Cleveland - Figure skaters are different from you and me. First of all, their attire is not everyday wear. Sequins and so forth. And they have a lot of excused absences from school. For instance, Great Neck North High School freshman Sarah Hughes spent most of last week here in Cleveland, where she won a bronze medal in the national championships, qualifying her for a trip to Japan later this month - as part of the U.S. team in the Four Continents Cup - and for a journey to Nice, France, in late March for the World Championships.
"I like traveling," Hughes said. "It's fun to see new and different places and meet different people." Besides, it was during a competition in Austria that Hughes and her coach, Robin Wagner, attended an opera in Vienna and picked up the music Hughes used for her long program here Saturday night, Puccini's Turandot. Travel can be enlightening.
(What, a skating visitor asked a Cleveland resident during the championships, do people do in Cleveland? "The polka," was the answer.) But, back to skating. Figure skaters - at least, the best of them - are unique not simply for the physical skill to perform startling gymnastic tricks while balancing on a quarter-inch blade flying along slippery ice, but also in their mental ability to deal with inevitable imperfection.
During Hughes' long program Saturday night, for example, she began with historic sharpness. She landed the first triple jump-triple jump combination ever by an American woman. Hughes was in danger of coming apart, however, when she completed only half of her next triple-triple attempt.
"You know, you can't freak out when you miss something," Hughes said afterwards, sounding reasonable beyond the norm. "The performance goes on. I knew I could do everything else, and you can't go back and change what you didn't do." Easier said than done, though, and Hughes admitted such poise doesn't come automatically. "Oh, yeah, I had to learn to get through it," she said. "That happens and I'm saying, 'Oh, that's stupid; oh, I'm so stupid I can't believe I did that.' But you can't beat yourself up." While skaters are holding their hands just-so and hanging onto their smiles, the wheels had better be turning in their heads or more trouble will find them.
Wagner figured that Hughes' failure to complete the second triple-triple combination simply was a matter of not having her mind a split second ahead of her body.
Maybe the soreness Hughes had developed in her left hip a couple of weeks ago had been in the back of her head, too. Hughes didn't think so; "maybe I didn't train quite as hard as I might have" if the hip hadn't been an annoyance. Maybe having to skate first among the final six, while trying to hang on to the second place she earned in the short program, added to the pressure. Hughes didn't agree. "I like to go first," she said. "I'm all warmed up and I can just go; I don't have to sit and wait." She saw no reason for excuses. Even with that flaw in her second combination and a fall, late in the program, on a final triple-jump attempt, it didn't keep one of the nine judges from ranking Hughes first. The other eight judges went for the polished, experienced Michelle Kwan, giving her her fourth U.S. title.
Both Kwan and second-place Sasha Cohen, the itsy-bitsy spider (4-9, 79 pounds) who had weaved her web of magic in the short program, also fell on triple jump attempts.
But all three medalists - and men's champion Michael Weiss, who took three stitches in his chin during practice and was thoroughly outjumped by runner-up Timothy Goebel during their long program - had demonstrated how skaters are different: They soldiered on.