Olympic Retrospect - 2002 Olympics (Kwan)

I found this article on Michelle Kwan today from the 2002 Olympics. She was such a diva that year, haha. I think the skating world will always be amift (did I just makeup that word?) why she fired her coach and choreographer right before the Games - it almost seemed like professional suicide. Yeah, she did get a second medal, and two Olympic medals are great for any figure skater - unless, however, you've been touted as the latest ballerina perfect since you were fifteen years old.

I love the pool pictures - she has an amazing body. I've been ice skating for two months, when will I start looking like that?!

Kwan's Song
February 2002

It's a winter night in Manhattan Beach, Calif., and Michelle Kwan is in the driver's seat. She's picked a sushi place for dinner and, though the restaurant is only a five-minute walk from your hotel, she insists on driving you herself. That's partly because she's always as polite as advertised. But you suspect it's also because she wants to make a little declaration of independence by chauffeuring a "grown-up" around and because she wants to show off her new black Corvette convertible. Years ago you had dinner with Kwan and her family at Legal Sea Foods in Boston, and you remember her cheering ebulliently as a waiter dismembered her lobster for her. Tonight, as you eat sushi on the restaurant's patio, Kwan seems less girlish, more willful, more blunt. "Who cares what goes on in my head?" she says when the talk turns to the mental game. "To win I have to be in the zone. If I knew how to get there--if I knew how to explain it--I'd always be there when I had to be."

Kwan is still the most respectful, least self-involved superstar athelete you've ever met. She still speaks carefully, often tilting her head back while searching for the right word. In key ways, however, she's become a palpably different person. When the skater excuses herself to use the restroom, a woman at a nearby table leans over to you. "I know she's famous, and I know I know her," she says, "but who is she?"

At the XVIII Winter Games in Nagano, Kwan was still a child, at 16 very much a product of her strong-willed coach, very much just another sweet kid in sequins who could skate circles around all but one of the other figure skaters (she scored silver to Tara Lipinski's gold). That's not the Kwan who'll compete in Salt Lake City next week. When they announce her name, look for a 21-year-old SoCal babe who's an A-list celebrity, whose boyfriend is an NHL defenseman and who abruptly canned both her longtime choreographer and her coach last year--in short, a Kwan ready to kick ice.

From the age of 7, Kwan has known that she would achieve greatness as a figure skater, but she wasn't sure that would be enough. "I wanted to be the Michael Jordan of my sport," she said. "I dreamed of being a legend." And by some measures she has succeeded. In less than a decade of competition, the 21-year-old Kwan has been the U.S. champion six times, world champion four times and won more perfect 6.0 scores from judges than any other skater in history. But legends are not made by points alone, in the rink or on the basketball court. For figure skaters, the door to that mythic realm of eight-figure endorsement deals, of celebrity that transcends sports itself, opens only once every four years, when the world briefly suspends its customary indifference to the spectacle of pretty young women leaping and spinning to the accompaniment of Ravel or Rachmaninoff. And Kwan knows this better than anyone. "To the public," she tells you, "the Olympics is the supreme of the supreme, and I don't believe you can ever truly be a legend without winning it."

And to win it, of course, you have to take it away from someone else: the title of America's Sweetheart is as hard-fought as any other in sports, as Tonya Harding demonstrated so vividly eight years ago. Although Lipinski has retired to the lucrative obscurity of the professional circuit, there is a new crop of teenagers eager to take on Kwan, led by her two euphemistically designated "teammates," fierce Sasha Cohen, 17, and smooth Sarah Hughes, 16.

Her toughest competition, though, is expected to come from a longstanding rival, the Russian Irina Slutskaya, 22, who this season outscored Kwan all three times they met. And she must face them without her highly regarded longtime coach, Frank Carroll, whom she inexplicably dismissed last October. The move was widely interpreted as a sign of desperation--if not, in fact, outright insanity, as she made good her vow to train and compete without a coach--an endeavor as unprecedented in the world of sports as a champion boxer's taking a step without an entourage. When she finished her winning program at last month's National Championships in Los Angeles and skated over to the "kiss and cry" bench, she had for company only her father. Danny Kwan was a systems analyst for Pacific Bell for many years, then took early retirement to work in the family's restaurant, the Golden Pheasant, in Torrance, Calif. He's been a crucial cheerleader and confidant for his daughter. Still, he's never pretended to know much about the technical aspects of figure skating.

