Art & Creativity Quote by Nancy Kerrigan

Kerrigan’s line is almost disarmingly practical, and that’s the point: it smuggles a philosophy of performance into plain speech. Figure skating sells itself as athletic purity, but it’s built on a more complicated bargain. You don’t just land jumps; you land an idea of yourself. By putting “finding the right music” before “planning a costume,” Kerrigan outlines a hierarchy that skaters and judges understand instinctively: sound sets the emotional contract, and the body becomes the instrument that has to look like it belongs to that soundtrack. The costume isn’t decoration; it’s compliance with a genre.

The subtext is about control in a sport where control is constantly threatened. Skating careers hinge on tiny errors, fickle scoring, and public narratives that can swallow an athlete whole. “Process” reads like a quiet insistence on craft amid chaos. It’s also a window into how femininity is engineered on the ice: music cues the mood (romantic, dramatic, playful), and the costume translates that mood into legible signals for judges and TV audiences. Style becomes strategy.

Context matters here because Kerrigan’s era amplified the packaging. Early-1990s skating was peak broadcast spectacle, and Kerrigan herself was forced into a cultural storyline bigger than her routines. Her emphasis on the workmanlike sequencing of choices subtly pushes back against the myth that skating is either effortless grace or tabloid theater. It’s neither. It’s choreography as brand management, assembled one deliberate layer at a time.