American Expression

Her audience consists of about a dozen skaters and about as many parents and coaches clustered near a heating unit, but Michelle Kwan doesn’t see them.

So intent is her concentration, she could be at center ice before a panel of Olympic judges and thousands of spectators instead of on the glassy rink at the Ice Castle International Training Center in Lake Arrowhead, as she is on this late December day.

The background blur of jumps and spins freezes to a still-life tableau as she assumes the pose for the start of her program. She strokes smoothly to build speed, her face coloring from exertion. Her combination jump is crisp and clean, her layback spin supple, her spiral steady. The skaters at the edges of the rink unabashedly enjoy watching her in her splendid solitude. They’re as eager as any fan to get a preview of how she will perform in the U.S. championships this week at Staples Center and a month from now at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

When she finishes, there’s applause, muffled by gloves and mittens. Kwan cools down, breathing hard in the 5,500-foot altitude. It’s a satisfying session--two clean programs, no wasted time and a sense of accomplishment.

“It feels good,” the 21-year-old Torrance native says. “One week here seems like two months down there. You get a lot of work done, and you have a lot of solid time on the ice. I have access to the rink on weekends. It’s very convenient.”

“Down there” is HealthSouth Training Center in El Segundo, her previous training base. She has been skating almost exclusively at Lake Arrowhead since November, or shortly after parting with longtime coach Frank Carroll.

She has created a routine within a cocoon of family and friends. And if that seems to contradict the reason she offered for leaving Carroll--a need to take control of her life and her skating--she doesn’t see it.

“What is independence? Am I going to move all alone to a city?” she asks. “In some ways, independence comes from within, how you make decisions and how you act. That’s what I call independence.”

Freedom--whether artistic, physical or emotional--is a central theme of her life. It’s why she became enchanted by skating when she was 7, after seeing Brian Boitano’s unfettered power and artistry as he won the gold medal at the 1988 Olympics. It’s why she gave up gymnastics, after a coach bound her feet and told her to do a flip, not knowing she hated restraints.

“I said, ‘Are you serious? You’re tying my feet here, you know that?”’ she recalls.

And it’s why she ended her nearly decade-long relationship with Carroll, for the freedom to obey her instincts as she pursues her sixth U.S. championship and a chance to win the gold medal that eluded her at Nagano in 1998.

No elite skater has competed without a coach under such pressure. And Kwan has yet to produce an unassailable performance this season. She has won only one of five events--a hotly debated decision over an impressive Sarah Hughes at Skate America--and finished third at Skate Canada, her first placement lower than second in a major event since 1996.

But she has had less than perfect seasons before and prevailed at the end. She fended off challenges from teen phenoms Sasha Cohen in 2000 and Naomi Nari Nam in 1999, and from a resurgent Irina Slutskaya of Russia at last year’s World Championships.

Kwan won her first world and U.S. titles in 1996, but lost both to upstart Tara Lipinski in 1997. Fighting back, Kwan regained her national title in 1998, recording 15 of a possible 18 perfect 6s for presentation in her two programs, despite having missed three weeks of training because of a stress fracture in her foot.

At the Nagano Olympics, she was the leader after the short program and was considered as close to a sure thing as anyone could be in a slippery sport. She doesn’t know why, but she held back almost imperceptibly in an otherwise splendid long program, “just a little gasp of air.” Given a small opening, Lipinski burst through for the gold.

“I remember there was one part of the program where I felt a lot of freedom, and something went a little uncomfortable and I held back, and that could be the difference,” Kwan says. “I held back in emotions.”

Her graceful acceptance of the outcome probably earned her more admirers and endorsements than if she had won.

She did win the 1998 world title, albeit over a field weakened by Lipinski’s absence. Russia’s Maria Butyrskaya topped her in 1999, but Kwan won the next two world championships, each time silencing critics who said she had become stagnant and had fallen behind Slutskaya in her technical prowess.

But each year brings another call to reinvent herself. Kwan tried to escape an artistic rut last summer by asking Sarah Kawahara to choreograph her long program instead of Lori Nichol, who’d designed the Rachmaninov short program Kwan performed in 1998 and resurrected for this week’s competition and the Olympics. When she parted with Carroll as well, no one knew what to make of it. Carroll still professes to be puzzled.

“We’ve all had our coaching melees. We’ve all had our disputes ...” said Christopher Bowman, a talented but undisciplined two-time U.S. champion and two-time world medalist who studied with Carroll in the 1970s and ‘80s. “But nobody, under any circumstances, should go to a major championship, especially the Olympics, without a coach.”

Nichol, who knows Kwan well, cautioned against such generalizations. “In this sport, you have to get past the brouhaha and realize it’s about a person,” she said. “The only person that has to handle all these changes is Michelle.”

Besides, who can say it’s impossible to win at the Olympics without a coach if no one has tried?

“I can understand her need for more control and independence,” 1992 Olympic gold medalist Kristi Yamaguchi said soon after Kwan had split with Carroll. “It’s probably earth-shattering because no one has done it before, but Michelle has proved time and time again she can handle it.

