us in a wavering line, and under the banner, the cold bright air rang with their laughter.