Orser back in Olympic focus mentoring Kim Yu-Na: Hopes Kim Yu-Na will benefit from his Olympic experience

For half of the 22 years Brian Orser has been away from the Olympic spotlight, he couldn't bear the thought of going back there, or even examining the video evidence.

Now it's a mere month away and the elements seem so familiar to him: the hopes of an entire country; a world championship belt carried into the Olympic ring; a long-time rival from a larger, dominating nation in the opposing corner. The biggest change from Calgary '88, though, is fundamental: Orser is 48 years old, his black hair flecked with grey, the corners of his eyes showing a hint of crow's feet, no longer chief protagonist but instead the wise old hand pointing the way. It's the protégé, ice princess Kim Yu-Na of South Korea, who will be putting on the blades in Vancouver as the Olympic favourite.

"I keep telling people: this is her Games," Orser insists. "I had my time."

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said there were no second acts in American lives, but Canadian Olympians are apparently another matter. Orser, less than three years into what he calls his "big-boy job" as skating director of the plush Toronto Cricket, Skating and Curling Club, is more than an innocent bystander in this latest skating soap. Kim arrived at the Willowdale club nearly four years ago, a 15-year-old world junior champion seeking the input and inspiration of top Canadian choreographer David Wilson. Apart from a three-month vacation each summer, she's never left, growing into an elegant world No. 1 under a support staff that includes Orser and former Canadian Olympian Tracy Wilson.

"We were all sort of dabbling," Tracy Wilson says. "Yu-Na brought us all together."

In a sport that was pretty much a mystery to Koreans, Kim is her country's most popular athlete, and Orser her revered mentor. In August, his Korean-language autobiography hit the shops of Seoul, Busan and beyond. Just before Christmas, he filmed a commercial with Kim for South Korean television, the pair selling Samsung air conditioners as they riffed on the James Bond theme that will underpin her short program in Vancouver.

"She's an old pro at this stuff," Orser says. "I was flattered just to be asked, but I'm actually recognized more in Korea these days than I am in Canada. It's a culture where they really embrace the coach, and hold them with a certain amount of respect – and expectation as well. They kind of treat you as `the master.' That's nice, but it's Yu-Na who is the special talent."

To Orser and Wilson, that was evident from the very first moment Kim showed up, her skating career at a crossroads back home.

"We took this girl at 15 who was just a machine – she could do all this stuff, but nobody had chipped away at her soul," Orser said. "The soul and the spirit is what you need in skating."

This arc, too, was right up Orser's street. A national junior champion at 17, he was regarded as a superb technician. By the time of the Battle of the Brians in Calgary, the world champion Orser against perennial rival Brian Boitano of the U.S., he'd added the requisite heart and soul and was at the top of his game.

"Our careers have been so similar," he says of Kim. "The one thing I can share with her is I've been there. I can say to her, `I know what you're feeling,' and she knows that I really do.

"I keep telling her, and her mom and her agent, this is the Olympics. This is not just another day at the office. I'm really trying to build that up, while not freaking them out.

"You've got to be competitive. You've got to be fierce. When she carried the torch in Hamilton, I knew it. All I had to do was look at the picture of her, and the look in her eyes told me. She gets it."

It's easy to forget, more than two decades later, how big a fall guy Orser was at Calgary. Just months before Ben Johnson redefined Olympian tumbles from grace, Orser's silver medal under intense pressure was regarded as a huge failure – "the costliest defeat in the history of skating in Canada," according to one commentator.

Of all the kicking, perhaps Orser kicked himself hardest: "It took me a long time to digest that I was not Olympic champion. I did the what-if thing forever."

Gradually came acceptance. And unexpectedly this new chapter has arrived, with a young, beautiful prodigy from a faraway land bringing him back to that same place – an Olympics, at home.

"Last week, when we did the big Happy New Year, I realized it was 2010. I never thought I'd revisit it. I had no reason to think that. I did the same thing on New Year's 20 years ago – this is it, we're here. It's here.

"And it's cool. All the things I did then I'm putting into motion now."