Golden Girl Grows Up

Even for an ice rink, the U.S. rink in the Olympic Center is bone-chillingly cold.

A dozen or so figure skaters dressed inelegantly in sweats, gloves and caps swirl and stroke and bring life to the visions of choreographer Christopher Dean. As music blares from a boombox perched on the dasher boards, the group splits in two lines. Each line curls back on itself at full speed, a pretty and precise move.

Sort of.

As skaters follow the music and each other, Sarah Hughes and Jamie Sale brush shoulders and nearly collide. They laugh, a couple of Olympic champions sharing a light moment before everyone lines up to do the move again. And again.

It was only the second day of rehearsals for Stars on Ice, Hughes’ second day back in the world she left behind more than two years ago. Her return is surprising, because elite skaters rarely take a few days off at a time, let alone a few years. And it’s intriguing because figure skating needs strong women to fill gaps created by injuries and attrition, the kind of strength and grace Hughes displayed in her improbable triumph at Salt Lake City. .

“I don’t know if ‘risk’ is the word, because there’s general interest in skating,” Jef Billings, a co-director and costumer of the show, said of adding Hughes to the cast. “We know that you go see [1976 gold medalist] Dorothy Hamill, and Dorothy Hamill is not going to do triple jumps.

“The difference here being that this is the current Olympic gold medalist, so we’re expecting more.”

Dean wasn’t sure what to expect.

“When we got a chance at Sarah, it was great. And at the same time, she’s been away for a year,” he said. “But she knows what she has to do to get back to what she needs to get back to. She’s done this before. She’s done this most of her life.”

Hughes was only 16 and a junior at Great Neck (N.Y.) North High when her intricate and mesmerizing long program lifted her from fourth place to a golden finish. It was the best thing that could have happened to a sport left a shambles by a judging scandal that skewed the pairs competition.

“For me, it saved the Olympics,” said 1984 gold medalist Scott Hamilton, a TV commentator at Salt Lake City and a producer of Stars on Ice. “It allowed the best performance to absolutely win the night and to win the medal....

“I saw her after she won and gave her some wisdom: ‘Oh, by the way, from this moment on, your life is completely different. You’re the same, but everybody else is going to be different.’ ”

Everyone wanted her time or endorsement but she gave priority to her education and did only a few post-Olympic shows with Champions on Ice. In the 2002-03 season she squeezed the SATs between the prom, school play and U.S. and world championships, finishing second in the U.S. and sixth at the world meet despite little practice.

A few months later, when she packed for her freshman year at Yale, she didn’t take her skates.

“I needed a break,” said Hughes, now 19. “I’d been skating since I was about 3 years old. It was so intense for so long.

“After a while, just from my personal experience, you forget about why you’re skating. Or I did. And it was a lot of pressure, a lot of intensity. It didn’t bring me the joy and the happiness that it should.”

No longer bound by a strict schedule of practicing and competing, she felt liberated at Yale. She played tennis and immersed herself in English, psychology and political science. The young woman who skated flawlessly at the Olympics with millions of eyes upon her was nervous before delivering a presentation to her Spanish class. When her contract law professor innocently asked whether she participated in sports, she told him, “I used to skate a little bit.”

And Van Gogh used to paint a little bit too.

The professor apologized the next day, saying, “I didn’t recognize you without your skates on.” That was the point: She didn’t want to be defined only as a skater.

“I didn’t go there to skate,” she said. “I didn’t know if I’d ever skate again when I went there. I just wanted to see what else is out there.”

Her grades were good -- “When they keep score, she’s there,” said her father, John -- and she worked out regularly “just for health.” She wanted to regain her strength and balance in case she decided to skate again. If that day came, she vowed to skate for pleasure, not applause or medals.

At least, that was the plan.

“When she came home after exams at Yale, she went to the rink and spent an hour. The next day, she spent eight hours. I saw that and wasn’t all that surprised by her decision,” her father said of her return.

“School has been great for her. For five years, no one skated in more competitions than her. She was on more podiums than anybody. Those are the years from 12 to 16, and that’s a lot of skating at that age. She’d accomplished a lot and wanted to go to school with her peers, and I think this is the right decision right now. It’s another challenge for her.”

