Five days a week Sarah Hughes meets her coach, Robin Wagner, in a Long Island parking lot, and they drive together to a rink in New Jersey because it has the best ice conditions anywhere in the area. They try to talk about everything but skating during the drive–school, current events, rock stars, whatever–a trip that can take two hours in bad traffic.
Still, one of the things they often talked about was the pressure Hughes felt after beating the women who were the world’s two leading skaters, Michelle Kwan of the U.S. and Irina Slutskaya of Russia, at a Grand Prix event last November. Over the next three months the 16-year-old Hughes did not cope well with the expectations created by that pressure.
Now she has a new kind of pressure to deal with: that of suddenly becoming the Olympic women’s champion after leaving Slutskaya in second and Kwan in third Thursday night at the Salt Lake Ice Center.
“One thing I want Sarah to keep in mind,” Wagner said, “is no one can ever take away from her what she has done [Thursday]. I don’t want her to fear living up to this.”
Sarah Hughes did not fear skating on a left foot that is a mess, with bursitis in the ankle and a bone spur atop the instep. She wanted this badly enough to spend her break from daily practices, in May and June, not taking a vacation but catching up on missed schoolwork.
“Before, it was between two people [for the Olympic gold],” Hughes said, referring to Kwan and Slutskaya. “Now it’s really an open competition.”
Hughes said that in December. She was prescient.
Hughes often punctuates sentences with a laugh that retains heavy overtones of a giggle, a reminder of her still incomplete transition to young womanhood. Her father, Manhattan attorney John Hughes, was shocked into that future two years ago when Sarah changed her ponytail for a sophisticated layered hairdo and wore a backless, black jumpsuit to perform an exhibition program.
“You wonder where your little girl has gone,” he said.
Hughes has been torn between her desire to skate and her desire to be a junior at Great Neck North High School in Long Island. Hughes drops in at school for an advanced placement U.S. history course when she can, which has been rarely in this Olympic year. The history teacher and English teacher come to Hughes’ house.
Ask her where a piece of clothing is, according to Hughes’ 10-year-old sister, Taylor, and Sarah will reply, “It’s next to the green one under the striped one in the second drawer on the right.” She has arranged clothes by color, season and sleeve length, filed her fourth-grade schoolwork and spackled the walls in her bedroom because she didn’t like the way others were doing it.
“Sarah wants to do it all and be really good at everything she is interested in,” her mother, Amy, said. “She only expects the best of herself.”
Home is a rambling, lived-in, ranch-style house in a Kings Point, N.Y., neighborhood where mansion fairly describes many of the other homes. The garage became a family room when John and Amy Hughes moved in with the first of their eventual six children 20 years ago, and the family room is the one place with any evidence of Sarah’s celebrity.
John Hughes was captain of Cornell’s 1970 NCAA champion hockey team and had a brief NHL tryout before beginning his legal studies and career.
“The hardest thing with Sarah’s success is maintaining normalcy,” her mother Amy Hughes said. “You asked Taylor what it was like to see her sister on TV, and her response was to think that is normal. Life isn’t like that.”
If Hughes needed a reminder of what is important in life, she got it when her mother underwent bone-marrow and stem-cell treatments for breast cancer four years ago. It forced her, at 13, to be more independent of a mother with whom “I had done everything.” Amy Hughes’ cancer is in remission but the experience left Sarah more confident about making her own choices.
“It was a dream of mine to be an Olympic champion, but never a lifelong goal,” Hughes said. “There are a lot of things I still want to accomplish.”
