Good as Gold

She is accustomed to performing under bright lights and suffocating pressure, but giving life to an animated Disney character isn’t an everyday occurrence for Michelle Kwan.

Alone in a glassed-in Hollywood recording studio, dwarfed by a huge headset and microphone, Kwan reviews her three lines in “Mulan 2,” a direct-to-video release scheduled for 2004. A window separates her from the control room, where engineers, artists and writers wait expectantly.

“You’re making me nervous,” says Kwan, a four-time world figure skating champion, six-time U.S. champion and two-time Olympic medalist.

Not to worry.

“You’re going to do it a million times,” Jamie Thomason, head of casting for Disney TV and animation says soothingly. “We do it with everybody.”

She takes a deep breath, then utters Line 506.

“We just got in some excellent ginger,” says Kwan, the voice of a shopkeeper named Michelle.

Try it again, she’s told. Faster. Slower. Perky.

She does. Finally, there are several versions editors can choose from when the scene is assembled. It’s on to Line 509.

“How about some fresh ginseng?” she asks brightly.

Again, please. Whispered. Louder. Enticing.

Another series of takes, then an “in” joke conceived to elicit laughs from kids because it sounds funny and guffaws from those who know skating lingo.

“We have a special today,” she says, leaning forward and mugging for a nonexistent camera. “Fresh salchow. Yum, yum.”

She’s a hit. As a reward, she gets to do another line, the comically drawn-out wail of someone who nearly falls but pulls off a Kwan-like, graceful landing. She’s finished in about 35 minutes.

“Hey, you’re good at this,” Thomason says.

Kwan is relieved.

“Can you imagine doing 100 pages?” she asks.

Someday she might, and not merely as the voice of someone else’s creation.

“The sky’s the limit,” Mike Mendenhall, president of marketing and synergy for Walt Disney Studios, says of her potential. “To us, she’s a great role model for kids and teens. She truly has the right attitude, the right ethics, the right personality. She’s contemporary. She’s relevant.”

Her “Mulan 2” work was part of her three-year agreement to be Disney’s global spokeswoman, the company’s most extensive deal with an athlete. It eclipses a five-year deal Disney made with golfer Tiger Woods a year ago, because his is for broadcast work only. Hers extends to parks, radio, theatrical, video and voice-overs.

Terms were completed during the Salt Lake City Olympics but weren’t announced until a few weeks later, after the 22-year-old Torrance native had stumbled in the free skate and earned a bronze medal instead of the expected gold. Though it was Kwan’s second successive Olympic disappointment, following a narrow loss to 15-year-old Tara Lipinski at Nagano in 1998, Mendenhall said he had no qualms about proceeding.

Similarly, General Motors’ Chevrolet division ignored her Salt Lake City result and extended its endorsement deal with her after the Games.

“To be honest, we got a lot of questions after the Olympics,” said Dianne Harper, a promotional manager for Chevrolet. “Like, ‘She didn’t win the gold medal, so ... ‘ And I was, like, ‘Yeah, and your point?’

“It doesn’t matter. It’s who she is, and her value to us doesn’t decrease because she doesn’t have a gold medal. The original reasons we liked Michelle hold up today.”

That won’t change, Harper said, even if Kwan doesn’t compete this season, a decision she will make in the next week or two.

Figure skating season has begun, but Kwan hasn’t entered any Grand Prix events and hasn’t decided if she will compete at the 2003 U.S. Championships in Dallas, the qualifying event for the World Championships in March in Washington. She has competed in every U.S. championship event since 1993 and every world meet since 1994, and has won seven world medals, the most by a U.S. skater.

After performing in all 93 shows of the five-month Champions on Ice tour, Kwan took a break and only last week, resumed training at L.A.-area rinks. She hasn’t hired a coach, although she has said she would if she continued competing. She has been busy with her Disney duties and with deciding whether her best chance for fulfillment lies on film or on the ice, chasing the one honor that has eluded her.

“There are a lot of opportunities,” she said. “It’s very nice to have those options, but those decisions are tough. So many doors are open, you don’t know which is the right one, and it’s pretty scary for me. I’m 22 and I’m making life-altering decisions.”

Of the 34 U.S. teams or individuals who won medals at Salt Lake City, Kwan was the big winner commercially. Glory for snowboarders and short-track speedskaters melted at winter’s end, but Kwan’s star remained bright after she’d finished behind U.S. rival Sarah Hughes and Russia’s Irina Slutskaya.

Figure skating is the Games’ marquee event, and the women’s gold medalist usually gets the most chances to cash in. Hughes, who turned 17 in May, appeared on a Wheaties box and signed with General Electric to skate in two NBC specials. She is also a spokesperson for Campbell’s soup. Slutskaya joined Kwan in the Champions on Ice tour, but Kwan got the highest salary in the cast, which included men’s medalists Alexei Yagudin, Evgeni Plushenko and Tim Goebel. Kwan, whose contract goes for four more years, earned more than $1 million for her performances.

