Ice Breaker

To the kids she visits in the hospital every year at holiday time, Michelle Kwan is special because she brings them a wagon full of stuffed animals.

She’s memorable to them not because she’s a five-time U.S. figure skating champion, three-time world champion and 1998 Olympic silver medalist. To them, she’s the nice lady with the pretty smile who lets them choose a toy and makes them feel a little better.

They don’t know those stuffed animals were thrown at her feet in adoration on figure skating rinks around the world. Or that the 20-year-old Torrance native will compete for her fourth world title starting Wednesday here at GM Place, trying to become the first woman to win four world titles since Katarina Witt of East Germany won in 1984, ‘85, ’87 and ’88.

“They’re so small, they don’t know,” said Kwan, who gives the stuffed animals to hospitals in the city where she happens to be skating, or ships them home to distribute at Los Angeles Children’s Hospital. “It’s nice, when you don’t have a camera crew around, and it’s just you and a kid. They don’t care who I am.”

Like those kids, Kwan doesn’t see herself as many of her fans see her--a delicate, remote ice princess. She has a refreshing and admirably level perspective about her place in the world and the all-encompassing nature of her sport.

She can be close to perfect on the ice, melding music and movement so seamlessly that she received seven perfect 6.0 scores for her short program at the U.S. championships in Boston in January, a performance she considers one of her best. But she’s humanly imperfect when she has a paper due for the twice-weekly class she takes at UCLA and is staring at a blank computer screen, unable to get past “The” and wondering how writers churn out the stories she has saved in scrapbooks about her career.

“They make it look so easy,” said Kwan, who handed in a final paper before coming here. “They have a deadline and bang, they’re done. They deliver.”

And when she sees her image on TV or on magazine covers--not a rare occurrence, since her endorsement deals reportedly earn more than $3 million a year--she doesn’t always recognize that fashionable, perfectly made-up person. Most days at HealthSouth training center in El Segundo, where she skates twice in the morning and once in the evening--with a workout and a quick meal squeezed in--she wears sweats or a leotard, her hair pulled back in a convenient ponytail.

The only evidence of her stature one recent morning was provided by Gary, the rink’s coffee shop counterman. After giving her a free cup of tea, he told her he liked her new TV commercial. She thanked him and joked about how long it took to complete the brief ad.

“It’s different,” she said. “I don’t see myself as the me that I know I am with friends, more like a skater, Michelle. It’s a glamorous life when you’re in the spotlight. Everything seems to be perfect, and you go to a premiere and you’re dressed to the nines. I don’t go to that many of them, but you walk on the red carpet, and you go in a limo, and da-ta-da. People figure that’s how it is all the time.

“They don’t see the mornings when I wake up and say, ‘Aah, I have to wake up. Aah, I have to skate. Aah, I have to drive myself to school. In grunge.’ When I see famous people, I look at them like it’s so different. They don’t have seven inches of makeup or they don’t look like they look when they airbrush [photos]. It’s happened to me, a few times on magazines. Someone will say, ‘That looks great,’ and I’ll say, ‘Wait a minute, that mole I have right over there is gone!’ ”

Occasional retouched photo aside, there is no pretense about her, merely purpose.

In winning the U.S. title five of the last six years, Kwan has fended off a succession of young phenoms with wonderful jumping ability. Naomi Nari Nam in 1999. Sasha Cohen in 2000. Sarah Hughes two months ago in Boston.

Yet, none has matched Kwan’s grace and power or her ability to perform as if each jump, spin and gesture was meant to be done then and there, for that music, and no other. Nor do her rivals have her competitiveness, which inspired her to continue in Olympic-eligible skating after she won silver to compatriot Tara Lipinski’s gold at Nagano in 1998.

Kwan could have left the cutthroat world of so-called “amateur” skating for an ice show, leaving behind those long, three-practice days. Instead, she pointed herself toward the Salt Lake City Olympics and perhaps beyond, determined to challenge herself technically and artistically.

“It is different, the professional world, for sure,” she said. “I guess you don’t have that much free time when you’re amateur. You have to keep up with the flow of things and maintain everything. You can’t really have fun and do other activities. You can’t tour and do a lot of exhibitions. You’re very limited in what you can do.

“But the demands are what I like so much about what I’m doing. Amateur skaters are still setting the standards. You can see that with the [quadruple jumps] and abilities we have. I definitely don’t resent all of the demands. I think I’d resent myself if I’d made the other choice. I thought about it once and I said, ‘That’s not even what I want to do.’ It’s not like I don’t have freedom. I choose more wisely in what I can do. I can do a lot of things. When you’re forced to be disciplined, you do things.”

Her discipline and grace served her especially well at the world competition last year in Nice, France. Supposedly vulnerable after a less than stellar season, Kwan rallied from third place after the short program, skating a superb long program and passing Russians Maria Butyrskaya--who had defeated her the previous year--and Irina Slutskaya.

Kwan knows she will have to be at the top of her game this week to beat Slutskaya, who defeated her at the Grand Prix Final last month in Tokyo. It won’t be easy. Bothered before the U.S. competition by a sore back caused by the repeated twisting motion of the triple salchow-triple loop combination she hoped to add to her long program, Kwan eliminated the jump. She also scaled down her triple loop-triple loop to a double-double.

“There’s been a lot of emphasis on triple-triples,” her longtime coach, Frank Carroll, said Monday. “Her competitors have landed one. [But] Michelle doing Michelle’s thing--skating cleanly, aggressively and beautifully, is unbeatable.

“That’s what I hope she’ll do here, skate aggressively and not back off. When she does that, she’s in a class by herself.”

In the world competition, skaters must do their long program in the qualifying round, the short program and the long program again. Kwan plans to do the triple loop-triple loop in the second long program and might add the triple salchow-triple loop if she feels good and thinks she needs more technical difficulty to prevail.

“I guess it all depends on the rest of the skaters,” Kwan said. “And you’re not only judging the long program. There’s the short program, where you have to nail all the [required] elements. . . . You can concentrate on the triple-triple, but there’s other jumps to think about. If you land the triple-triple and make other mistakes, that’s not going to help you.”

This competition begins the final approach to the Salt Lake City Olympics, and thoughts of the Games continually creep into her mind. She rues having held back for some inexplicable reason at Nagano, “because when I’m freer I skate better. That’s the one thing I have to work on.”

Given another chance, she wants to find what she calls “the sweet spot,” an unfettered, free-flowing performance that incorporates all she has learned.

“In a way, I guess it’s nerve-racking,” she said of the proximity of the Games. “People say, ‘It’s coming, it’s coming.’ First, people say, ‘It’s two years.’ Then a year and three months. Now, it’s less than a year and it’s coming closer to reality.

“I think it will be nice because I know what goes on. The second time, it won’t be a surprise.”

If there’s a surprise, she wants to spring it. She’s still deciding which costumes to wear this week and joked that after her experiment with a short haircut drew critical gasps from fans, she might shave her head or put temporary pink streaks into her shoulder-length hair.

“Like everybody else my age, I like trying things,” she said. “It’s one of those things where later you look back and your kids are going, ‘What were you thinking, Mom?’

“There’s nothing that I really regret yet. We’ll see if that continues.”