Word: fall
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...evolving dynamic that takes shape only as blade hits ice. Underneath the show smiles whir constant questions: "Is there enough speed for this jump? Can I make three revolutions or just two? Since I missed the first jump, should I throw another one in?" Yet skaters must not fall for the easy temptation of deep analysis. Lipinski, a wizardly technician on the ice, says that during her long program, lasting 4 minutes, she doesn't think too hard about mechanics. "I try to keep the technical things in mind, but I don't think about it too much, because then...
...months. The defeats devastated her. Losing the nationals a year ago was the bitterest of all. She was the favorite for the gold medal, but a few minutes into her long program, she found herself sprawled on the ice after slipping out of a jump. After the first fall came another; then she had to put a hand down on the ice to steady herself after a shaky landing. She had panicked. Coming off the ice, Kwan could only shake her head and ask over and over, "What did I do?" Lipinski took the title, and a fierce rivalry...
While she would have liked to arrive in Nagano as the U.S. ladies' champion, Lipinski is seasoned enough to put her loss behind her. "It was disappointing," she says of the dramatic fall that cost her the short program and forced her to battle back from fourth place to take the silver. "The biggest thing for me was that I made a mistake but I got up and did the rest of my program well instead of falling more and falling apart and not being able to hold it together. That felt good to me, that I could show everybody...
That fierce self-assessment, with its apparent reference to Kwan's spectacular fall last year, is magnified by Lipinski's appearance. There is a moment during every competition when the audience is reminded of just how young--and tiny--Lipinski really is. Just before it's her turn on the ice, as she waits for her name to be called, she skates around with the flower girls. She carves small circles around them, head down, eyes focused, concentrating on the program she is about to perform. At 4 ft. 10 in. and 80 lbs., with her hair pulled back...
...wasn't rocking 'n' rolling that caught young Elvis' attention. "It was spinning," he says. "I saw all this spinning on TV, and I started tugging on my parents to take me skating. When I got on the ice, all I wanted to do was slide and spin and fall, slide, spin, fall." And soon, jump. From the first, Elvis was a jumping machine...