To Salt Lake City's Delta Center next week, Kwan will bring her familiar strengths of unrivaled artistry and balletic grace, which, for the first time this season, were amply on display at January's Nationals. She won that championship decisively--and more important, she said, rediscovered "the freedom and joy" that have always fueled her triumphs. It is just those intangible, evanescent and subjective qualities that the judges and critics will be looking for at the Olympics. In 1998 Kwan peaked too early, turning in
one of the most dazzling performances ever in the Nationals, only to allow a tiny note of flatness to creep into her routine at the Olympics--at least in comparison to the ecstatic Lipinski.

Early this season, notes of flatness were resounding and frequent. Kwan lost to a fellow American (Hughes) for the first time since 1998. She placed third in an international competition for the first time since 1996. And perhaps most alarming of all, the figure-skating community pronounced her act stale, at least in comparison with a reinvigorated Slutskaya. "Everything she has brought to skating--the passion, the flow--was missing," the veteran coach of one rival said shortly before the Nationals. "It looked like the fire was out." Kwan herself admits that she has struggled recently to find the spark that once ignited automatically when she stepped onto the ice. She says her decison to go solo stemmed from her conviction that she alone knew what she had to do to win at this Olympics. And she is appalled at how "some people talk about me being over the hill. You'd think I was 35 years old."

Ever since Nagano, Kwan had tried to balance her skating aspirations with competing desires to lead the more conventional life of an all-American girl. That meant an L.A. life: Kwan bought a condo near Manhattan Beach, enrolled part-time at UCLA, took some acting classes as part of a sponsorship deal with Disney and, for the first time, had a few pals who didn't know a lutz from a salchow. Occasionally, she'd put the top of her convertible down and stray from the rink to the beach. Her taste matured from California rolls to melt-in-your-mouth slivers of tuna sashimi. While her life wasn't exactly a social whirl, Kwan could count on invitations to star-studded events--and got to train at the same complex with the likes of the Lakers' Kobe Bryant. Her parents watched her practice regularly. You'd see her mother, Estella, sitting in the stands--"If I skate and look happy, my mom is happy," Kwan once told you--and you'd see her father pacing around the huge complex, frequently stepping outside for a cigarette. (Somehow during this high-pressure season, her dad quit smoking.) Between skating, school and other demands, Kwan's life in L.A. was so busy that her parents rarely saw her. They would come to the practices, her mother told you, just to get a glimpse.

In November, Kwan decided to move back to sleepy, no-sashimi Lake Arrowhead, Calif., where she grew up. She returned to the tidy A-frame next door to her parents, where her dad was always ready to run over with a fresh-fruit plate or a comforting word. Most important, she could focus on training. The back-to-the-future approach seems to be working. Without a coach her practices appear more intense because there are no pauses for discussion; whatever input she requires, she provides herself, from her own bottomless well of experience. In the final session of one typical day, Kwan skated virtually nonstop for 45 minutes, except for brief pauses to restart her music, "Scheherazade," or to grab a tissue--and to pick herself up off the rink after crashing in a shower of ice chips. "There's not a day when you're not tired and hurting, when you don't have to plead with yourself, 'just keep on going'," she says. "You have to be like a gladiator because, in the end, the toughest person usually wins."

By retreating from L.A. to Lake Arrowhead, Kwan escaped the prying eyes and questions of the media, which she believes turned on her after she dismissed the popular Carroll. "We had differences," was as specific as she would get about the split, which only fueled speculation among reporters who still look back fondly on the Harding-Kerrigan brawl as a shining moment in figure-skating journalism. Rumors circulated that Kwan was in the thrall of some new Svengali--if not her father, then perhaps her boyfriend, or else the boyfriend of her sister, Peter Oppegard, a former Olympian and skating coach. Kwan bristles at the sexism inherent in what she regards as ridiculous assumptions. And she insists the decision was all her own--and less earthshaking than everyone makes it out to be. "I learned an awful lot from Frank," Kwan says, "but in the end you're always out there alone."

Both say they parted as friends. But that didn't stop the media from suggesting Kwan was headstrong, ungrateful or cavalier in her treatment of someone who had invested as many years in her career as she had herself. Kwan had been praised for the gracious way she handled her second-place finish in 1998. Now she was described in terms once reserved for Tonya Harding. "People were saying, 'She's insane,' and making me out to be a nasty, evil person," Kwan said. "You know how they say, 'Sticks and stones break your bones, but names will never hurt you'? Well, they both hurt." Life in Lake Arrowhead has been therapeutic. Everybody in town cheers Kwan on and respects her privacy. And everybody, the skater says, seems to be wearing the same button these
days. It says KWAN GOLD.