“If this is where her heart is ... “

It is.

“I’m comfortable. I’ve gotten used to the idea,” Kwan says over a cup of decaf in a Lake Arrowhead coffee shop. “It’s been what I hoped it would be. I made my decision based on how I felt. A lot of people thought it was hard-headed and, in a lot of ways, I am hard-headed because this is the way I want it and this is how I see it. Whether other people question me or not, as long as I feel it’s right, that’s what matters.”

Clearly, she is no longer the shy, cute 13-year-old who was thrust into the middle of the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan mess in 1994. Kwan, second to Harding at the U.S. Championships after a knee-clubbing forced Kerrigan to withdraw, was designated an Olympic alternate. Kwan didn’t compete at Lillehammer, but she has occupied figure skating’s center stage ever since.

With five U.S. titles, she trails only Maribel Vinson (nine) and Gretchen Merrill and Theresa Weld Blanchard (six each) in the U.S. Figure Skating Assn. record books. One more world title will tie her with Carol Heiss for most won by a U.S. woman. One more world medal will move her past Heiss, who won five gold medals and a silver, to Kwan’s four golds and two silvers.

Despite having grown up in public, she has blossomed into a well-grounded young woman who is exploring the power of her femininity and her physical and mental limits. Slender at 5 feet 21/2 and 106 pounds--but blessed with to-die-for abdominal muscles she bared in a photo shoot for International Figure Skating magazine--she’s no lightweight.

She is wise enough to enjoy skating for its own sake, not for a never-certain reward at the end. She has traveled the globe, sampled life at UCLA before time pressures led her to put school on hold, and become involved in her first serious romance, with Florida Panther defenseman Brad Ference.

She is driven to excel, to be remembered. But because she knows there is infinitely more to life than skating, winning the gold medal at Salt Lake City is not the be-all, end-all for her.

“It used to be,” she says. “I’m glad it sort of happened this way. I’m not glad [to place second at Nagano], but I’m happy with staying amateur and staying [in Olympic-eligible events] another four years. I could have easily gone professional, but I wouldn’t have experienced the three world titles [won after Nagano]. Some people say, ‘You won one, that’s enough.’ But for me, it’s the duration of my career. You experience things. Each worlds was different for me, at different parts of my life ...

“I’m different than I was yesterday. I’m always changing. I don’t feel like I’ve been waiting around for [Salt Lake City].”

Kwan started skating when she was 5, copying her hockey-playing brother. Transfixed by Boitano in 1988, she turned an interest into a passion, giving up gymnastics, ballet and tap dance.

“I think it’s the freedom of skating, the beauty of being able to combine athleticism and beauty in one sport,” says Kwan, who won her first competition at 7. “You rarely see that.”

She climbed through the ranks with astonishing speed. After sneaking behind Carroll’s back to take her senior level test--he wanted her to spend more time as a junior--she finished sixth at her first senior U.S. Championships in 1993. She was second in 1994 and eighth at her first senior World Championships in 1994. She also won the 1994 world junior title.

“It doesn’t feel like a lifetime ago, yet when I break it down, I’ve grown so much,” says Kwan, who has videotapes of all her competitions and occasionally watches them.

She makes no apologies for not severing the umbilical cord to her family, or for her father’s ubiquitous presence. Danny, who declined to be interviewed, attends her practices and competitions but has said he’s not coaching her, although all evidence points otherwise.

“Why cut a good relationship?” she says. “I could see it if it was overbearing.”

Bowman, however, claims Kwan’s family gave her a false sense of security before Nagano, undermining her chances. He also theorized that she dumped Carroll to create doubts about her prospects and make herself an underdog at Salt Lake City, knowing that she has always been successful at fighting back from positions of supposed weakness.

“They built her up so big and puffed her up so much and put her on a pedestal so high that when she fell, it was like falling off the Empire State Building,” he said, later adding: “What they did is set her up for disaster, her father and the people around her saying Tara Lipinski could never beat her.”

Kwan disputes the perception that she was blindsided by Lipinski or is making herself an underdog to manufacture motivation.

“I did know of Tara and I did know of her triple-triples. I wasn’t unprepared. You could never prepare for somebody.” Skating well this week is her main focus. Besides retreating to Lake Arrowhead, another piece of her plan has been breaking in new boots. It’s a crucial process and she’s picky about them, especially since flimsy boots weakened her performances in 1997.

She is also deciding whether to change some jumps in her “Sheherezade” long program, knowing a tenth of a point on the technical mark could dictate her placement.

Her artistry has long been her strong point, a luminous grace and innate feel for music that is unmatched among her peers. Her edging, spirals, flow and command of the ice are exemplary, but she might need to up the ante technically. She’s thinking of supplementing her triple toe loop, triple toe loop combination with a triple lutz-triple toe loop or a tougher triple lutz-triple loop. Her final choice will dictate which other jumps she performs.

Whatever her choices, they will be made with the idea of allowing her the freedom to give everything emotionally, unlike Nagano.

“That’s what I’m hoping,” she says, “to give myself another chance, maybe be stronger and wiser and bolder.”