Cleveland - In the heavy storm of flying teddy bears, accumulating like a snowfall on the ice, Kings Point's Sarah Hughes waited for the crowd to settle down so she could, as her coach had just told her in a quick preskate pep talk, "Go out there and show them how great you are." The bouquets of fuzzy toys were being hurled from the stands to salute tiny 15-year-old Californian Sasha Cohen (4-9, 79 pounds) and with 14-year-old Hughes next up, the national figure skating championships clearly had taken on a revolutionary tone Friday night. Earlier in the ladies short program, which counts one-third of the event's total score going into Saturday night's long-program final, reigning star Michelle Kwan, all of 19, had taken a spill and the door of opportunity had cracked open for Hughes, who last year placed fourth in this event.
Furthermore, last year's runner-up, 14-year-old Naomi Nari Nam, already had buried herself in fifth place with three glaring errors. Last year's bronze medalist, Angela Nikodinov, 19, hadn't been quite good enough for the judges to keep her ahead of the imperfect Kwan. When Cohen, in her first nationals appearance on the senior level, brought the crowd to its feet with an elegant and energetic show, she swept into first place, leaving Hughes with a challenging encore.
"It's not easy to go out after a standing ovation," Hughes noticed. "But I just tried to stay focused and I'm very pleased with the way I skated." Gliding around in her periwinkle outfit, making the best of her classic skating lines and clean landings, Hughes performed well enough that three of the nine judges cast first-place votes for her. Five judges favored Cohen and one stuck with Kwan, leaving a Cohen-Hughes-Kwan order going into Saturday night's decisive skate. Among those three, whoever wins the long program will win the competition, and Robin Wagner, Hughes' coach, said the obvious when she admitted that she would rather be second to the less-experieced Cohen than three-time national champion Kwan.
Cohen hasn't been around long enough to have established her consistency for the four-minute long program. Hughes, in her first World Championships a year ago, used her long program to advance from ninth to seventh place, a significant accomplishment under pressure.
Friday night, Hughes said, "I wasn't watching [Kwan]." Instead, she remained in the warmup area during Kwan's stylish but marred routine, in which she fell on her wallet attempting one of her easier jumps, a triple toe. "But I could tell. Just from the crowd. You can hear." Neither did Hughes immediately realize - as the crowd raved, the stuffed animals rained down and Cohen's leading marks were posted - "that Sasha had gone ahead," Hughes said. "I didn't look up [at the scoreboard]. But it's very easy to find out and, by the audience reaction, I could tell." Still, while the intensity of the competition had been ratcheted up a notch, Wagner said she "could see in Sarah's demeanor that she was ready. She's had nice practices, both here and at home before we came. I felt a certain calm in watching her skate. I just really enjoyed it." It was not, both Hughes and Wagner judged, Hughes' best-ever short program, though neither could put a finger on specific failures. "Some performances just really sparkle, something that has to come out of Sarah," Wagner said. This one, by contrast, merely was technically "crisp," Wagner said, and certainly good enough.
By sitting in second place, Hughes is presented with some large possibilities, given that skating observers consider Hughes, among the three leaders, to have the most difficult elements planned Saturday night. Kwan, sitting alongside Cohen and Hughes in the post-competition news conference, admitted that "I do see the future. I was watching them skate and I see great potential." John Nicks, Cohen's coach, called Friday night "a wonderful moment for Sasha that she should enjoy, but it's only a moment, because she has business to do [Saturday night]." Nicks also honored Kwan as "supreme. But the champion never rests easy on the throne." Saturday night's forecast is for more toy flurries. But for whom will the teddy bears fly?