Head Turner

Skating with utter confidence and uninhibited joy, Sarah Hughes soared from fourth place to gold and became the new queen of the ice

By E.M. Swift

Issue date: March 4, 2002

It was 1:30 in the morning and the eyes were still bright, the smiles wide, the energy pulsing, stoked by the powerful turbines of a dream come true. The Hughes children, all six of them, were seated at a circular table in the Marriott University Park early last Friday -- gold medalist Sarah, 16, flanked by her brothers David, 20, and Matt, 18, and sisters Rebecca, 24, Emily, 13, and Taylor, 10. Every one of them was playing hooky from a school back East to share Sarah's Olympic moment, and their mother, Amy, was slightly horrified by her complicity in the plan.

"I'm the one who's always talking about the importance of an education," said Amy, a breast cancer survivor, her eyes shining as she soaked in the scene. Matt had planned to take the red-eye back to New York on Thursday night, but Amy had nixed that once they learned that Sarah, exceeding all their expectations, had pulled off one of the most shocking and endearing figure skating upsets in Olympic history. Her life, they knew, would never be the same. "All my children," Amy said in wonderment. "It's so exciting. I never let them stay up this late."

The second-youngest U.S. Olympian had skated the performance of her life to leap from fourth to first and win the marquee event of the Games. Everyone wanted a piece of that story. An unpretentious kid from Great Neck, N.Y., had not only knocked off the two favorites, Michelle Kwan of the U.S. and Irina Slutskaya of Russia, but also lifted her sport from the mire of the pairs' judging scandal by providing the most enduring image of the figure skating competition: her joyous, uninhibited reaction to the news that she'd won.

Hughes doesn't even have an agent. So within hours of her triumph her father, John, a New York attorney wearing an FDNY hat, and her coach, Robin Wagner, weren't guzzling champagne. They were sifting through a pile of interview requests presented to them by U.S. Figure Skating Association media relations director Bob Dunlop. The wake-up call for the Today Show was less than four hours away. Sarah had to prepare two numbers for the Olympic skating exhibition that evening. The Tonight Show wanted her on Monday, the Grammys and Saturday Night Live later in the week. On and on it went. The big whoopee was well under way.

Two things took priority. First, Sarah wanted to relax in the hot tub at the house outside Salt Lake City where her family had been ensconced. (Her siblings had raved about the views of the Wasatch Range from the tub.) And she wanted to go to the gold medal hockey game on Sunday. All other decisions could wait till tomorrow. "Tell Leno we'll sleep on it," John Hughes said, chuckling at the absurdity of such an utterance, before shooing his golden girl to bed.

Miracles on ice seemingly come out of nowhere, but they almost always follow a carefully scripted plan and involve strong-minded athletes who are resolved to carry them out. Such was the case with Hughes. Her Olympic journey really started with her third-place finish at the U.S. nationals in January, a placement that stuck in her craw. It wasn't finishing behind the six-time U.S. champion Kwan that bugged her; it was being upstaged by 17-year-old Sasha Cohen of Westwood, Calif., who by finishing second became the spicy new flavor in skating. Before Cohen emerged, that had been Hughes's role.

Hughes and the 44-year-old Wagner, who is also Hughes's choreographer, mentor and best friend, started making big changes. Wagner consulted with a respected judge who concurred that the music Hughes had used in her free skate at the nationals, Daphnis et Chloe by Ravel, was not upbeat enough and that her program needed to end on a crescendo. So Wagner recut the last 90 seconds, choosing another selection from the recording that she thought might have the emotional impact to bring an Olympic audience to its feet. This was playing to Hughes's strengths. She can't match the elegant Kwan or the balletic Cohen in a contest of stylistic grace. However, in terms of expressing the pure joy of skating, no one can touch her.

Her hair was restyled. Noted designer Jef Billings was hired to make more elegant outfits. But by far the most important change Hughes made in the five weeks between nationals and the Olympics was adding a second difficult triple-triple combination jump to her free skate. "I was coming to the Olympics as the third-place finisher from our country, so I needed to pull out everything I could do," she says.

"She's an athlete," says Mahlon Bradley, a former competitive skater who was a U.S. team doctor at Salt Lake City. "She's like Jimmy Shea, the skeleton driver. She gets angry at something before she competes. That's how she motivates herself. She was angry about her placement at nationals."

When Hughes took the ice for her short program on Tuesday, though, she looked more nervous than mad. She was the fifth of 27 skaters, a poor draw, and with tension etched on her face, she started mechanically. Hughes made a couple of minor technical errors, and while it was a good skate on balance, five of the judges hammered her on her technical marks, with a range from 5.1 to 5.3. When the last skater was done, Hughes stood fourth, behind Kwan, Slutskaya and Cohen.

