Robbie Kimura sat by herself on one end of Turin's Oval Lingotto, skaters whizzing by so fast her digital camera didn't have a chance.

"Oh, Joey," she screamed as America's Joey Creek crossed the finish line in a time that put him into first place and ultimately cemented a gold medal in the 500 meters.

"All right, Joey," she screamed, madly snapping pictures at the rink's TV monitor and hugging strangers. "I feel like his mother."

Kimura, whose son Ryan Shimabukuro coaches the U.S. Olympic men's sprint team, feels like every skater's mother these days and minutes later, tears rolled down her face as she ached for Kip Carpenter and Casey FitzRandolph, two skaters whose performances fell well beneath expectations.

The joy of triumph and pain of failure is just as sweet and every bit as sharp for the Olympic parent as it is for the Olympic athlete. Maybe not sweeter, but definitely sharper.

Ryan Shimabukuro was 6 when he saw Eric Heiden for the first time. When you're 6, no one can tell you that you live in Hawai'i and would have a better shot pursuing a career as a whale watcher than an Olympic speedskater.

But Ryan persisted. Three years later, the first indoor hockey rink opened in Honolulu and he was all over it. And by 14, he was ready to leave Hawai'i and train on the short track in Marquette, Mich.

Robbie and husband, Gilbert, whom she married when Ryan was 4, stayed back, took out a $10,000 loan to finance Ryan's private education and training in Michigan, made the school his guardian and told themselves they were doing the right thing.

Later that year, Ryan wanted to move to Milwaukee to try long-track skating. Robbie and Gilbert decided to join him.

"Once we knew that Ryan was serious about this, that this was his endeavor, his dream, his odyssey, we knew that it was going to be a journey both his father and I were going to have to go with him wherever it took him," said Robbie.

And so they packed up, left three older children behind who said they understood, and moved to Waukesha, Wis. Robbie was a trust officer at a bank and made the job switch relatively easy. The lifestyle transition was considerably tougher.

"I can feel for all the other parents," she said, "because we had to give up not only our livelihoods but moved from our home state to a place very foreign to us."

Kimura's acclimation included falling on the ice and breaking her wrist. She suffered frostbite on both ears. She was also there for 17 months without her husband. He was stuck in Hawai'i, trying to get a transfer from his federal civil employee's job in Honolulu before finally giving up and "taking whatever job he could get," said Kimura, which was as a furniture re-finisher.

In '94, Shimabukuro narrowly missed making the Olympic team and Kimura remembers sitting in her office and crying. In '98, when a case of pneumonia kept him off again — his last chance — she wept again.

"Besides feeling the despair of letting us down, he felt he let down the state of Hawai'i because so many people back home supported him emotionally and financially," Kimura said.

And how does a parent feel when a 20-year investment in her child's future seems to fall flat? "It was heartwrenching," Robbie said, "and it took a while to look back and say to myself that it's not the medal, it's the journey."

This week, she said, was her final journey, her odyssey, and she was coming to watch her son at his first Olympic Games as he has clearly found his true calling as a coach, developing one of the deepest sprint teams in U.S. history.

Leaving her husband behind because only one of them could afford to make the trip, Kimura left last Wednesday from Honolulu and arrived on Friday, 32 flight hours and 11 time zones in all.

It was a grueling trip, she said, a long and difficult journey. But it was one she was going to take with her son. Wherever it took them.