This Bruin Still Has Plenty of Golden Moments Left

Michelle Kwan doesn’t wear blue and gold when she competes. Nothing on her costume says “Bruins,” but Kwan has won the 2000 world figure skating championship and which other UCLA student-athlete can brag of such an accomplishment?

Not that Kwan will brag. She laughs when the question is posed. Is Kwan the most successful UCLA athlete of the year?

“Well, maybe I did better than the basketball and football teams,” she says. “But the [1999] softball and [men’s] volleyball teams won NCAA titles.”

Today, Kwan will skate at the Arrowhead Pond as part of the Champions on Ice Summer Tour. She will be joined by Laguna Niguel’s 15-year-old Sasha Cohen, runner-up to Kwan at the 2000 U.S. national championships, and Irvine’s Naomi Nari Nam, 14, who was second to Kwan at the 1999 nationals.

Kwan, who grew up in Torrance and whose parents live in Lake Arrowhead, comes home for the first time since winning her third world championship in March in Nice, France.

It was a dramatic performance in which Kwan, 19, came from behind, winning the long program by skating a joyful, exuberant and mostly mistake-free program. The victory was unexpected. Kwan had been considered an underdog to Russia’s Irina Slutskaya, an athletic jumper who had won earlier Grand Prix competitions during the season by completing two difficult triple-triple jump combinations.

Kwan also had seemed listless and even a little unenthusiastic about skating at the U.S. national championships in February. She was pushed by the elegant Cohen and 14-year-old Sarah Hughes of Great Neck, N.Y. A year earlier it had been Nam, then 13, who had finished second to Kwan and earned a standing ovation. One after another, these youngsters have been coming at Kwan. Hughes jumped better. Cohen and Nam had the audacity to challenge Kwan’s strength, her exquisite artistry.

Kwan read about herself in February and March and mostly what she read was that her time had passed, that she was not interested in fighting to stay among the world’s best, that she was unable or unwilling to increase the technical difficulties of her program, to add the difficult triple-triple combinations that Slutskaya and Hughes were doing and that, most certainly, by the 2002 Olympics, Kwan might be hard-pressed to make the U.S. team, never mind win the gold medal that she had missed in 1998.

“It didn’t make me mad,” Kwan says. “But I kept wondering ‘How can you write me off when I’m doing so much. If I’m not giving up, then don’t give up on me.’ ”

What Kwan did this year hasn’t been done by any other figure skater. Kwan began her freshman year in college, moved away from home and into a dorm, took a full load of classes to start with, changed her training base from Lake Arrowhead to El Segundo.

Skaters like Tonia Kwiatkowski and Paul Wylie have attended college and skated. But Kwan’s position was different. As the best-known U.S. figure skater, she had commitments to skate in exhibitions and shows. To be eligible for the World Championships, she was required to skate in two International Skating Union Grand Prix events.

“It was a very challenging year,” she says. “I had to figure out how it all fit together, skating and school and travel. When Paul [Wylie] was going to Harvard, I don’t think he was competing at worlds. It’s really hard, you know? And then everybody was watching and saying ‘Can Michelle do it?’ ”

Michelle did it.

She had to make adjustments. Living in the dorm was too difficult and Kwan moved into an apartment in El Segundo. She is lucky, she says, because UCLA is on the quarter system. So she has taken this quarter off. She was able to concentrate on her preparations for worlds and skate on this tour.

“And then I can go to school the summer quarter and catch up,” Kwan says.

She says she approaches every day wondering, “What will make me a better skater? I love the competition, still. It’s all about the competition, all about getting better than the top skater.

“When you see someone doing a triple-triple, you ask yourself, ‘What will make me better than them?’ Then I have to go to practice and do it.”

As she sees the young skaters, the little girls who say Kwan is their idol, suddenly in the spotlight, as Nam was in 1999 and Cohen in 2000, Kwan gets thoughtful.

“It’s hard work that gets you to the top,” she says. “Sometimes, when people are 13 or 14 and get a glimpse of the spotlight, that’s when trouble happens.

“There’s the pressure all of a sudden and you get a taste of that sweetness. You have people offering you things, people want you to do this, that, tempting you. It’s once in a lifetime. You think it’s so cool to be on TV when [Jay] Leno or [Dave] Letterman calls. You have to say yes sometimes, you can’t say no to everything, but you have to be smart, too.”

That’s what Kwan has always been. Smart.

She has handled the disappointment of losing the 1998 Olympic gold medal to Tara Lipinski in an upset. She has handled attending college and being a world champion. If you want to write her off, feel free. But why would anyone want to do that? It’s the question Kwan will ask.

*

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.