The Best Birthday Gift

They serenaded the birthday girl with a rendition of the song that makes just about every birthday boy or girl break out the widest of smiles.
Cynthia Phaneuf, all 21 years of her, sat across the way at the Credit Union Centre and positively beamed when she heard the familiar refrain. As if her special day wasn't, well, special enough already.
"It feels good for my birthday," Phaneuf said after performing her short program at the 2009 BMO Canadian figure skating championships. "Even if I know I did make a mistake in my program, I was just feeling so good on the ice and having so much fun on my birthday.
"This was the best gift that I could give myself."
This was before Phaneuf even knew she'd skated well enough to land on top of the leaderboard with 56.16 points, just ahead of a pair of fellow Quebecers — four-time defending champion Joannie Rochette (53.58) and Amelie Lacoste (53.55). She's right in the hunt to regain the Canadian title she first won back in 2004 at Rexall Place in Edmonton.
But as Phaneuf spoke afterward, she made it clear such things wouldn't be on her mind during Saturday night's short program. She is after exactly the same thing she came to Saskatoon this week to claim — one of two women's spots on Canada's team for the 2009 world championships in Los Angeles.
"Even I know if my goal is not to win the gold medal, just to be on the world team, I don’t have a lot of pressure on myself," she said. "I just want to have fun on the ice on Saturday, just like I did today."
She will tell you this is the new Cynthia Phaneuf, finally free of the demons in her head that thwarted her dreams over the past few years. With the help of a sports psychologist, she now skates on the ice with everything in the right perspective.
"It was my confidence," Phaneuf said of her struggles to regain her standing as a women's contender . "When I was going on the ice, I wasn’t feeling good. I was all stressed out and I wasn’t using the stress well. I was using my stress in a bad way. Now I’m trying to use it the right way."
Certainly, it hasn't been the road Phaneuf imagined since the night in Edmonton when, at 15 years old, she became the youngest women's champion in Canadian figure skating history. Two days shy of her 16th birthday, everything seemed possible for the young girl who left everyone at Rexall Place breathless with her performance.
In London, Ont., a year later, all eyes turned instead toward Rochette, who seized the national crown with the best display of women's skating in years. An injury-shortened season followed, wiping out any chance of making the 2006 Turin Olympics team. Then a huge growth spurt that forced Phaneuf to pretty much start from scratch.
"A very bad period of my life," she called it. "I had to learn to jump all over again. For sure, I had some days when I wanted to quit because it will have been the easiest way."
Her deep love of skating simply wouldn't allow it and Phaneuf returned to the national championship stage in Halifax in 2007 with a fourth-place finish. Last year in Vancouver, she quietly climbed back onto the podium as the bronze medallist behind Rochette and Mira Leung. None of it, however, was seen as a sign she might contend again.
"I don’t think I’m worse than I was before because I’m doing the same jumps and everything is going as well as before," she said today. "What I had to work on was my head and my confidence and this is what I did before I came here to nationals. My new psychologist helped me a lot to be here and to be proud of myself at each competition."
Most of all, she is smiling again. Even after a short program which included a blown program, Phaneuf left the ice at the Credit Union Centre grinning widely as she hugged her coaches. She knows it is simply the way it has to be.
"I want to go out on the ice (Saturday) with the same smile I had today," she said with an eye toward Saturday's free skate final.
In that alone, Phaneuf is sure, she will have found her biggest victory.
Some birthday gift, indeed, we'd have to say.