An Olympic-sized rink looks like acres of ice on televised events, but it seems more compact when you’re right beside it, hearing the scratch of Weir’s blades, watching him wipe ice from his gloves or push his damp hair back from his face, which bears a light stubble.

Here the rigor that goes into making a champion is both workmanlike and wondrous.

Weir practices a sequence of his program, lyrical music sounding from a speaker, stopping, then starting again. Rinkside, his coach models arm movements as Weir watches.

Then he soars gracefully into the air, spiraling, and a little boy watching from the rink’s bleachers blurts out “Whoa!”, his voice carrying across the ice.

In two weeks, the 21-year-old skater, who grew up in Quarryville, will go to Italy to compete for a medal in the Winter Olympics.

He says it won’t be a gold. Russian skater Evengy Plushenko is just too good, he thinks. But he’s one of several men who would like to bring home a silver medal.

Weir, who has made a name for himself as an athlete who says what he thinks and has a good time while doing it, goes into the Olympics at the top of his game, coming off his third straight national championship in St. Louis earlier this month.

He’s healthy, confident and, at a press conference at The Pond Monday, as Johnny-like as ever.

At Nationals, he described his skate to classical music as a “cognac and cigarettes” moment for the audience, contrasting it with a competitor’s more bouncy “let’s snort coke” routine.

He caught some flak from figure skating officials. Their problem, not his, he says.

Take him or leave him, Weir is his own man, someone who loves coffee and shopping, chocolate milk and high fashion, Christina Aguilera and perfection on the ice.

“That’s the way I rock it ... it’s always got to be me,” says Weir.

And: “You only get to live life one time. I think it would be a mistake to mold yourself into something you’re not.”

Not that there’s any danger of that.

When he is asked to describe himself at the press conference, his coach, Priscilla Hill, puts her hand over her mouth, reddens and laughs in anticipation. His agent, Rocky Marval, leaning against one wall, says dryly, “Keep it clean.”

Weir says he is passionate and out to win, loving and stubborn. He thinks he comes across as pretentious and arrogant, but says some of that is simply his confidence.

His description finished, he smiles innocently and says, “I didn’t say anything bad.

“Yet.”

Weir’s family moved to southern Lancaster County from Oxford when he was just a toddler. They lived in Holtwood, the Tanglewood development outside Quarryville and Little Britain from 1986 to 1996, moving to Newark so Weir could train.

Though his family has lived in Delaware for about 10 years now, his mom, Patti, says before the press conference, “Johnny considers himself from Lancaster County, from Quarryville.”

His grandparents, Robert and Marcella Moore, live in Willow Street. An aunt and uncle, Diane and Joel Neff, recently moved to Quarryville.

Weir’s mom regularly returns to the county to go grocery shopping at Ferguson & Hassler in Quarryville for his family, which includes his dad, John, and 18-year-old brother, Brian, known as “Boz.”

Looking back, Weir says he doesn’t know if he would have survived if he still lived here, because he has changed so much. But he says he feels nostalgic about the place where he grew up.

He remembers playing in the woods, getting muddy and doing “everything that is not figure skating” while living in southern Lancaster County.

His mom says Weir played T-ball and soccer — “He tried all the normal things” — and rode horses.

But in 1993, while stuck indoors during a March blizzard that hit the county, Weir fell in love with figure skating, watching Oksana Baiul win the world championship.

Though he’s not the kid who left Little Britain, he says, “I still feel like a country boy” and notes that when he chugs chocolate milk or iced tea, his friends say, “You are so country.”

“I still feel such a connection to where I came from,” he says.

Now he is focusing on Italy, however, as he perfects his long program, a revived 2004 routine he skates to the music of “Otonal.”

As he’s matured, he says he realizes a gold medal is not the end-all of his athletic career. Rather, it’s the experience of going to the Olympics and doing his best there.

While in Italy, Weir also is looking forward to watching some aerial skiing and the men’s hockey finals and attending the closing ceremony. But Weir, who notes on his Web site that he needs “alone time” and that his closet is color-coded by designer and hanger color, jokes he is not quite as excited about living with a bunch of other athletes at the Olympic village.

As he looks to the future, Weir says another Olympics may be down the road, if he stays healthy.

“I still don’t feel like I’m the best,” he says. “I still don’t consider myself finished.”

After that? He would like to buy a house and maybe design his own line of clothing.

“I do everything full out, 100 percent,” he says. “That’s all I can do for now. I just want to live, and be happy... and love every second of what I am doing.”