This week’s road extends only as far as Helsinki, where Kwan will seek her third world crown. But she is also skating around the truth–that far down the road is the motivation that truly matters. And world titles, while nice, are merely way stations over the next 1,000 days toward the one precious title America’s greatest skater lacks–Olympic champion. As the International Olympic Committee met last week in Switzerland to try to salvage its reputation, Kwan and others are dedicating their lives in pursuit of Olympic medals untarnished by scandal. “Everyone seems distracted but the athletes,” she says. Indeed, Kwan’s Olympic dream has proceeded unabated since she was a youngster. “As a child, I’d wonder, ‘When I die, will people still remember me 1,000 years later?’ And without the gold medal,” she says with a shrug, “well, the Olympics are the ultimate achievement in my sport.”
After Kwan’s upset loss to Tara Lipinski at the ‘98 Olympics, she immediately announced her intention to compete through the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City. But guided by her parents’ strong views about sportsmanship, Kwan tried to smile through the tears and wouldn’t admit publicly to anything beyond mild disappointment with her silver-medal showing. In truth, Kwan now says, the defeat, after a performance in which she didn’t make a major error, was devastating. “It was the hardest moment of my life,” she said in an interview in her new home, next door to her parents’, in Lake Arrowhead, Calif. “I was so close to what I’d always dreamed of that I could taste it. Afterwards, I just tried to hold it together. But when I saw my dad and mom, I lost it. They wanted it for me more than even I did.”
Her coach was distressed, too–and got even more so as he watched folks console Kwan by overpraising her performance. Carroll thought she had skated well, but not her best. As he watched her, he wanted to yell, “Skate more! Don’t hold back! Go for it!” Carroll realized he had “to zap” Kwan with the truth. “I knew it might even jeopardize our future together. But if she listened to others, she might feel she got screwed out of the gold and have been bitter for the rest of her life,” he says. “So I took her aside and said, ‘You were too slow and too tentative–you didn’t let go.’ She knew it. She said, ‘I didn’t think I was doing well.’ To me that was truly remarkable. When you gear your whole life to one thing and do a damn good job, you desperately want to believe everybody’s hype.”
When Kwan spoke to the press, just a few minutes later, she had nothing but praise for Lipinski and no quarrel with the judges’ decision. In a sports landscape where boorish behavior, whiny laments and ready excuses are the norm, her classy demeanor stood out. Kwan returned from Japan to find that her popularity and marketability had not diminished–and had perhaps even grown. While she and Lipinski now headline rival skating tours, it was Kwan who landed a coveted array of Disney deals for TV specials, books and, likely, a film version of her autobiography, “Heart of a Champion.”
With Lipinski retired from Olympic competition, Kwan is indisputably her sport’s premier performer. She is undefeated in 10 competitions since Nagano, and judges routinely award her what was once a rarity, perfect 6.0 marks. “She puts her heart and soul out there with incredibly beautiful movements,” says two-time Olympic champ Katarina Witt.
Kwan’s skating is not without weaknesses: her jumps could be more forceful and her spins could be faster, and she’s still trying to master a triple-triple jump combination, which helped propel Lipinski onto the top medal stand in Nagano. Still, she insists she will skate a more difficult routine next Olympics than she did in Japan. But it’s very hard for women skaters as they age–and Kwan, at 18, is practically in her dotage by skating standards–to master new tricks. They must cope with changes in weight distribution and a significant loss of flexibility. “At times I think, ‘Why should I push myself all those long hours in the rink?’ " Kwan says. “But then I think, ‘How will I ever know how good I could have been?’ I want to be the Michael Jordan of my sport.”
So each day she endures three 45-minute sessions on ice, as well as an exhaustive off-ice regimen of stretching, aerobics and weights. At practice she goes full speed and often has to be ordered off the ice as she tries to squeeze in “one more” anything, while the Zamboni circles her. But Kwan can’t exercise away all her doubts. “At 13, I was fearless. I looked at everything so positive,” she says. “When you’re older and been through it all, you know how bad it can get. There is a fear of failing.”
There is also a desire for a bit more independence than can be carved out with your parents as next-door neighbors. While the pictures on the wall of her modern A-frame–Kwan with celebrities ranging from Mark McGwire to Sinbad to Newt Gingrich–suggest a fast-track existence, Kwan knows she has led a sheltered and isolated life. “I don’t even know anyone who isn’t a skater,” says Kwan, whose social life is pretty much limited to an occasional movie with skating pals. “I want to get to know people my age who have other goals.” So this fall Kwan plans to attend college, while still competing. “I’ll be in Salt Lake City in 2002,” she says. “We just haven’t worked out all the details of how I’m getting there.”
Making it to Salt Lake is only half the battle. Nobody yet knows who the other half will be. After all, three years before Nagano, Lipinski was only a runner-up in the junior ranks. Skating’s next generation is already flashing its blades; at last month’s nationals, two 13-year-old rookies, Naomi Nari Nam and Sarah Hughes, finished second and fourth. “No matter how good you are,” Michelle’s dad, Danny, never ceases to remind her, “the ice is still slippery.” And Olympic ice is the slipperiest of all.
