Word: skater
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...Yorker has proved herself a deft navigator of the skating circuit. She is a crafty competitor with enough international experience to know--and deliver--what the judges like to see. She bested both Kwan and Russian star Irina Slutskaya at an international competition in November, becoming the first U.S. skater to beat Kwan since Tara Lipinski did it at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan...
...full-time coach, not to mention surrogate mother, mentor and confidant. Says Hughes: "She was always asking me whether I liked something. When you're 10, you always want to be the boss, and when someone asks you for your input, you get really excited." A onetime singles skater, Wagner connects with Hughes as both a former competitor and a coach, and their bond is undeniably strengthened by the amount of time the two spend together off the ice. Wagner picks up Hughes six days a week at a shopping-mall parking lot, as she has done for four years...
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...
Apolo Ohno is scheduled to be a star. He is the best short-track speed skater in the world, and he could win a gold medal in each of his sport's four Olympic events. At 19, he has the fresh-faced good looks of a boy-band member, a marketable name and a signature style--flowing hair beneath a red bandanna and a soul patch under his lower lip--that makes him instantly recognizable. Abandoned by his mother as an infant, reared in Seattle by an itinerant Japanese hair-stylist father, Ohno has also waged the personal struggle required...
There's only one problem: Ohno can be something of a knucklehead. He is a teenager, just a few years removed from a pattern of skipping school and interrupting training runs with pizza binges. In December a skater named Tommy O'Hare alleged that Ohno and fellow U.S. medal hopeful Rusty Smith, who had already qualified for the American team, tanked the 1,000-m short-track final at the Olympic trials so their friend Shani Davis could finish first and make the team instead of O'Hare. Despite some damning evidence, an arbitrator exonerated Ohno, but the mini-scandal...