Word: skates
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Elsewhere in the Olympic cosmos at the same time, a 5'4", 34-year-old man named Derek Parra churns several swift laps in the 1,500-meter speed skate race, and charges toward the finish, hoping to hold on. Meantime, the Games' marquee event, women's figure skating, is well underway. The usual suspects - Irina Slutskaya of Russia and American teenagers Sasha Cohen and Sarah Hughes - are already placed 1-2-3 as the elegant 21-year-old veteran Michelle Kwan skates to center ice to begin her short program...
...gold medal in the Winter Games. She is joined in success on this magical night by Bakken, a former soccer player at Oregon State who was one of many U.S. National Guardsmen in attendance in Salt Lake last week; Parra, a Mexican American who had learned to skate on rollers in the streets of San Bernadino, Calif., and Kwan, the star from La La Land, perhaps the country's most famous citizen of Asian descent. The Winter Olympics had never before looked like America, but during this night - this fortnight - they looked just like America...
Four years ago in Nagano, young Tara Lipinski "pulled a Tara," leaping over Michelle Kwan without nicking her to take the gold medal. In figure skating circles that immediately became known as pulling a Tara because, under the rules of skate scoring - rules so arcane and cryptic and convoluted (and, as we know, so easily abused) - no one is allowed to pass anyone in the rankings unless the pre-disposed judges say they can. Yet Tara did just that, turning in a long program performance so astonishing that the judges could not deny her superiority. And so they moved...
...that happen in figure skating? I put the question to my colleague, Alice Park, as we sat at the Delta Center waiting for the final group to skate. "Well," she explained patiently, "it's because if Hughes skates great and Cohen's behind her then she has to beat Kwan. But if she does that, then Slutskaya has to beat Kwan for Hughes to win, because if Slutskaya is second to Kwan tonight then the short program is brought to bear and so Hughes, even though she beat Kwan, would finish second to Kwan and Slutskaya, who lost to Kwan...
...figured wrongly. Figure-skate judging had learned nothing in the last week and two judges had placed Hughes's performance this evening below both Kwan's and Cohen's. Incomprehensible. Outrageous! Moreover, the entire Russian Olympic team was threatening to pull out of the Games this very evening. They'd been hard done because some cross-country skier had tested positive and Wednesday's hockey game was called too closely and there was still that thing with the Canadian pairs and, well, they were in fifth place overall and someone had to answer to Putin. (Or so speculated a Russian...