Hip Injury Will Keep Kwan Out of Events

Michelle Kwan’s quest for an elusive Olympic figure skating gold medal has been temporarily derailed by a strained ligament in her right hip, costing her precious chances to test herself under the scoring system that will determine the champion at the Turin Games in February.

The Manhattan Beach resident, a five-time world champion and nine-time U.S. champion, on Thursday withdrew from Saturday’s Campbell Classic at St. Paul, Minn., and the Grand Prix-opening Skate America event, Oct. 20-23 at Atlantic City, N.J. Her agent, Shep Goldberg, said there was an outside chance she might compete at the Cup of China in Beijing, Nov. 2-6.

“This is not career-threatening or career-ending,” he said in a telephone interview. “She just needs time to heal.... She already started therapy and there’ll be a gradual building back up and exercises so it doesn’t become chronic.”

He said Kwan, the silver medalist at the Nagano Games and bronze medalist at Salt Lake City, had felt soreness for a few weeks while skating and that it intensified last weekend. She was examined and diagnosed on Monday by Leisure Yu, an orthopedic surgeon in Loma Linda.

Goldberg said Kwan skated Monday and Tuesday and felt more pain before she agreed to stay off the ice. “Her spirits are pretty good,” he said. “The key thing is for her to get better.”

Kwan skipped last season’s Grand Prix events and competed only once under the new cumulative scoring system, finishing fourth at this year’s world championships. If she can’t compete in China, she will have only the U.S. championships at St. Louis, and the Four Continents competition at Colorado Springs, Colo., to gauge how her programs will fare in Turin.

The new system, adopted after the pairs judging scandal at Salt Lake City, was designed to end bloc judging and give skaters more precise marks for jumps, spins and artistry than the 6.0 system allowed.

“Of course I’m very disappointed, but I see this as a temporary setback,” Kwan said in a statement. “I intend to follow the doctor’s orders, get well and be back competing as soon as possible.”

Breaking the Ice

Figure skater Sasha Cohen has moved from Southern California to Connecticut, New York and then back to Orange County in the last three years, traveling a lot of miles but not getting as far as she’d hoped.

Whether her coach was John Nicks, Tatiana Tarasova or Robin Wagner, one truth remained constant: she’d skate one graceful and mesmerizing performance but couldn’t sustain that in successive programs at the Olympics or world championships.

“At times she is unbeatable,” said Nicks, who coached her from the time she was 11 until she was 17 and welcomed her back to Aliso Viejo late last year.

“But she’s got to put a total of six minutes and 50 seconds, at the Olympics, two programs together, without error. And I am more confident this year that she will do that.”

Cohen was third before the free skate at the 2002 Olympics but fell and dropped to fourth. She was first after the short program at the 2004 world championships but was overtaken by Japan’s Shizuka Arakawa; she was three points behind Russia’s Irina Slutskaya at this year’s event before a flawed landing on a jump cost her points and contributed to another second-place finish. She has finished second to Kwan at the last two U.S. championships.

This year, however, Cohen appears to have many factors in her favor. She has worked with the sport’s most successful coaches -- Tarasova guided Salt Lake City men’s gold medalist Alexei Yagudin and Wagner coached women’s champion Sarah Hughes -- and with noted choreographer Nikolai Morozov. And Nicks said Cohen’s concentration and determination have improved since they last collaborated, to the point where he must sometimes urge her to ease up.

“She’s very focused and very determined,” he said, “telling me she has to do this to do what she wants to do this year. I’ve never seen anybody work quite like that.”

Cohen will debut her “Romeo and Juliet” program on Saturday at the Campbell’s Classic. Also scheduled to compete are Arakawa, 2005 U.S. bronze medalist Kimmie Meissner, and Emily Hughes, Sarah’s younger sister and an aspiring Olympian. Emily Hughes will replace Kwan at Skate America.

The men’s field is set to include Takeshi Honda of Japan, 2002 Olympic bronze medalist Tim Goebel of the U.S., and U.S. champion Johnny Weir. The event will be televised on Oct. 16.

“I’m really excited that the season is beginning. I feel like I’m in a good place,” Cohen said. “This is going to be a great chance to test out my program and set things up for the rest of the season.”

Her program features a sequence of about 20 turns in 10 seconds, “some of them extremely difficult, different types of turns, and done very elegantly and done to the music,” Nicks said. “I don’t think anybody’s going to beat that.

“And that being said, she has to skate two clean programs.”