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As a skater, I've wondered that myself.  Below is Scott Hamilton's bio
from one of his home pages.  Warning -- it is long!

Scott was born on August 28, 1958 and adopted by Ernie & Dorothy
Hamilton of Bowling Green, Ohio. They were both professors at Bowling
Green University. Scott has a sister, Susan who is six years older than
him and a brother, Steve, who is 4 years younger than Scott.

Scott was a normal healthy kid until he mysteriously stopped growing
when he was 5 years old. "When I was 5, I just stopped growing," he said.
"They never really knew what was wrong with me. I just had no physical
development at all.

"They did have a lot of ideas. I was diagnosed once as having cystic
fibrosis, and obviously, that was false. Then they thought I had
Schwachmann's syndrome, but that didn't pan out," he said.

"They never really had a true diagnosis. Maybe if I'd had what I had for
two more years, they would have come up with one. But we'll never
know."

For four years, his doctors knew just one thing - that his body was unable
to absorb virtually any nutrition from the food he ate. But even that
discovery didn't help cure Hamilton. In fact, it was one case in which the
cure was almost worse than the disease.

"They put me on a lot of interesting diets," he said. "I couldn't have this,
and I couldn't have that. I wasn't allowed to have any white flour or milk.
One diet doctor said they were basically starving me to death. It was
basically malnutrition on top of malnutrition."

And so, because his disease had no cure and the treatment itself made
him even more frail and more weak, Hamilton spent four years traveling
from hospital to hospital, going from lab to lab, bouncing from diet to
diet. For four years, he thought he would never grow another inch.

"When I was a sick little kid, I was always in and out of hospitals.
Hospitals are chambers of horrors. There were awful tests. Some of the
worst were when they put tubes down my throat"

Scott, ever the optimist, finds good even in his childhood difficulties.
"From age 5 to 9, I was always in different hospitals in different parts of
the country, not having my family, not having a consistent school, and
that can really hurt you," he said. "But what it did for me was to make me
more self-sufficient."I learned to work within the system of the hospitals,
how to drive the nurses crazy and that sort of thing. I learned, basically,
that I had to depend only on myself."

That self reliance certainly helped him withstand the pressures of
becoming a world and olympic champions.

Because he had been so sick, Scott was not involved in school sports.
But one day, when he was 9, he tagged along with his sister to the ice
skating rink. He came home and told his family he wanted to try it. It was
a shaky start. He fell a lot and he cried a lot. But he kept at it and he
showed a talent for it.

"It was the one thing that I could do on an equal basis with the other
kids," he said.

Something else happened when Scott took up skating. At his next check
up he was healthy and had actually grown some! All signs of his illness
had disappeared! Some attributed it to the cold air and vigorous
exercise of skating. Scott simply says "I skated myself out of it"

Because he was already nine years old before he began to grow, Scott
never caught up and never grew taller than 5'3-1/2". But he stands tall on
the ice!