hawayek baker

There are days when some things don’t work quite right for Kaitlin Hawayek and Jean-Luc Baker.

Twizzles aren’t in perfect unison. A lift doesn’t go up quick enough. Their coaches at the Detroit Skating Club (DSC) are grumpy. Frustration flares.

“Why can’t we get this? What’s the matter with us today?”

Then they think about the story behind their free dance, set to the soundtrack of The Theory of Everything, and they realize how good things really are, on and off the ice.

“We have long, hard days of training and by the end of the day, we might be, ‘Oh, I’m so tired!'” Hawayek, 18, said. “We take for granted that we’re able to do athletic things with our bodies, but so many people don’t have that ability.”

When Hawayek saw the 2014 Oscar-nominated film, which chronicles the relationship between renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking and his first wife, Jane, in the wake of Hawking’s amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) diagnosis, a light went off in her head…. read more here