She Kept Her Dream Alive

Even at her lowest point, when the pain of a fractured vertebra drove her to withdraw from last year’s U.S. figure skating championships, Sasha Cohen refused to consider that she might join the long list of skaters forced out of the sport by stress-induced injuries.

“I never thought I couldn’t come back,” she said. “I knew it would be hard, but I always persevered, even when I was frustrated, and I worked really hard.”

Said her mother, Galina: “She’s a strong-willed person. She knows what she wants, and those are good things. At the end of the day, she’s happy with her decisions. And she also knows if there are consequences of her decisions, and that’s a good thing to learn, that our actions have consequences.”

The story of this 17-year-old from Laguna Niguel, though, is as much a triumph of the won’t as a triumph of the will.

She won’t be intimidated, no matter that she looks as delicate as a porcelain figurine. And she won’t blindly follow convention, having become something of a rebel.

After returning from her injury and reestablishing herself on the international scene, Cohen blew the doors off the U.S. championships last month at Staples Center with two electrifying performances that placed her second to six-time U.S. champion Michelle Kwan. Thus, she will go to the Salt Lake City Winter Games knowing a medal is within her reach.

“Part of me kind of expected and hoped to go, to get one of the spots on the team,” she said. “But when I stop and think that I’m actually going to the Olympics, it’s really amazing.

“I remember watching Kristi Yamaguchi win the gold [in 1992] and I watched that tape over and over. I remember Oksana [Baiul] winning [in 1994] and more recently, I remember Tara [Lipinski, in 1998]. As I get older, each lady was more and more inspiring. With Tara, just the way that she won--and nobody expected her to--is a real inspiration for me in Salt Lake. I thought she had an amazing performance, and I hope I have one like that at Salt Lake.”

At Nagano, Lipinski defeated Kwan because of her girlish exuberance and technically demanding triple-triple combination jumps. Cohen’s style is more balletic, featuring lithe layback spins and steady spirals. Her musicality infuses sweetness into the choreography she and her coach, John Nicks, devised for her “Sentimental Waltz” short program and breathes life into the old standby “Carmen” in her long program.

Nicks is fond of saying her innate grace won’t allow her to assume an ugly position on the ice. But she also has a fiery determination about where she wants to go and doing what it takes to get there.

“She’s very ambitious and fearless and breathtakingly beautiful,” said Peggy Fleming, the 1968 Olympic gold medalist and a skating icon. “The way she can move is amazing.”

There’s no doubt, though, that she moves to her own beat.

Although women have largely given up on performing triple axels, Cohen has tried a quadruple salchow, defying skeptics who predicted she’d re-injure her back in an effort to become the first woman to land a four-rotation jump in competition. After three misses during the season, she omitted the jump at the U.S. nationals but announced she will try it at Salt Lake City.

“I guess I’ve got my orders,” Nicks said, sighing in mock resignation.

Galina Cohen, who was born in Ukraine and emigrated to San Diego with her family at 16, supported her daughter’s initiative. But they also took precautions when she began practicing the quad, buying a special harness that spared her harm.

“She’s not foolhardy. People don’t realize that. She’s a pretty smart girl,” said Galina. “People have to realize all these girls are determined. Michelle is, Sarah Hughes is, Angela Nikodinov is, Jenny Kirk is. That’s what makes them who they are. If you’re not determined, you will go only so far, especially in this sport.... You have to have an inner strength and core to stay up there.”

That strength was tested after the U.S. nationals, when some observers accused Cohen of skating too close to competitors while warming up for the long program and not yielding when they landed jumps, as skating etiquette demands. Cohen and Kwan brushed arms, but Kwan also narrowly missed Hughes. Yet, it was Cohen who was portrayed as a Roller Derby rogue. “In the whole six minutes, we were close once,” Cohen said, denying she shadowed Kwan or tried to intimidate anyone. “A whole bunch of other skaters had close calls as well.... I know that I was fine and just going to get my stuff in. It’s just something people chose to talk about, and hopefully it will die down.

“What I’m focused on is my on-the-ice stuff. The stuff in the media doesn’t bother me that much.”

However, it disturbed her mother. Message boards on skating Web sites crackled with expletives about Cohen and demands that she be thrown off the Olympic team, an extreme reaction to an incident Kwan downplayed. In fact, Galina Cohen said her daughter was cut by a careless competitor in a practice collision four years ago at now-closed Ice Chalet in Costa Mesa, but she wouldn’t identify the girl.

“The other competitor landed a jump and cut her right calf in half, for 21 stitches, 11 inside and 10 outside,” Galina Cohen said. “The other skater never admitted her fault. Fine. We never insisted on it. We would never think of blaming anybody. But at the time, you never know if you’re going to skate away. It was her landing leg....

“Mr. Nicks has told me if you haven’t done much, you won’t be in the news and nobody is going to care about what you do. Attention means you’ve done well. You’d like to have positive attention, but what can you say?”

Nicks stood by his student, saying she practiced her jumps as she’s trained to do.

Although the spirited teen and the 72-year-old Englishman sometimes resemble a comedy team, with running gags about her willfulness and his inability to rein her in, much of that is for show. Their collaboration, he mused, is unlike any he has had in a career that has taken him to the Olympics twice as a pairs skater--he finished eighth with his sister Jennifer in 1948 and fourth in 1952--and soon 10 times as a coach.

“The problem is conflict and the psychology of training,” he said. “When you train a young person, you want them to become as independent as possible. It’s the independent person who’s the strong competitor, the kind of competitor that needs nobody. Then you turn around and say, ‘Please do as I say.’

“It’s a fine line. It’s not easy. Knowing that, I’m perhaps more tolerant than I might have been 20 years ago.”

Cohen’s talents also extend his tolerance.

“It’s a unique, special persona that she has,” he said. “It’s not just her technical skating. It’s a lot of other things.”

He’s not alone in that belief.

“I think Sasha Cohen is just as capable of going in [to the Olympics] and winning as anyone, depending on other people’s performances,” said Sandra Bezic, a choreographer who has worked with Yamaguchi, Lipinski and 1988 men’s gold medalist Brian Boitano.

“She’s fantastic, and I thought her choreography in both her programs [at the U.S. nationals] was perfect for her at her stage of development. It was all just excellent, excellent work. When she’s on and she does that, she’s everything you want a skater to be. She’s captivating, she’s beautiful and she has that ‘it’ quality. She’s gorgeous, talented and spirited.”

Cohen’s performances at the U.S. nationals put her in contention for an Olympic medal. Kwan must be considered the favorite over a recently shaky Irina Slutskaya of Russia, and U.S. third-place finisher Sarah Hughes, who won medals at all three of her Grand Prix events this season, to only one for Cohen in two Grand Prix events.

“I, as a coach, expect all those ladies to be coming to Salt Lake well-prepared and skating well,” Nicks said.

Said Cohen: “I go in with a dream of winning Olympic gold, and I’m thinking more of something I can do for myself, and that’s to skate two clean programs. Doing well at nationals is a really big step for me, and we’ll see what happens now at Salt Lake.”

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Sasha Cohen on Center Stage

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