Kwan Drops Out of Games

Michelle Kwan listened to her body, and it told her no.

Kwan, the Torrance native who was hoping to add a gold medal to her stellar figure skating resume, withdrew from the Winter Olympics early today because of a groin muscle injury she sustained during a practice session Saturday afternoon.

The U.S. Olympic committee has submitted a Late Athlete Replacement form to organizers and proposed replacing Kwan with Emily Hughes of Great Neck, N.Y., sister of 2002 gold medalist Sarah Hughes. A decision on that request is expected this week.

Kwan, 25, won a silver medal at the 1998 Nagano Games and a bronze medal at Salt Lake City. While pursuing the elusive Olympic title, she injured her right hip in October and pulled a groin muscle in December, leading her to skip the U.S. championships and petition for an injury bye onto the Turin team. She won a place after performing for a five-judge panel in Artesia on Jan. 27, but she did not skate well in her first practice here, on Saturday.

U.S. Olympic Committee officials said she had strained her adductor muscle during the practice, a session in which she fell hard once and was able to cleanly land only one jump.

She acknowledged she had felt some soreness in her groin, and that worsened as Saturday wore on. At 2:15 a.m. Turin time she was evaluated by U.S. team doctor Jim Moeller, who diagnosed a severe groin strain. She withdrew from the competition shortly afterward.

“Taking myself off the team is the most difficult decision I’ve ever had to make,” she said in a release issued by the USOC, “but it’s the right decision. This injury prevents me from skating my best, and I’ve said all along that if I couldn’t skate to the level that I expected from myself, I’d withdraw from the team.

“The Olympics is the greatest sporting event in the world and what’s most important is that the United States fields the strongest team possible. As much as I’d love to represent the United States in Torino, I would never stand in the way of that.”

After the Jan. 27 session at the East West Ice Palace in Artesia, Bob Horen, a member of the panel, had been enthusiastic about her prospects after the session. “It is truly the opinion of this monitoring team that Michelle could win the Olympics,” he said.

But the smooth, confident Kwan who impressed him and his fellow judges two weeks ago was not in evidence Saturday.

Kwan, 25, said she was “a little stiff” when she took to the ice, which she attributed to having spent four hours sitting in chilly Olympic Stadium on Friday during the opening ceremony. She said she didn’t return to the athletes’ village until midnight and applied heat packs as a preventive measure, but to no avail.

She also said she hadn’t adjusted to the nine-hour time difference between Turin and her Los Angeles home. To complicate her woes, her coach, Rafael Arutunian, wasn’t at the sideboards on Saturday to offer advice. Kwan’s agent, Shep Goldberg, said the Russian-born Arutunian had encountered visa problems but was expected to arrive in Turin late Saturday.

Kwan said she had known the opening ceremony would be cold but wanted to participate because she’d done it before “and I thought it was a great experience.” She did not march at Nagano in 1998 but took part in the festivities four years ago at Salt Lake City.

She said she had considered skipping Saturday’s practice but thought she’d benefit from getting a feel for the ice and the lights in the primary practice facility.

“It is kind of frustrating making mistakes,” Kwan said. “The first practice, you want to go out and be brilliant.”