At the 1992 Winter Olympic Games in France, American figure skater Paul Wylie won the silver medal. The victory came after a disappointing tenth-place finish at the previous Winter Games in Calgary (Canada). In an anthology entitled Finding God at Harvard: Spiritual Journeys of Thinking Christians, Paul Wylie shares his long journey from disappointment to victory—a journey marked by many ups and downs and great discipline. In his article Wylie uses his sport to reflect on the Christian life. He writes:

When maturity brings us closer to the ideal of Christlikeness, we fall less. More experienced skaters make fewer mistakes, and they also skate with a greater grace. As a skater refines a technique to match the ideal laid out by God in the laws of physics, the jumps and movements become effortless in their appearance, even though it takes years of falling to achieve the skills.