Q&A by Sarah Tomlinson Name: Eric Flaim Sport: Speed Skating Games: Calgary, 1988, Albertville, 1992 and Lillehammer, 1994

Monster: What was your first job after the Olympics?

Eric Flaim: I think I'm a bit different from a lot of Olympians who perhaps try to get a job with a large company. I had actually started my own company while I was still skating so that I could have something to go into when I was done. I had two retail stores specializing in inline skates and snowboards. One was on Newbury Street in Boston and the other was on Thayer Street in Providence. I was also managing a company that my father started, a manufacturing business, called R&F Microtools.

Mc: And then you decided to sell your retail stores?

EF: I had lived in Boston for six years and Marcy (my wife) and I decided that although we liked the city, we were ready to get out. We wanted to move to Vermont. So she got a job working at Killington and I took a job working for US Speed Skating.

I started with my current job earlier this year. I work for a company called Binary Pro. We're kind of Internet consultants, and we're working on an initiative to produce content for the different Olympic national governing bodies.

Mc: Have you seen athletes who didn't have something lined up for after they stopped competing and had problems?

EF: Yeah, it's interesting in the sport of speed skating. I skated with a lot of people who had very successful careers, who went into medicine and became doctors or lawyers. But then I saw other people that never really got out of the sport. They kept skating because they weren't sure what they wanted to do. And I didn't want that to happen to me. I definitely wanted to have something I could step into and really become emotionally involved with and passionate about.

Mc: It seems like it could pretty overwhelming to go from having such a strong focus to a "normal life."

EF: When you are an Olympic athlete, you've got to be completely self-focused. Everything has to revolve around taking care of you and you only. And it's very regimented. You wake up at the same time every morning, and it's kind of like a job, but the difference is that you don't really have to be so focused on working together with people. You've just got to think about, "How am I feeling today? Do I need to go in and get a massage? Do I need to go to therapy?" And you need to be really in tune with your body and really focused on you.

Business is similar in that you've got to be focused on goals, but at the same time, you've really got to be able to work well with people and communicate really well, especially if you've got a business with employees. And that sometimes is not an easy transition to make. I think a lot of times, Olympians tend to be, I don't want to say self-centered, but to look at themselves rather than at the big picture.

Mc: It seems that focus is necessary to compete successfully, but does it have drawbacks?

EF: In individual sports, it's completely up to you, so you learn to just rely on yourself. If you get into the management realm, you need to learn how to delegate and give responsibility to other people, and that's sometimes difficult because you're so used to having it all come down to you.

Mc: Is it hard to compete and then sort of be put out to pasture when you're only 29, which seems so young in the rest of the world?

EF: It's funny that you touch on that because I think that's probably the hardest part about leaving your sport and realizing that you're no longer an Olympian. When you're one of the best in the world, you command a respect because you're always within your sport, where everyone knows who you are.

And then when, as you said, you're put out to pasture and you leave, now you have to wait in line just like everybody else. You call up some place and they say, "we can't fit you in for two months." You think, when I was skating, I got in to see the doctor immediately. So that takes some getting used to and you've got to adjust. It feels a lot better to be taken care of. I think that's hard, and every Olympian has to deal with that.

Now I get to see my wife more. And you know what I looked forward to so much? Being able to unpack my bag and put my clothes in drawers in one place that I lived. Because as an athlete, you're constantly on the road and you live out of a suitcase. You don't get your mail. You don't have any clean clothes. You don't have any place to call home. So that's nice now.