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TORINO -- How would most 17-year-olds handle it? A Saturday night phone call at the end of dinner. An 11th-hour invitation to represent her country in the Olympics. A blizzard howling outside, making her getaway day to Torino uncertain.
Emily Hughes sounded utterly unfazed.
"The competition is over a week away, and I still have ... a little time to get in the competition mode," she said after being named Sunday to replace hobbled Michelle Kwan on the U.S. women's figure skating roster.
"We're just really taking things one at a time and hopefully leaving soon. ... We can't really go outside that much because there's so much snow. I think the snow's rather nice."
Hughes is ready to skate now, she said from home in Great Neck, N.Y., via teleconference. She insisted she'd be ready whenever she touched down in Torino. The women begin Feb. 21.
Her third-place finish in last month's national championships not only put Hughes in line for a berth on the Winter Olympic team -- until Kwan was granted a medical exemption, claiming the third and last women's spot -- but landed her on the U.S. team that will compete in the world championships in March in Calgary. So even with the Torino Games seemingly off her radar, Hughes continued to train hard.
She and some of her family, including her sister Sarah, the 2002 Olympic gold medalist, were finishing dinner at a Japanese restaurant when U.S. skating officials telephoned to say Kwan was bowing out.
"My dad got the call, and from his expression I could tell it was really good news," she said. "We were told to keep it sort of a secret. It was a little hard not to jump up and down, but we left pretty quickly so we could go home and jump up and down."
Sunday brought the snow. Hughes estimated it would be a few days "at least" before she could fly out but insisted she was in no hurry. She has changed some of her program since nationals in St. Louis, bumping up the difficulty of some of her jumps, but she said she has it mastered.
"I know she'll have an amazing time," Kwan said, "and she'll make the country proud."
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