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Her marvelous career is still missing one thing: an Olympics championship

Sunday, February 17, 2002

By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

SALT LAKE CITY -- Michelle Kwan swears it's not about the medals, not even the gold one she failed to win four years ago at the Nagano Olympics. It's not about the millions of endorsement dollars, not the adoration of the fans, not even the thrill of competition.

To skate, she needs more.

"I can't just justify training for four years just for that six minutes on the ice," Kwan said. "There's got to be more things I enjoy about ice skating. For me, it is definitely the process of getting there."

The process she has used to get to the 2002 Olympic Games has been quite a production.

First, Kwan tried to juggle international-level skating with college, living in a dorm at UCLA but still trying to maintain her skating skills. It didn't work, and Kwan -- still, technically, a freshman at age 21 -- moved out of the dorm and resumed her three-a-day practices.

Then she fired her choreographer Lori Nichol, the woman who designed the stunning short and long programs for which Kwan received 15 perfect 6.0s for artistry at the 1998 U.S. Olympic trials.

Her first adventure wasn't anything unusual, her second was surprising. Her third shocked the skating world.

Less than four months before the Olympics, Kwan fired Frank Carroll, the coach who had guided her since she was 12 years old. Even stranger, she didn't pick a replacement. She said she would coach herself.

"Not to say this decision will make me a better skater, but I'm making it based on what is right for me at the moment," she said in October. "It could be four days before the Olympics, as long as I think it will help me. I've made the decision I'm responsible for my own skating."

	Ice Queens Champions of the ladies figure skating competitions at the Olympics: Year Champion Country 1908 Madge Syers Great Britain 1912 No competition 1916 No competition 1920 Magda Julin-Mauroy Sweden 1924 Herma Planck-Szabo Austria 1928 Sonja Henie Norway 1932 Sonja Henie Norway 1936 Sonja Henie Norway 1940 No competition 1944 No competition 1948 Barbara Ann Scott Canada 1952 Jeanette Altwegg Great Britain 1956 Tenley Albright United States 1960 Carol Heiss United States 1964 Sjoukje Dijkstra Holland 1968 Peggy Fleming United States 1972 Beatrix Schuba Austria 1976 Dorothy Hamill United States 1980 Anett Potssch East Germany 1984 Katarina Witt East Germany 1988 Katarina Witt East Germany 1992 Kristi Yamaguchi United States 1994 Oksana Baiul Ukraine 1998 Tara Lipinski United States

Skeptics abounded as Kwan struggled through the early part of the season, but her performance last month at the U.S. nationals quieted them.

Now, starting with the short program Tuesday, she faces the biggest challenge of her career -- to win the Olympic gold medal that eluded her the last time.

"Four years flew by," Kwan said. "It's been a great four years. I'm glad I stayed in and stayed focused.

"I just want to skate my heart out. It's a lot of pressure having the Olympics in your home country, but it's a lot of fun, also. I just want to enjoy myself."

Alone in the spotlight

As if that pressure isn't enough, Kwan is attempting something unprecedented. No elite skater has competed in the Olympics without a coach.

Her father Danny stands on the boards in a coach-like position while Kwan competes. But he calls himself a cheerleader, and Kwan always teases him: "Where are your pompons?"

The figure-skating world was scandalized when she decided to go at it alone. No one understood why, including her former coach.

"The only real explanation I've gotten is that she really has a strong, strong feeling that she needs to do this by herself,'" Carroll told the Orange County Register. "That she has to be strong enough to get out there and lay it on the line without depending on me or depending on her father. That is, if she is to succeed, she has to be strong enough to do it by herself.

"I don't fully understand what's going through her head. I really, really don't."

He's not the only one.

Observers have questioned why Kwan's father is omnipresent if she is attempting to assert her independence. They wonder why, after making such a point of dropping Nichol, she has returned to the short program she skated in 1998, to Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 ... that was choreographed by Nichol.

"In any relationship, it evolves," Kwan said shortly after she dismissed Carroll. "When I was younger, the coach was pretty much the skater. You did whatever he said. As I've gotten older, I've gotten more independent and I think for myself. That's the way it should be.

