Meissner hams it up in new TV spot

Posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 6:56 pm

University of Delaware skater Kimmie Meissner is trying hard to be a normal teenager.

The 17-year-old is a senior at Fallston High School in Maryland, fresh off a major test in English. She’s hoping to get her driver’s license this summer, and she even practiced driving in the snow with her father recently.

“When you get your license, my car is going in the garage,” Ron Ludington, the director of UD’s Figure Skating program, told her with a laugh.

There aren’t many teenagers like Meissner, who is preparing to defend her World Figure Skating Championship later this month in Japan. She recently won the Four Continents Championship, which was preceded by her victory in the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

After all, most kids her age don’t have their own Subway commercial, as Meissner does, where she debates with the advertisement’s leading character Jared Fogle over “more meat” versus “less fat.”

And most kids her age aren’t talking trash with 2005 Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush, who was taping his Subway ad before Meissner. She said that’s why it took her from early in the afternoon until almost midnight to film her spot.

“Reggie Bush was totally messing up his lines,” Meissner said with a laugh. “I mean, ‘More meat!’ I was joking around with him. I told him I’d be better than him. I guess I must have been.”

That’s nothing compared to the trash talking Meissner takes from her schoolmates.

She can’t go down the halls between classes without someone yelling out: “Hey, Kimmie, ‘More meat!’”

Meissner also announced that her father, Paul, was having a birthday Wednesday and that she was going to buy him an iPod. When Meissner showed her father how to use the latest bit of technology that is all too familiar to the youngest generation, she said he was amazed to see how it worked.

“I’m like, ‘Where have you been?’” she said.

That effervescence explains why Meissner isn’t nervous heading into the World Championships, even though she’s the defending champion, and even though she’ll be competing against some of the top skaters in the world.

Besides, she said, the Japanese skaters are the ones who should be feeling the pressure. They’re skating in their home country, with hordes of media documenting their every move.

Meissner got a sense of this when she competed in the NHK Championships in Japan in the fall of 2005.

“We had never seen so many cameras,” said her coach, Pam Gregory. “You can just hear the clicking every time she skated by. I just think it’s going to be huge pressure for the Japanese skaters.”

To Meissner, anyway, that pressure can’t compare to standing up in front of the entire school assembly like she did recently and making an impromptu speech.

“That was really nerve-wracking,” she said.

Ludington has seen this ever since Meissner started taking lessons at UD as a 9-year-old.

“I can tell you right now that Kimmie is no different than she was last year or the year before,” he said. “She’s the most level kid. That’s what makes her click so well, because she hasn’t been carried away by everything that’s taken place.”

There was one exception: Meissner did get carried away with Jared.

“He did a really good Napoleon Dynamite impression,” she said. “That impressed me a lot.”

Martin Frank
Delaware Online