Cleveland -Like many freshmen at Great Neck North High School, Sarah Hughes takes a morning biology class. Unlike anyone else at school-or anyone else on Long Island for that matter-Hughes will be competing in the U.S. Figure Skating Championships alongside the likes of Michelle Kwan beginning tomorrow night.
"I was absent that day," Hughes admitted when asked about dissecting a frog.
"But I've seen pretty gross things under a microscope." Like other freshmen, she also takes a morning world history class. Unlike the others, Hughes has seen more of the world first-hand than the almost any other 14-year-old.
"What about when you stop in airports?" she wanted to know, wide-eyed, when asked how many countries she has visited through skating. "Can you count that?" She noted that she and coach Robin Wagner once spent hours waiting for a plane change in Germany, and then there were competitions in France, Italy, Mexico, Hungary, Croatia, Finland and Austria.
"I have," Hughes offered, "the best of both worlds." That is she is an elite skating competitor and, oh, she's just being a teenager. "I can always find someone if I want to hang out," he said. "Some kids think it's cool that I've been to Paris. But when I go to school, a lot of people don't know what a triple Lutz is." Hughes understands that "now that some people have seen me on TV, I'm 'Sarah the Skater.' " She realizes that she is "a local celebrity. When TV comes to school, everybody starts crowding around me. I suddenly have more lab partners." But to her there is no mystery to her circumstance. "I always liked to skate, I guess because I was pretty good at it," she said. Furthermore, her eyes and smile suddenly light up, "I love to perform. I love to be on stage. I love to have people watch me skate." Maybe it has something to do with being one of six children, but "I enjoy being the center of attention," she said.
Her parents could afford it-her father is an attorney and her mother a certified public accountant-so she took skating lessons, found a coach and choreographer and rink, won the national junior title at 12 and finished seventh at the World Championships at 13.
Now skating on the senior level for only the second season, Hughes is considered to be packing one of the most technically difficult routines among the women with a pair of triple-triple combination jumps. "I'd like to skate well," she said, but readily confessed to more. "I'd like to make the podium.
I'd really like a medal." She knows she is a markedly improved performer since her fourth-place finish in last year's nationals, more polished and attentive to "feeling the music." Yet she also seems to perceive that all is not black and white, that there are gray areas and unknowns in the sport to be taken in stride. To a question by one veteran skating observer, whether Hughes always has had an "elegant" style, Hughes broke into her always handy grin and said, "Well, everybody has their own opinion on that." In fact, she recently said that "when I started, all I liked was jumping. Jump, jump, jump, jump." She has noticed that "it seems to be a very popular question: 'Are you going to the Olympics?' I'd love to go, but things could drastically change" before the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. "You know, it's all a learning experience.
You can't go back and change things. I want to improve on everything, but I can't work on everything every day or I'd never leave the ice." As it is, she spends the middle part of most days at Ice House in Hackensack, N.J., driven there each day by Wagner. Up at 7, in school by 8, Hughes is fetched by her mother at 9:30 to rendezvous with Wagner at the Macy's parking lot in Manhasset. The drive to New Jersey can take from 45 to 90 minutes, and the truth is that Hughes prefers listening to the radio while Wagner sometimes begs for silence, at which point Hughes is left to doing homework.
Back in her Kings Point home by early evening, Hughes has one-on-one tutoring from her English and math teachers. "That's harder than being in class," she noticed, "because when it's just you and the teacher, you sort of have to do your work." Her father, John, said the whole system works because Hughes does well enough with her schoolwork that she is considering applying to either Harvard, her older sister's alma mater, or Cornell, her parents' school. Hughes also is getting more time in a high school setting than most top skaters. Just yesterday Kwan said that the biggest shock during her first semester at UCLA last fall, after having been tutored since eighth grade, "was when I walked in that lecture hall, I felt so small. I felt like an ant, so out of place. I actually have friends now outside of skating."