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Sunday, February 13, 2000 By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Sports Writer
CLEVELAND -- Usually before a competition, Michelle Kwan and her coach, Frank Carroll, joke around and play games to lighten the mood. Not yesterday, not when she was in third place headed into the ladies free skate at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.
"It was all business today," Kwan said. "Maybe I didn't communicate as much today."
And it paid off -- barely -- as Kwan, 19,. came from behind to win her third consecutive national championship with a free skate that had a fall, a missed combination and two shaky landings but was enough to beat 15-year-old Sasha Cohen, the surprise leader after the short program.
Kwan, who skated third of the six skaters in the final group, struggled. Wearing a maroon slip dress with gold trim and skating to selections from "The Red Violin," she failed to land her triple-triple combination, doubling her second toe loop, and she fell on her triple loop, a jump with which she had continually struggled in practice.
She was also shaky on two landings in the second half of her program, on a triple lutz and a triple toe loop -- the jump she missed in her short program -- that she threw in at the very end.
"I thought I was going to do triple-triple," said Kwan, who wanted to reach the magic number of six triple jumps. "I hesitated a little bit, and I knew right away I wasn't going to do triple-triple."
Still, Kwan received high enough marks -- 5.7s and 5.8s for technical merit, 5.8s and 5.9s for presentation, to put the pressure on Cohen, the runner-up in the junior division at last year's national championships who burst onto the scene in Gund Arena with a nearly perfect short program Friday night.
Cohen skated 10 minutes later. Dressed in red and skating to a Mendelssohn violin concerto, she skated almost perfectly for about 31/2 minutes of her four-minute program, landing a triple-lutz, double-toe combination followed by a triple-flip, double-toe. She then two-footed a landing on her triple lutz but recovered with a strong triple loop and double axel.
Then she fell on her triple toe loop, the last -- and easiest -- of her six triple jumps.
"I was a little tired," Cohen said. "I was really disappointed in my last jump."
By doing so, she gave the judges a difficult choice -- choosing between two flawed programs, one from an up-and-comer and one from the defending champion.
They chose the champion.
"I wanted to feel good about myself after the performance," Kwan said. "I didn't want to feel any pity."
Third place went to 14-year-old Sarah Hughes, second after the short program, who skated the competition's most technically difficult program with two triple-triple combinations.
Hughes, who had the competition's most technically difficult program with two triple-triple combinations, made two errors. She landed her triple-salchow, triple-loop, but she popped the second jump in her triple-toe-loop, triple loop combination. Hughes also fell on a triple salchow late in her program.
"Any program you do you should challenge yourself and be tired at the end," she said, discounting that she was simply too exhausted to perform the salchow correctly. "You shouldn't be happy if you weren't giving it your all."
The dramatic free skate was set up by Friday night's surprising short program, in which Kwan fell, and two of the younger challengers, Cohen and Hughes, skated cleanly -- and with a harder required triple jump than the one on which Kwan fell.
The evening started with Cohen in first place, Hughes in second and Kwan in third. Any of the top three women could have won the national championship by winning the free program.
Kwan and Hughes will represent the United States at the World Figure Skating Championships.
Cohen, however, finds herself in a rather difficult situation. To be eligible to compete in the 2000 World Figure Skating Championships, a skater must be 15 years old by July 1, 1999. Cohen turned 15 on Oct. 26, meaning she is ineligible unless she can meet the back-up requirement: a medal at the World Junior Figure Skating Championships.
That's why fourth-place finisher Hughes, then 13, was able to compete at last year's worlds and second-place finisher Naomi Nari Nam, also 13, was ineligible. Hughes won the silver medal at the 1999 junior worlds.
This year, junior worlds are scheduled for March 5-12 in Oberstdorf, Germany. If Cohen can medal there, she would be allowed to compete at the senior worlds, March 26-April 2 in Nice, France.
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