Word: medaling
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ALICE PARK, WHO WROTE OUR COVER STORY THREE WEEKS AGO ON SARAH HUGHES, THIS WEEK COVERS HUGHES' REMARKABLE GOLD-MEDAL PERFORMANCE. Last summer when I showed up in a sweater at the Ice House in Hackensack, N.J., where Sarah Hughes trains, her coach Robin Wagner took one look at me and shook her head. "I've got a coat and some gloves in my office; you'll need those." She was right. I spent hours watching Wagner and Hughes break down the bane of Hughes's existence, the Lutz jump. Judges had penalized Hughes repeatedly for taking...
Since Hughes was the first of the medal contenders to skate, she didn't know exactly what she had done. Or that her program would weather assaults from Sasha Cohen, favorite Michelle Kwan and Russia's Irina Slutskaya to stand, at the end of the evening, as worthy of Olympic gold. As she came off the ice, none of that mattered. "Going in, I didn't think I had a chance for gold, let alone a medal, given who was skating here," Hughes says. "So I didn't hold back...
Sarah Hughes' performance was the pinnacle of a figure-skating competition tarnished by a judging scandal in the pairs competition that resulted in two gold-medal awards. It also had to withstand a protest by a cranky Russian Olympic federation demanding gold for Slutskaya and threatening to leave the Games over assorted alleged judging improprieties. Hughes refocused attention on the outstanding performances these Olympics offered across a menu of winter sports, before crowds that were full and festive despite an unprecedented level of security...
Still, John and Amy Hughes, thrilled with what they thought was, in the best-case scenario, a bronze-medal finish, learned otherwise only by watching Sarah and Wagner's reaction on the monitors. "It never dawned on me that she could win," says Amy. "Fourth in the short--I didn't understand how you could...
...hard defeat for the 21-year-old Californian, who won silver at Nagano in 1992. Her disappointment and surprise at finding herself with bronze this time was as deep as Hughes' ecstatic shock at having defeated her idol. Puffy-eyed from crying when she skated out to receive her medal, Kwan will now wrestle with the burden of dealing with an Olympic victory that has slipped from her hands not once but twice. "I just wanted to come home with the gold," she said immediately after the competition. "I have to remind myself to keep my head up high...