"You have your differences in the way you should go about things, and that's what Frank and I ran into."

The Nagano lessons

One thing is certain. Kwan has always had a headstrong streak, dating to her pre-teen years. After Carroll forbid her from taking her senior test, she took it anyway, while he was out of the country at a competition. When he returned, he discovered that she had passed the test and was no longer eligible to compete as a junior lady.

So at age 12, she went to the 1993 U.S. nationals as a senior, the youngest senior lady in 20 years.

Since then, she has essentially grown up on television.

The next year, she got caught up in the Tonya-Nancy debacle, finishing second at the U.S. Olympic trials after Nancy Kerrigan was unable to compete. When Kerrigan was placed on the U.S. Olympic team anyway, Kwan, 13, was an alternate at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics, where she watched and learned.

"Just to do interviews when I was 13 years old," she said, "was pretty overwhelming."

In 1996, when she was 15, she won her first U.S. national title and she added the world title, too. She was the third-youngest world champion.

Even though she lost the 1997 world title to fellow American Tara Lipinski, by 1998 Kwan was considered the favorite for Olympic gold. Her performance at the 1998 U.S. Olympic trials -- those 15 perfect marks for artistry -- cemented her as the woman to beat.

At the Olympics, however, she held back, and she lost to Lipinski. Although Kwan lost the gold medal, the grace and class she exhibited in defeat earned her more fans and more endorsement dollars than Lipinski.

And the whole experience taught her a lesson.

"It's realizing there's more to life than a medal," she said. "You live life with no regrets and just go, and you make mistakes -- you might fall. ... I wish I could say that winning so many medals would complete me as a person, but yet how come the richest people, the most famous people, aren't the happiest people on earth?"

Competition

Kwan isn't the overwhelming favorite this week, as she was in 1998.

Her primary rival since the Nagano Olympics has been Russia's Irina Slutskaya, who finished fifth in 1998. Slutskaya's presentation isn't as smooth as Kwan's, but her technical skills are superior.

In other words, Slutskaya has landed more triple-triple combinations than Kwan has.

Kwan has beaten Slutskaya the past two years at the world championships, but since the Goodwill Games in October, Slutskaya has beaten Kwan three times.

The two other American women also are applying pressure. Sarah Hughes, 16, won SkateCanada, finishing ahead of Kwan and Slutskaya, and became the first American woman to beat Kwan since Lipinski. And Sasha Cohen, 17, the runner-up at the U.S. nationals, has forced herself into contention despite missing last season with a back injury.

Of the four women, Kwan has had the least success landing triple-triple combinations.

Cohen has flirted with a quadruple salchow, but said she will not attempt the jump in the Olympics.

Hughes, who finished third at nationals, said she has added a second triple-triple to her long program.

Conventional wisdom holds that the gold-medal performance will include a triple-triple. The jump was one of the things that made a difference for Lipinski in 1998 -- she landed the difficult triple loop, triple loop.

In the past, Kwan had opted to do a safer triple-double combination, something she could land cleanly, and it has worked. In the past two world championships, she beat Slutskaya for the gold.

"The question is," Kwan said, "do you take that risk?"

Marching forward

Kwan is approaching these Olympics differently than her last ones.

She arrived late in Nagano, afraid she would not feel comfortable in the training facilities. (She ended up liking them, but didn't want to take that chance.) She stayed in a hotel, not the Olympic Village, and she generally held herself apart from the Olympic Games experience.

Lipinski, who visibly embraced everything about the Games, put that energy into her program and won the gold, apparently teaching Kwan a lesson.

This time, Kwan arrived in time for the opening ceremonies and, despite the cold, she marched.

"There's a lot to learn," she said, conceding that marching in the opening ceremony is an important experience that shouldn't be missed. "So, right now, it's like 'OK, let's take it in.'"

She stayed in the village a few days before the Games began, but she has since moved to a hotel with her family, the better to avoid distractions.

"What I've been practicing lately is just to put a bottle on your emotions and reflect the program," Kwan said. "Let certain emotions come out so that you get a great performance. For me, it's a lot of joy I feel with figure skating and, hopefully, the people watching, they feel that sort of joy also."