|
 |   |
|
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Multimedia Central Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities Work in Sports
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE |  |
Inside Olympic Sports
Posted: Wednesday February 16, 2000 12:29 PM At the nationals, runner-up Sasha Cohen, 15, augured a dazzling future for U.S. skating By E.M. Swift
In an election year there's nothing like being the incumbent. That was the message delivered by the judges at the U.S. figure skating championships in Cleveland last weekend as both Michael Weiss and Michelle Kwan overpromised and underdelivered but repeated as champs. The buzz in Gund Arena, however, was generated by a couple of young turks -- Timothy Goebel, 19, and Sasha Cohen, 15 -- who each finished second and served notice that the order will soon change if the old dogs don't learn some new tricks.
The 19-year-old Kwan, who's a freshman at UCLA, should be reminded of that, too. This was her eighth appearance at the nationals as a senior lady, and, to be blunt, she's showing some wear. She fell on relatively simple triple jumps in both her short program, in which she finished third, and her freestyle, but she still won her third straight title and fourth overall, thanks to her reputation as a peerless stylist. Never mind that Kwan's stylishness was largely absent last weekend. The judges have the memory of an elephant and marked her as if it were present and accounted for. "I wasn't in character as much as I usually am, which doesn't mean I didn't feel the music," Kwan said afterward, referring to the sound track from the film The Red Violin. "This music isn't very cheery either, so it suited my mood." Indeed Kwan, who loves college, seemed as if she would rather have been taking, say, a medieval history exam. She says otherwise, but all the joy seems to have been wrung out of Kwan's skating, particularly in contrast to the effervescent performance of her younger rival. Cohen, a high school sophomore from Laguna Niguel, Calif., looks about 12 but moves her 4'9", 79-pound body about the ice as if she were a prima ballerina: assured, composed, impossibly flexible and elegant. Yes, at 15, elegant. Her hands, her spins, her spirals, her posture, her positions in the air are flawless, often breathtaking. "We call her the china doll, but don't be fooled," her coach, John Nicks, said after Cohen won the short program. "I've seen her take many hard falls, but I've never, ever seen her cry." Competing as a senior for the first time, Cohen proved her mettle in Saturday's freestyle program, when, unfazed by the pressure of leading, she landed five triple jumps and mesmerized the 15,036 spectators. Near the end she made her one error, falling on a triple toe loop, a mistake that gave the judges the excuse they needed to put Kwan first. The judges at next month's worlds will feel no such loyalty to Kwan. (Because of her age and lack of international qualification, Cohen will have to place in the top three at the junior worlds in Oberstdorf, Germany, next month to claim her spot in Nice.) If Kwan wants to regain the championship she lost to Russia's Maria Butyrskaya last year, she has to go back to full-attack mode. That means landing a triple-triple combination, which Kwan never attempted in Cleveland but which internationally is the technical standard by which the top women skaters are judged. Do Weiss and Kwan still have the fire in their bellies to raise the bar technically, or is it time to unleash the kids? Issue date: February 21, 2000
For more Inside Olympic Sports see this week's issue of Sports Illustrated, on newsstands Wednesday, February 16. Click here to subscribe to SI.
| ||||||||||||||||||||
