For Lipinski, This Gold Medal Is Child’s Play

Figure skating judges occasionally get it wrong. Even when they get it right, people think they got it wrong.

France’s Surya Bonaly repaid them for an eight-year international career of perceived slights during her freestyle program, performing an in-your-face illegal back flip right in front of them. It was the most elaborate expletive in Olympic history.

But there was little question that the judges got it right Friday night at the White Ring, awarding the gold medal in women’s figure skating to Tara Lipinski over her U.S. teammate, silver-medalist Michelle Kwan.

The conventional wisdom was that the gold medal was Kwan’s to lose.

Lipinski didn’t buy it, not for one moment. She went out and won it, becoming, at 15 years 8 months, the youngest individual gold medalist ever in the Winter Olympics.

She won it with the most aggressive of freestyle programs, attacking it the way one of her Olympic heroes, Austria’s Hermann “the Hermannator” Maier, attacks the slopes. Call her the Taranator.

She matched Kwan with seven triple jumps, then raised her by becoming the first woman in Olympic history to perform a triple loop in combination with another triple loop. Kwan’s only combination was a less complex triple lutz-double toe.

It was as simple as rocks beats scissors.

When Lipinski landed the second of the triple loops, her normally reserved coach, Richard Callaghan of the Detroit Skating Club, began banging the boards, like an exuberant fan at an ice hockey game.

More telling, however, was the moment when a softer portion of Lipinski’s program carried her to Callaghan’s end of the rink and he mouthed the single word, “Gorgeous.”

Because of her age and her size, 4 feet 10, 82 pounds, Lipinski often looks like one of the flower girls when she skates on the ice at the beginning of a program.

Except for Bonaly, a 24-year-old former gymnast who has never achieved the refinement necessary to win at this level, the other four women in the final group of competitors Friday night all figured to either match or surpass Lipinski’s artistic scores.

Their performances were indeed engaging. Only Kwan’s presentation scores, however, were higher.

As in Wednesday’s technical program, Lipinski appeared carefree as she practically floated across the ice to the music, from the movie “The Rainbow” and “Scenes from a Summer Festival.”

“She’s flying, she’s flying,” one of her coaches, Meg Faulkner, said.

She certainly was by the time she finished her four-minute program. She hopped instead of glided to the center of the ice for her bow, blew kisses to the crowd and began crying.

“I can’t believe it, it was so good,” she told Callaghan and Faulkner when they arrived in the kiss-and-cry area to await the scores.

Kwan, who had already skated but didn’t watch Lipinski, heard the scores and realized her slight advantage artistically could not overcome Lipinski’s technical superiority.

It might have been different two years ago, when Kwan, only 15 herself then, won the world championship with her own triple-triple combination. But she had difficulty adjusting to her maturing body last season, finishing second in the world to Lipinski, and suffered a stress fracture in her foot this season that limited her jumping.

She seemed to have overcome that during last month’s national championships in Philadelphia, where she earned 15 perfect artistic marks of 6.0 for her two programs and reclaimed the national championship from Lipinski.

But Kwan never skated with the same confidence here.

She won Wednesday night’s technical program even though she appeared nervous. She was considerably better Friday night, good enough to win in most years, but still skated more deliberately than she would have liked.

Instead of skating to win, she skated not to lose.

“Tonight, I was cautious,” she said. “I took my time. I did one thing at a time. I enjoyed my performance. But it seemed like I was in my own world. I didn’t open up. I didn’t let go.”

That sums up her Olympic experience.

She remained at home at Lake Arrowhead to train for a few extra days instead of coming to the opening ceremony, then stayed in a hotel with her parents instead of the athletes’ village and never ventured out to see any other sporting events. She seldom ventured out at all.

Her father, Danny Kwan, said after seeing a U.S. skater, Caryn Kadavy, miss the long program during the 1988 Olympics in Calgary because of flu, that he, Michelle and Coach Frank Carroll decided to control her environment as much as possible.

If truth be told, that also was the preference of Lipinski’s parents, Jack and Pat, of Sugar Land, Texas.

But Lipinski wouldn’t hear of it.

She insisted on arriving in time to march with the U.S. team in the opening ceremony, stayed in the village except for a few days away to train privately in Osaka, posed for hundreds of pictures with other athletes, got her share of autographs from NHL stars, played video games, attended numerous other competitions and checked in often with her friends back in Detroit to make sure she didn’t miss out on any good gossip.

One thing she didn’t do was routinely check in with her parents at their hotel, leading them to ask reporters on occasion if they’d heard any news of their daughter.

She was like a 15-year-old at camp.

“That was really important for me,” she said Friday night. “The Olympics are pretty stressful. You have a lot of pressure. When I was in the village, I relaxed a lot and let myself have a good time. It really worked.

“Then, when I stepped onto the ice, I knew what the Olympics were about. I was full of pure joy.”

That translated into her skating, allowing her to live the moment she had acted out as a 5-year-old girl by standing on the top of a Tupperware bowl to accept an imaginary gold medal while watching the Olympics on television.

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MEDALISTS

Figure Skating

WOMEN

Gold: Tara Lipinski, U.S.

Silver: Michelle Kwan, U.S.

Bronze: Lu Chen, China