There was no way for Tara Lipinski to block out everything going on around her, the strategy on which figure skaters usually rely during the final moments before they take the ice.
Lipinski’s coach, Richard Callaghan, told her backstage to think it was just the two of them back at their practice rink outside Detroit. Any hope Lipinski had of playing that mental game disappeared as soon as she walked toward the boards for what would become a stunning triumph.
“As we went out there,” Lipinski said, “the crowd was going crazy.”
This was the Champions Series Final at the Munich Olympic Hall and Germany’s Tanja Szewczenko was delivering the performance of a lifetime before 5,600 spectators who grew more delirious with each second of her 4-minute free skate. When Szewczenko landed her seventh triple jump, the applause and then the 5.8s and 5.9s the German received from the judges would ring in Lipinski’s ears.
“It was hard to get my concentration back,” said Lipinski, the reigning world champion and Champions Series defending champion. “I was saying, `I can do this, this is what I want to do, I have the control over it.’ “
Skating last of the five competitors, Lipinski seized the chance to make a lasting impression in the judges’ minds. She did it with a performance that erased the dubious impressions of her two previous competitions and could leave a considerable imprint on the rest of her Olympic season.
Her first victory of the season, after second places at Skate America and the Lalique Trophy, also brought Lipinski, 15, her first scores like those she earned in winning the world title nine months ago. Although two of the seven judges placed Szewczenko, 20, first in the free skate, Lipinski received her first 5.9s of the season–four each for technical merit and presentation.
“This is a big thing for Tara,” Callaghan said. “The big worry this year has been, `Tara is too young to win.’ Here you had Tanja who is older and a beautiful skater giving an awesome performance, and Tara still got the respect she deserved.”
With the respect came $60,000 for finishing first in what would have been an Olympic preview but for the absence of injured Michelle Kwan of the United States, the 1996 world champion who beat Lipinski at Skate America. Szewczenko, continuing her remarkable comeback after a season lost to a debilitating combination of viruses, earned $40,000 for second while Russia’s Maria Butryskaya got $30,000 for third.
In the other three disciplines decided by Saturday’s free skates, all of which saw skating of a remarkably high quality, it was Russians here, Russians there, Russians winning everywhere.
In his best skating since winning the world silver medal in 1996, Ilia Kulik upset world champion Elvis Stojko of Canada in the men’s event, with former world champion Todd Eldredge of the United States third.
Elena Bereznaia, who suffered a severe head injury in a skating accident two years ago, and partner Anton Sikharulidze beat world champions Mandy Woetzel and Ingo Steuer of Germany in the pairs. Pasha Grishuk and Evgeny Platov, the 1994 Olympic champions, won their 20th straight ice dance competition.
That the women’s competition would be special became evident when struggling Irina Slutskaya of Russia, the two-time European champion, began it by landing six triple jumps during her first good performance since the 1997 worlds. Butryskaya, 25, who claimed Friday the judges were tired of Lipinski’s “childish skating,” got one 5.9 but was third after hitting six triple jumps.
Szewczenko, who will have her tonsils removed Monday, said she felt tired after placing third in Friday’s short program, after which she lapsed into a fit of coughing. She skated Saturday with an energy that carried through a triple toe loop-double toe loop combination at the very end of the program.
“This was the best free skate of my life,” said Szewczenko, who never before had landed seven triples.
Lipinski, expected to meet Kwan at the U.S. championships in three weeks, came here after doing flawed free skates in her two other competitions. The scores she was receiving had seemed to indicate a reaction against the exuberantly youthful style with which she had become the youngest world champion in history.
“It was almost more emotional for me than worlds,” Lipinski said. “To be second in both events before and to get it back was great.”
Lipinski, who also won Friday’s short program, flowed into each of her seven successful triple jumps, including two lutzes and her trademark triple loop-triple loop combination.
Lipinski may be the only reigning world champion to be an underdog heading into the subsequent Olympics. Now the attention shifts to the favored Kwan, who won two Champions Series events before going to the sidelines with a stress fracture in her toe.
