Kwan Takes Skating Title

On a night when the competitive skating future of Olympic champion Alexei Yagudin appeared in doubt, Michelle Kwan was back to her winning ways.

Kwan won her seventh Skate America title Saturday night, only a week after she agreed to be a last-minute fill-in for injured Sarah Hughes.

With a fall and another botched jump, it certainly wasn’t Kwan’s best program. But with everyone else bumbling and stumbling, it was more than enough to win.

“This was icky,” Kwan said, grimacing and screwing up her nose. “And I’ve been feeling great all week.”

Yagudin, who dropped out of the competition because of a chronic hip problem, was anything but great.

“I am worried because it’s just like darkness in front of me,” he said. “I really believe I will be back. I want that. I will be back.”

Yagudin, who turns 23 in March, said Friday that he has a degenerative hip defect that could force him into early retirement. The socket in his right hip doesn’t cover the bone completely, so the two rub together and cause painful irritation.

In the women’s competition, Ann Patrice McDonough and Ukraine’s Elena Liashenko crashed in warmup, but it didn’t hurt either of them. McDonough, the world junior champion last year, was second and Liashenko was third.

Jennifer Kirk, who had been in second after the short program, dropped to fourth.

Yukari Nakano of Japan and Ludmila Nelidina of Russia caused a stir by landing triple axels within half an hour of each other. They’re the first women to do the jump in international competition since Midori Ito at the 1992 Olympics.

“I saw one in warmup and I was like, was that a ... ? Wow!” Kwan said.

In the men’s competition, Yagudin with drew just before he was to skate Saturday night. In his absence, Brian Joubert of France won the title.

Five days ago, Yagudin was expressing relief that the pain in his right hip seemed to be going away.

Friday night, after winning the men’s short program at Skate America, Yagudin said the pain had returned with an intensity that makes him feel his competitive career could be ending.

The 22-year-old Russian, figure skating’s leading man since the 1998 world championships, will seek opinions from a number of doctors, starting Monday with orthopedist Jeffrey Abrams in Princeton, N.J. Yagudin expects to withdraw from the Skate Canada event next weekend.

Yagudin said another doctor had told him that “It can damage me the rest of my life. I have to sit down and think what is the best thing to do. I have a big question in front of me.”

Yagudin, world champion four of the past five years, said he has seen a number of doctors since the hip began bothering him last December.

The most recent came here Thursday, when Yagudin said he was given an anti-inflammatory injection for the pain.

According to Yagudin’s agent, Dmitri Goryachkin of IMG, Spokane orthopedic surgeon Thomas Halvorson said he suspected Yagudin has a congenital problem with the bone socket at his hip.

“I was born like this, it wasn’t something I damaged by skating,” Yagudin said. “The doctor said if I was not an athlete, it could cause problems in the future, when I was 50, 60 years old. I could not imagine at age 22 I would have serious problems.”

Yagudin said one doctor would have advised him to quit skating already if he were not so talented.

“I’ve won everything, but it’s so hard to find the right moment to stop,” Yagudin said.

In ice dancing, Elena Grushina and Ruslan Goncharov of Ukraine staged a minor upset by winning. Galit Chait and Sergei Sakhnovski, favored to win here after taking the bronze medal at the world championships last spring, were a surprising fourth.

Tatiana Navka and Roman Kostamorov of Russia were second.

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Philip Hersh of the Chicago Tribune contributed to this report.