When ice skating teacher Cindy Kauffman-Marshall takes to the ice, there always seems to be a sparkle in her blue eyes and a broad smile on her face.

Kauffman-Marshall, a two-time Olympian, is the first to admit she’s passionate about ice skating and can’t imagine a day when she’ll have to hang up her skates.

”I do love skating. It’s what I do,” said Kauffman-Marshall, 58, looking out onto the rink. ”I’m more comfortable out on the ice than anywhere else. I’m even more comfortable on ice than I am just walking.”

Kauffman-Marshall has been teaching ice skating at Seventh Mountain Resort for seven winter seasons, but this year is her last in Bend. Cobbling together a teaching schedule has been difficult for her when the small outdoor rink closes after the winter season.

”I really have to travel a lot in the summer. I’m constantly driving to Eugene, Portland and Seattle to teach private lessons,” explained Kauffman-Marshall, who is highly sought-after by some of the top Northwest ice skating coaches for her expertise in power and strength skating. ”I’m tired of traveling. Maybe it’s because of all the travel I did when I was younger.”

The making of an Olympian

Kauffman-Marshall started taking ice skating lessons in Seattle with her older brother, Ron Kauffman, when she was 6 years old and he was 8 years old.

The brother and sister caught the eye of a national-level coach who was working with another senior-level skating pair.

That ”chance discovery,” according to Kauffman-Marshall, changed their lives forever.

However, dreams of becoming an Olympian came in a shattering way.

”In 1962, The World Team plane, which had all of our seniors (ice skaters), crashed in Belgium. All the seniors and my first coach, the one who discovered us, were killed; it was so sad,” recalled Kauffman-Marshall. ”After that crash, all of us juniors were being moved up. That included Peggy Fleming.”

An intensive two-year grooming of the young athletes brought them to Innsbruck, Austria, for the 1964 Winter Olympics.

Leading up to the Olympics, Kauffman-Marshall and her brother traveled to train in Lake Placid, N.Y, in the summer months, and by autumn were training with their coaches in the Midwest.

”We had four months of fall and winter competitions, and all the training, and my mom, she drove us out to Lake Placid, and then the Midwest, and we did this for eight or nine years,” explained Kauffman-Marshall, shaking her head. ”We would just take our school work with us. I don’t think we ever thought of it as a sacrifice because we loved skating so much.”

Training six days a week for at least four to five hours a day was the norm.

Sacrifices

While Kauffman-Marshall says she never felt that she missed or sacrificed anything while training for the Olympics, she does feel her parents sacrificed a lot to give her and her brother the opportunities to skate at the highest level.

”When I think about it now, I do feel sad for my dad. He did want us to skate and do this together, but there were Christmases and birthdays when he was all alone in Washington, because Ron and I were skating, and our mom was with us. But I never heard my dad ever complain,” said Kauffman-Marshall. ”Now I wonder how he ever did that because now that my boys are gone, it’s really hard.”

Only recently did Kauffman-Marshall learn that her parents mortgaged their house to keep them skating.

”They never made us aware of how much this was costing them,” said Kauffman-Marshall. ”Back in those days it probably cost about $25,000 to $30,000 a year, and back then we didn’t pay thousands of dollars for our costumes either; my mom made them.”

Kauffman-Marshall estimates the cost of today’s training at that level would run anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000.

To bring in extra money, Kauffman-Marshall says she remembers her mother opening up a boarding house in the summer at Lake Placid where they trained.

”In those days, I wanted to earn some extra money by working in the snack bar at the ice rink, and my brother wanted to learn how to sharpen blades, but the USFSA (United States Figure Skating Association) heard about it, and wouldn’t let us earn any money if we wanted to compete at the amateur level,” said Kauffman-Marshall. ”I just heard Dick Button say that now all the top national skaters all make about six figures while competing.”

Best kept secret

Though Kauffman-Marshall and her brother returned to the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble, France, a single fall kept them from medaling.

A month later, at the World Championship, Kauffman-Marshall and her brother skated a clean program to win a bronze medal and a standing ovation.

Kauffman-Marshall says it was one of the highlights of her career, along with being inducted into the Ice Skating Hall of Fame in 1995.

But with all her success on the ice, Kauffman-Marshall says most athletes back then were not awarded with huge, lucrative advertising contracts.

Which is why she’s been teaching ice skating for 36 years, with the last seven of them in Bend.

When Denise Gorman first started bringing her daughters for lessons five years ago, ”it was sort of the best kept secret in town back then, but now all her lessons are always booked … Well, we know where she’s going to be teaching, so we’ll be doing some road trips.”

Year-round ice

Ironically, Kauffman-Marshall is returning to the city of Wenatchee, Wash., a place she had left when she decided on Bend.

”Back then, I had read in one of my skating magazines that Bend was building an indoor full-size rink. We moved here, and later that land where it was going to be built was auctioned off, but by then my boys were already in middle school and high school, so we stayed anyway,” explained Kauffman-Marshall, shaking her head. ”When I left Wenatchee, it had an indoor rink, but not year-round ice. We had thought Bend would get the year-round ice first.”

According to the Wenatchee Chamber of Commerce, Global Enterprise is undertaking a new Ice Arena project in Wenatchee and is building not one full-size rink, but two. The ice arena is due to be completed this fall, and Kauffman-Marshall will be their new ice skating teaching director.

Sorely missed

During her years here, Kauffman-Marshall has taught thousands of Central Oregon children and adults to ice skate.

According to Seventh Mountain Resort Activities Manager Janet Nelson-Shofstall, the last couple of winter seasons, they’ve had to turn away skaters because all of Kauffman-Marshall’s lessons were booked solid. Most had waiting lists.

”She has been so phenomenal, above and beyond. Her quality and talent, she does it all, she teaches the little, little ones to the adults,” said Nelson-Shofstall as her eyes welled up with tears. ”This is the kind of person she is, when we were starting the ice this season, it’s a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. process and she split the shift, and then we got this wind that brought the pine needles down. How many two-time Olympians do you know who would be out on the ice, chiseling out the pine needles that got embedded into the ice in the wind and the rain?”

Nelson-Shofstall and the others who work with Kauffman-Marshall say the petite ice skater is also incredibly humble.

It was only last year, after much pleading, that Kauffman-Marshall agreed to let Nelson-Shofstall hang some black-and-white photos of her and her brother performing in the Olympics on the walls of the seasonal ice skating center.

”She never tells anyone she’s been to the Olympics. It’s usually me who’s telling people who they’ve got for a teacher,” said a laughing Nelson-Shofstall. ”She is one of the hardest workers, and to see her skate around here is just so graceful, and when she’s with the hockey players for power skating, she can really put the pedal down and leave them in the dust.”

Final bow

At the recent WinterFest Ice Skating show, Kauffman-Marshall stood on the sidelines whispering words of encouragement to the young skaters as they took to the ice for the grande finale with a compact disc of Bruce Springsteen singing ”Born in the USA.”

After many international competitions and world tours, Kauffman-Marshall said she can really appreciate that song.

”Well, I’ve traveled to Russia, Japan, most of the countries in Europe, and even the communist countries, and that was a real eye-opener for me. I realized then how fortunate I was to live in a country where I was free,” said Kauffman-Marshall. ”We met skaters from communist countries who skated because it was their job, it meant money for their families. I learned to really appreciate what we had in the states.”

So after all the traveling, Kauffman-Marshall concedes when she’s not on the ice, she wants to just stay at home with her husband and dogs.

When the strains of ”Born in the USA” were over, Kauffman-Marshall was introduced, she glided onto the glittering ice and took her final bow in Bend.