Wagner said later that if Hughes couldn't finish in the top two in the short program, which accounts for one third of the scoring, it was better to be fourth than third. Sitting fourth, she had nothing to protect. It was an invitation to cut loose. "Wait for the music" is usually the last thing Wagner tells Hughes before she skates to center ice to start her long program, a reminder that she must pause once the music begins. On Thursday night Hughes beat Wagner to it.

"I know. I'll let the music start," Hughes said, clasping hands with her coach. She was completely in the moment. In her eyes was a spark of fire, maybe anger, that caught Bradley's attention as he stood behind Wagner. This was no timid ice princess. "You could tell she was going to be great," he said.

Hughes wasn't worried about gold. She said later that she wasn't even thinking about medals, which she usually does. She was thinking, I'll show them. She was angry, all right. About nationals. About her fourth-place standing. Now she'd show everyone what she could do. "Those four minutes," 1994 gold medalist Oksana Baiul said knowingly on Friday night, "can change your life."

Hughes landed her first double Axel and began feeding off the crowd's roars. She landed her trademark triple Salchow-triple loop combination, the most difficult jump any woman would do that night. The program was gaining momentum, but she still hadn't done enough. To move from fourth to first, to bypass a four-time world champion, which Kwan is, you must make history. Midway through her program Hughes did precisely that when she landed her second triple-triple, this one a toe loop-loop combination. It was the one she'd added after nationals. Wagner, jumping up and down at rinkside, began to hyperventilate.

"Just breathe," Bradley quietly cautioned in her ear.

The rest of Hughes's program -- what remained of those reworked 90 seconds -- was a blur of giddiness and joy. Hughes was screaming from her heart, "I love skating!" and the reaction it drew from the 16,500 in the Salt Lake Ice Center was cathartic. Flowers and toys and thunderous applause rained down seconds after Hughes ended her final combination spin, and she exchanged an eye-popping look of disbelief with Wagner. "What did I just do?" she seemed to ask.

When Hughes reached the end of the rink where Wagner was waiting, the coach wouldn't let her leave the ice. "Turn around," she instructed. "Close your eyes." The audience was still going wild. "Soak it in."

"That was her Olympic moment," Sarah's mother said. The marks? The placement? It didn't seem to matter at the time. Not enough to ruin that feeling. She'd done what she set out to do. The judges, with the top three still to skate, marked her conservatively -- mostly 5.8s with a couple of 5.7s. Not a single 5.9. There was still plenty of room for Hughes to be passed.

Hughes and Wagner retired to a quiet place -- the men's locker room -- to savor what had happened. Hughes called her mom, who was in the arena. "She never does that," Amy said. "She wanted to know what I thought. She was so happy. When it's your kid, that's all you want. I didn't care what the other skaters did. I didn't even watch."

Neither did Wagner, though after Cohen skated, the coach was curious enough to call her husband, Jerome Grossman, who was in the crowd, to see whether Hughes had moved ahead of her rival. Once Wagner learned that she had, that Hughes had won at least a bronze, the two talked about what it would mean. "I told her it didn't really matter what color the medal was, that her performance had endeared her to millions of people," Wagner says. "I reminded her to be very gracious. We compared it to the way Michelle handled her silver medal in Nagano."

Just about then Kwan, who'd stayed around four long years for another crack at gold, was two-footing the front end of what was supposed to be a triple toe-triple toe combination, a jump that had eluded her all season. She then fell on a triple flip, and the energy drained from her program. The favorite would finish third.

Slutskaya, skating last, seemed set. Kwan had self-destructed, and the gold medal was dangling there for the 23-year-old Russian champion to snatch. If she too collapsed and finished behind Hughes and Kwan in the free skate, Kwan would win her gold after all. The only chance for Hughes was for Slutskaya to finish between the two Americans. "It was like drawing the last card of a royal flush," John Hughes said.

Right from the start Slutskaya was slow. Like Kwan, she was succumbing to the intense pressure. She failed to land either of her two triple-triples and spun out of a triple flip -- the same jump that had ruined Kwan. The Russian federation would protest that Slutskaya was undermarked, victimized by a giant conspiracy against Russian athletes in Salt Lake City. In truth, though, she was lucky the judges placed her second. She was tentative and uninspiring throughout.

An NBC cameraman, shooting Hughes and Wagner quietly huddling on a bench in the men's locker room, gave them the news. "You won," he said. "Sarah won."

Their spontaneous reaction provided the final exclamation point on a startlingly unscripted evening, one that ended in a knee-buckling, squealing heap on that locker room floor. Having left everything out on the ice, Hughes wasn't about to opt for decorum now. This was a new generation of ice princess. What she was selling, America was tickled pink to buy.

"I was coming to the Olympics as the third-place finisher from our country, so I needed to pull out everything I could."

"She was so happy," Amy said. "When it's your kid, that's all you want. I didn't care what the other skaters did."

Issue date: March 4, 2002