Soon, the flap over Kwan and Carroll will be forgotten--if Kwan wins, that is. Otherwise it will go down in Olympic history as a cautionary tale of how even a levelheaded young woman can go astray when she put her destiny entirely in her own hands, as well as on her own feet. Skating against Cohen and Hughes is like being caught between fire and ice. Cohen finished a strong second in the Nationals after missing the previous season with a back injury. But she got far more attention for delivering what she claims were a few inadvertent bumps to Kwan during the warm-ups, which the press treated as gravely as if she had taken a Tyson-like chomp from the champ's leg.

Hughes, at 16, skates with a confidence and serenity that belie her years. In October, at her first major international competition this season, she was stunned to hear the crowd booing when her second-place marks were announced. As unassuming as Cohen is cocky, Hughes couldn't fathom that they were upset because they believed she deserved to beat Kwan. A week later Hughes startled the figure-skating world by beating not only Kwan, but Slutskaya, too.

But perhaps it's Slutskaya who should concern Kwan the most. Slutskaya is Lipinski grown up--the same energy, leaping ability and winning smile, but with far more style and sophistication as a performer. With this season's routine, a frantically emotional skate to Puccini's "Tosca" she has finally shed a reputation for pedestrian artistry that had kept her a perennial runner-up to Kwan at the World Championships. Now Kwan, unquestionably the greatest skater of her generation, actually finds herself an underdog going
into this last-chance Olympics. Could that help Kwan somehow? Is it possible that losing has given her an edge? Kwan waves the notion away. "Losing is negative," she says. "I don't think it can ever be a positive thing. I don't think that way." Others disagree. "The Olympics is an incredible pressure cooker," says Brian Boitano, the 1988 Olympic champ and a friend of Kwan's. "Anything that brings that pressure down even the tiniest notch can be very
helpful."

No one, least of all Kwan, thinks the world should feel sorry for a beautiful 21-year-old with worldwide renown and endorsement deals for products ranging from Yoplait to Chevrolet. It's hard, though, not to sympathize as she struggles not just to master the minute and exacting demands of her sport, but to summon up, after so many years of competition, the passion and joy and vitality that will find favor in the judges' gimlet eyes. And so she will be battling not just Cohen, Hughes and Slutskaya, but herself as well--up against
the judges' memories of who she was, and their exaggerated expectations of what she might have become. "When you hang in all these years, people seem to get tired of you," she says, in a characteristic moment of introspection. "When I don't measure up to what they expect, it's as if they say, 'Well, then, you deserve to be placed second' [whether or not another skater actually surpassed her]. I feel like they're always demanding that I reinvent myself."
Which is a burden no ordinary figure skater, let alone a great one, ever faced. But it is, perhaps, the fitting test of a legend.

Sasha Cohen

RECORD: At 15, she took second at the 2000 Nationals and was hailed as America's hot young teen. A back injury cost her a season. But Cohen, now 17, has rebounded with another silver behind Kwan at the Nationals.

STRENGTHS: At 5 feet 1, she is the next in a long line of petite American dynamos who fire up the ice. Cohen is light on her feet and flashy, with sharp lines and dramatic expression. She also appears fearless and, if the situation calls for a gamble, is willing to go for it.

WEAKNESSES: Cohen can be inconsistent and can appear rattled under pressure. She was the consensus favorite at the World Junior Championships in 2000 but finished a sloppy sixth. THREAT ASSESSMENT

Sarah Hughes

RECORD: Hughes, 16, had a break-through season last year, winning a silver at the Nationals and a bronze at the Worlds. This year she became the first American to defeat Kwan since 1998, before taking third at last month's Nationals.

STRENGTHS: Hughes seldom makes a major error and conveys great serenity on ice. She also has the muscle to be a big jumper. She has two triple-triple combinations planned for Salt Lake City.

WEAKNESSES: Hughes has a reputation for "cheating'' on her lutz--they call it a `"flutz''--by taking off on the wrong and easier edge of her skate. Her coach claims that lots of skaters do it, but the judges have been punishing Hughes.