That’s no understatement. Stars on Ice will debut its “Imagine” show Saturday at Lake Placid and begin a 60-city U.S. tour in January. Hughes has two solos and will skate in group numbers with an accomplished cast that includes 2002 men’s gold medalist Alexei Yagudin of Russia.

Also performing are Sale and David Pelletier, the Canadians who were given duplicate gold medals after the Olympic scandal, and Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, the Russian gold medalists. Other skaters include former U.S. pair champions Kyoko Ina and John Zimmerman, six-time U.S. champ- ion Todd Eldredge, Steven Cousins of Britain and Yuka Sato of Japan. Guest artists such as 1994 men’s gold medalist Ilia Kulik, Michael Weiss and Ekaterina Gordeeva will appear in various cities.

Hamilton, interviewed shortly before he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, likened rehearsals to “doing a 50,000-piece jigsaw puzzle and then coordinating everybody to work on the puzzle at the same time.”

Said Billings: “Chris is not a simple choreographer. Chris is complex. He will do things that go against what you’d expect.

“I’m hoping she’s not freaking out at this point. It’s a lot to absorb when you’ve been in school for a year and then all of a sudden you’re thrown into a kick line.”

Before signing a one-year deal with Stars on Ice with “a possibility” for a second year, Hughes got a waiver from U.S. Figure Skating that keeps her eligible for the 2006 Turin Olympics. She filed forms to enter next year’s U.S. championships but doesn’t plan to compete there; beyond that, however, she’s simply not sure.

“I haven’t done this yet,” she said, smiling.

“Last year at this time, I never imagined that I would ever skate again. Why close doors? I’m not turning professional or anything like that. I love to skate. I want to skate, and this is a way for me to skate.”

To hone her technique and fitness last summer she turned to coaches Adam Leib and Brad Cox.

“There’s days when I felt like a train ran into me,” she said, “but the support I had at the rinks I skated at was really great. In the summer I saw a lot of younger kids, and it brought back a lot of good memories.”

Her progress was delayed while she worked for New York’s WCBS-TV as a reporter before and during the Athens Games. She couldn’t find practice ice in Athens, but she enjoyed perks such as interviewing swimmer Michael Phelps’ mother and hanging out with Andy Roddick at the Olympic Village. Her father says that solidified her resolve to skate again. “It was sort of the Olympic environment, being with the athletes and everything,” he said.

She returned to reality when she resumed jumping. She can do all of her double jumps, but the triple jumps have been slower to reappear, and without them she’d have no hope in competition. However, she took heart from a conversation she had with tennis star Martina Hingis.

“She took a lot of time off and is playing [exhibitions] now, and she told me she had to give herself a good six months to see if she even wanted to continue to play,” Hughes said. “If she took six months, I think I should give myself six months too.

“I have to be patient with myself. I can’t expect the world.”

She also must adjust to physical changes she experienced in the last two years.

She grew about an inch, to 5 feet 6, and towers over her female cast mates. Dean described her as “a statuesque girl,” intending it as a compliment because she combines power and edges.

Billings agreed.

“Sarah’s really the first one we’ve brought into the loop that comes out of the triple-jump era and the athleticism that’s become so required,” he said.

“The money card in skating has always been the female Olympic gold medalist, particularly if it’s a United States female Olympic gold medalist. So in that sense, I think it’s an unknown, but I hoped that there would be this opportunity because it really will be the first time we will ever see her perform.”

Hamilton said he believes she will regain the fire that fueled her rise to the top of a competitive sport.

“This cast is a hard-working cast, so that’s infectious. You’re inspired by that,” he said. “When you’re in a company like that, it just brings out the best in you.

“I think she’s in the best place she possibly could be.”

So does she, at least for the moment.

“It’s nice to be with so many elite skaters, very established skaters who know a lot about what’s going on,” she said. “I think I can learn a lot from them. If you’re going to be on the ice eight hours a day with people, I couldn’t imagine a better group to be with....

“I intend to go back to school. That’s open too. This is great, because now I feel like this whole other part of my life that was missing before and always haunted me a little bit, I now have.”