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« Je pensais me faire des amis, a-t-elle dit de cette époque de sa vie, en faisant des bêtises. » Mais un jour, en 1988, quand elle avait seize ans, elle a vu à la télévision le patineur de longue vitesse Gaétan Boucher qui était alors en fin de carrière. « J’ai alors vu un homme, a-t-elle dit plus tard, qui se donnait corps et âme à une cause, et son désir, sa passion et cette volonté que j’ai vus en lui ont changé ma vie. »
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But in some ways, the most remarkable thing about Hughes is her willpower. A self-confessed “wild child” born into a Winnipeg family plagued by addiction and mental illness, she started smoking cigarettes in Grade 3 and was smoking a pack a day by Grade 6. By high school, she was drinking heavily and partying a lot. “I thought fitting in,” she would say of that time, “meant getting into trouble.” But one day in 1988, when she was sixteen years old, Hughes watched on television as Olympic long track speed skater Gaétan Boucher competed at the end of his career. “I watched a man,” she would later say, “who gave himself to something, and that desire and commitment and that want I saw in him changed my life.”
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