Cohen’s Task Is No Small Matter

She unzipped her black warmup jacket, revealing a red leotard top, baring a symbol:

Her shoulders.

Have you seen her shoulders?

So pale, for a task so weathered.

So tiny, for a burden so large.

Sasha Cohen finally goes to work tonight, not only for the acquisition of a medal, but for the perception of a flag.

As America’s top female figure skater, she is the glamour girl of the glamour sport at the end of a fortnight that has been so much star-spangled blather.

Bode Miller, big pub, no podium. Lindsey Jacobellis, all hotdog and no bark.

Apolo Ohno, just another lousy sequel. The women’s hockey team, boring and bronzed.

Johnny Weir missed the bus, and the women’s ski team missed the course, and seemingly everyone but Shani and the snowboarders missed the moment.

Americans have feuded with one another, disrespected one another, and made their anthem the sort of fractured aria one hears on a Turin street corner at 3 a.m.

With the Winter Olympic version of the Super Bowl beginning tonight, America’s team is desperately in need of beauty and strength.

It is desperately in need of those pale, white shoulders.

Which, during Monday’s practice session, went spinning into the air.

Then tumbled to the ice.

“It happens,” Cohen said. “We’re not robots.”

Well, she’s certainly not, and, in a way, that’s part of the problem.

The Corona del Mar skater is 21, she finished second in the last two world championships, her nemesis Michelle Kwan is gone, she is finally on the verge of greatness.

But she is also continually on the verge of collapse.

If it seems that any hard knock could break her frame in half, well, sometimes it has.

Has Cohen ever skated a memorable program in anything anybody has remembered?

She could have stolen the gold medal in 2002 in Salt Lake City after starting her long program in third place, but she fell to her knees and off the podium.

She could have dominated the Kwan-less national championships last month but slipped during her long program and looked nothing like an Olympic contender.

She has never won anything as large as a world championship and never shown that she can mindlessly handle the pressure that seems to crack her china-doll expression into confused little pieces.

She reacted to her Salt Lake City fall by changing coaches three times and moving twice, only to end up back in Orange County and back with venerable John Nicks.

Some say the process has helped her grow up.

“She seems to be in a better place now,” said Robin Wagner, who briefly coached Cohen after coaching Sarah Hughes to the gold medal in 2002. “I watched her at nationals, and she seemed a lot more confident.”

Others, perhaps even Cohen herself, still wonder.

She can still bend her body; on her website, she has posed for a photo with her foot on her head. She twirls around the ice so quickly that when she spun at practice Monday, her ponytail became a blur.

But she also chose not to try any jumps during her rehearsal for tonight’s short program, and, in her career, has yet to land a truly big one.

“I just warmed up everything,” she said, adding that if she can do jumps tonight, “that’s what it’s about.”

One skater didn’t share that opinion. Unfortunately for Cohen, it happens to be the only other skater who matters.

Her name is Irina Slutskaya. She is the defending world champion from Russia, and her game face is on.

Skating in a group before Cohen, dressed in black and dark blue, with a thicker body and sharper stare, she soared into a triple lutz-double toe loop during her rehearsal, and then finished with rousing footwork and a final spin.

Cohen finished while skating off with a shrug.

Slutskaya grabs the ice. Cohen glides across it.

Slutskaya acts as if she owns the building. Too often, Cohen appears to be just renting it.

At 27, Slutskaya is the sentimental favorite to become the oldest Olympic women’s figure skating gold medalist in history.

About which she refused to comment.

She didn’t even show up in the media mixed zone, her people saying that she doesn’t talk in the middle of competitions. That won’t do much for her image, but she’s not about image.

The last time Slutskaya addressed a large gathering of American media, it was in 2002 in Salt Lake City, where she bitterly protested a second-place finish to Hughes.

“I’m obviously not the only Russian who has suffered here,” she said at the time, a classic rant of an Olympic poor sport.

Four years later, she is suffering from a vascular disease that makes her tired, her mother suffers from a kidney ailment that requires dialysis, and everyone remembers that, amazingly, no Russian woman has ever won an individual figure skating gold.

For all these reasons, figure skating’s bouffant-hair and heavy-perfume crowd figures she is owed one.

Which means those little shoulders have to do more than just carry off a gold, they probably have to first steal it.

“You have to adapt or you’ll be weeded out,” Cohen said. “You have to do what you have to do.... I’m one of those people that can feed off the energy and skate better.”

Good, because she’ll have plenty of energy around tonight.

By virtue of a blind draw, of the 29 skaters in the program, she will skate last.

As in, last chance for a country in search of a hero, for a skater in search of herself.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.