It is as if Michelle Kwan and her choreographer, Lori Nichol, want to show the divergences in Kwan’s new life as champion skater and college student. Never before has the two-time world titlist chosen competitive programs so dramatically different.
And never has she debuted the ensemble of those programs with as much aplomb as she did Friday and Saturday. Kwan received a perfect score in the short program and another in the free skate to win her fourth title at Skate America, the opening event of the Grand Prix series for Olympic-eligible skaters.
“The programs are a complete contrast,” Kwan said. “We wanted to take everyone completely off guard.”
Nichol’s jazzy choreography for the 2-minute, 40-second short program, to an instrumental version of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” complements music easily comprehensible to an audience. Even so, as her coach, Frank Carroll, pointed out, “It’s not your standard Michelle Kwan. It’s a little more provocative and sexy.”
Kwan performed her short program at the standard of combined technical and artistic mastery no other woman can match, getting a 6.0 for presentation. Her double axel jump had regained its sure-footedness after last year’s awkward landings, and her speed over the ice had shaken the elegant ponderousness often evident since it likely cost her the 1998 Olympic gold.
Her free skate uses more abstract music than Kwan ever has worked with: John Corigliano’s score for the movie, “The Red Violin.” It requires Kwan to carry the entire 4-minute performance, since the music is an aural challenge. There is no extended melodic sequence to lull the listener and allow the skater to drift.
“It takes a great athlete to pull it off,” Carroll said.
Kwan, who competes next weekend at Skate Canada, was willing the music along until she fell on a triple flip jump midway through the program. Until then, she was on the way to another memorable performance in a career marked by them.
While Saturday’s became the fifth straight flawed free skate for Kwan, this one would have been good enough to win most world meets. It did not merit the 6.0 given by an Austrian judge who may have inadvertently rewarded another dimension of Kwan’s artfulness.
“We practice getting up real fast (after a fall) just in cases the judges are snoozing,” she said.
Triple jumps no longer are worth mentioning in men’s skating, not after what Timothy Goebel of Rolling Meadows did while finishing second to world champion Alexei Yagudin of Russia.
Goebel, like Kwan a 19-year-old college freshman, landed an unprecedented three quadruple jumps in his free skate, accelerating the jump revolution underway the past two years.
“I really don’t think I’ve changed anything,” Goebel said. “This has been coming for a long time.”
Yagudin’s prediction that the quad would be necessity rather luxury after the 1998 Olympics has come true. Yet even he was stunned to learn, at the press conference after the event, what Goebel had accomplished.
“You did three?” Yagudin said. “Yes,” Goebel replied. “Jeez,” said Yagudin, leaning over to shake Goebel’s hand.
Kwan was equally impressed. No woman has landed a quad.
“I saw Tim earlier in the afternoon, and I said to him, `You’re doing three quads? Is that possible? What are you thinking?’
“But I didn’t want to psych him out, so I said, `You go, Tim.’ To push the envelope like that, it’s pretty amazing.”
