Word: rinks
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This being figure skating, don't count on a team effort to knock off the competition, which this year comes mainly from Russia. You can resurface a rink with the frostiness that elite skaters reserve for one another. Hughes, 16, makes it clear that despite Kwan's once revered status, the six-time national champ is "just another competitor" now. The equally aggressive Cohen, 17, announced her intention to risk everything by trying to become the first woman to land a quadruple jump in competition...
...star, then Hughes is the well-disciplined champion in training. Her ascent to Olympic contender in the past three years couldn't have been more methodical if it had been planned; each year she has bettered her rankings at both the national and the world championships. She covers the rink with more speed than Kwan and spins and jumps with more explosive energy. While Cohen does have the edge over Hughes in emotive prowess, Hughes is the more consistent skater...
Once at the Ice House, the Long Islander shares the rink with Olympics-bound pairs champions from the U.S. and Russia, and it's all business. Training with pairs, who generate more speed than singles skaters, pushes Hughes to mimic that power. After soliciting feedback from judges last season, Wagner and Hughes devoted the summer to addressing two criticisms of Hughes' skating--her still nascent expressiveness and her faulty technique on the triple Lutz jump, one of the most challenging leaps a female skater makes (only the triple Axel is more difficult). Hughes was slipping badly onto the wrong blade...
...long as the rink is frozen, you can count on Russian teams winning medals in pairs and ice dancing. Russian men have even had the golden touch, collecting three championships in the past three Olympics, but oddly enough, no Russian woman has won Olympic gold in women's figure skating...
...Olympic experience. And it worked for Lipinski. All of this may or may not have played in Kwan's mind on Thursday when she decided to stay in Salt Lake City for what may be two of the most important weeks of her life, but after viewing the rink facilities at the University of Utah and the Salt Lake Ice Center, she knew she wasn't going home. "It's a wonderful experience to walk around the Village, I like the rink facilities, and the people are so nice I thought I'd stay," she says...