Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Florent Amodio: International Adoptee and Olympian


We watched this amazing French figure skater, Florent Amodio, in the men's short program tonight. Zoe was cheering for him because he's from France and Mimi's from France! But after a few seconds of watching, she asked, "Are you sure he's not from China? 'Cause he looks Chinese." I reminded her that he could be Chinese-French, just like she's Chinese-American.

Just then one of the commentators said he was born in Brazil and said something about his being one of the street kids of Brazil, or something like that. The story went on that was "discovered" at age 4 at a public skate in France, and has had the same coach since that time.

I was curious how he made it from Brazil to France, how long he was on the streets in Brazil if he made it to France in time to be discovered at age 4. A touch of the google provided the answer -- he was adopted as an infant by a French couple. Doesn't sound like he was living on the streets in Brazil, but abandoned as an infant on the streets in Brazil. According to his website, he left Brazil at 1 month of age.

So, Florent Amodio is not Chinese, but he and Zoe and Maya have one thing in common -- they are international adoptees!


P.S. Apparently we weren't the only ones confused as to Amodio's ethnicity or curious about how he got from Brazil to France. Sitemeter showed me a number of searches about Amodio that brought people to this blog:
Florent Amodio Asian
Florent Amodio ethnicity
Florent Amodio abandoned
Florent Amodio orphan
. . . and quite stereotypically:
Florent Amodio gay

1 comment:

JennyBHammond said...

Oh, hooray! That's even better than my post on mixie olympiads:-) How fun it is to watch the Olympics.
http://adoptionfusion.blogspot.com/2010/02/mixie-olympiads.html