She also got the biggest ovations from fans, which she deems priceless.

“It’s more a reassurance, not like a pity,” she says. “Reassurance like, ‘Hey, you know, it doesn’t matter. Life’s not perfect.’ kind of attitude.... They realize the pain. That’s the wrong word. That that’s the way life goes sometimes. You have to kind of shrug your shoulders and move on.”

Said tour producer Tom Collins: “I’ve been in skating 55 years and I’ve never seen anyone handle things so well, good or bad. A lot of it was bad at the two Olympics, but she accepted her defeat with graciousness.... The world wanted Michelle Kwan to win the gold. She didn’t, and still they love her, they care for her and they feel for her.”

Advertisers agree, believing she embodies desirable traits such as perseverance and dependability, if not the white-hot flash of gold-medal glory.

Kwan is especially attractive in uncertain economic times, sports marketing expert Nova Lanktree said. Kwan says and does the right things, she’s untainted by the scandals that have clouded the pairs and ice dance events, and her grace in defeat at Nagano “became part of an ongoing drama.”

Kwan’s Disney deal, estimated at $1 million a year, provides for appearances at Disney theme parks in China and Hong Kong, on Disney Channel programs and possibly ABC sitcoms, and doing voices in “Mulan” sequels.

During a rare day off from Champions on Ice, she spent a morning in Pasadena filming scenes that will be references for animation drawings of a figure skating competition between Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck in the movie “Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas.” She had blisters on her feet and the cold numbed her legs, but she soldiered on, smiling, twirling a ribbon and handing “Daisy” a bouquet.

Disney executives gush about her, saying she transcends ethnicity, gender and Olympic disappointments to register strongly with kids and teens, the company’s prime audience. She was voted the most-admired athlete in last month’s Miss Teen USA pageant and won the Teen Choice and Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice awards.

Although it was speculated that the Japanese heritage of 1992 Olympic gold medalist Kristi Yamaguchi minimized her endorsement offers, Kwan’s heritage as the daughter of Chinese immigrants seems irrelevant. If anything, Mendenhall said, it’s a plus for Disney because her ability to speak Chinese will be useful in promoting its Hong Kong and Shanghai parks.

“Here’s a woman who’s so well-rounded and is diverse,” he said. “We never really even considered that. You just look at the type of person she is, the qualities she brings within her personality, her leadership, focus, commitment. Staying with something, staying committed to something. ‘Don’t let minor disappointments along the way keep you from your dreams, kids. Follow your dream.’ It’s about passion, and for me that’s so much more.”

One of Kwan’s requests of Chevrolet was that it create scholarships for young women. The Michelle Kwan R.E.W.A.R.D.S program (Recognizing Excellence of Women in Academics & Rewarding Dynamic Student-athletes) gave 10 college-bound women scholarships of $5,000 each, based on academic, athletic and civic achievements. Kwan calls herself “a proud mama.”

Lanktree calls it remarkable.

“What’s unusual is, people are actually putting out money for it,” Lanktree said. “Money is really tight and new production is down. Being that the corporate world is getting horrible press, GM is smart to associate with someone who has youth, beauty, grace, dignity. You probably could not calculate the value that gives them.”

The winners were flown to Southern California to meet Kwan and pose with her for an ad that will run in youth-oriented magazines in October and November. The set resembled a college dorm, and they dressed for a sleepover, re-creating a part of life Kwan enjoyed only briefly. She lived in a dorm at UCLA for a few months before the demands of skating pushed her off campus and, eventually, out of school.

“It was girl talk,” said Kwan, who has about a year’s worth of credits. “I miss those times when you were sitting and just talking.”

And she wants to finish college, “regardless of what age,” although she fears she won’t fit in on campus if she waits much longer.

“You have to be able to juggle relationships and your personal life and skating,” she said. “The hard part for any athlete is, we have a hard time separating our lives. Then you say, ‘What is fun?’ We consider fun in skating to be succeeding, landing jumps, and then when you come home, it’s love and friendship.”

In some respects, Kwan said, she felt younger than her 17-and 18-year-old guests.

“I have a manager who makes decisions, and I have my parents to help me make decisions,” she said. “I’m very protected, and that’s good. Those girls are the ones who have to do the [scholarship and college] applications. When they go off to school it’s, ‘You’re on your own, baby.’ ”

And she was touched by their insistence that she had won their respect without having won Olympic gold. She is still trying to make that same peace with herself.

“That means a lot,” she said. “For me, it feels sometimes like it would have made a difference. People would have looked at me a little different. Then again, it’s hard to say what it’s like because I’ve only known one thing, and that’s not having it.

“For me, understanding that if it doesn’t ever happen, if I don’t compete to 2006, [it’s a matter of] being happy with what I’ve done. It’s so much easier said than done. I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, I could live without it. There’s only a handful of people that have it in the U.S.’

“But it’s hard. Right now I’m in the process of making decisions. It’s easy to say, ‘I won the big one, now I’m walking away,’ but it hardly ever goes that way.”