Cohen takes off before taking her 4:14

TORINO -- The public address announcer's voice filled the Palavela: "Next music for Sasha Cohen." The score from the 1968 movie Romeo and Juliet was cued.

The top six figure skaters scheduled to share the ice for 40 minutes of practice Wednesday afternoon ran through their long programs. The only one missing from the group was Cohen, who decided to skip the session. And so, for the next four minutes and 14 seconds as Romeo and Juliet played, everyone but Cohen whirled around the Olympic ice, performing their own spins and jumps to Cohen's music.

This is Sasha Cohen's moment. But will she seize it? Or will someone else grab hold of her 4 minutes and 14 seconds? Entering tonight's decisive free skate in the Winter Games, Cohen is in first place and poised to win her first gold medal during a career of near misses.

Cohen is in the lead by a sliver, 0.03 of a point ahead of Russia's Irina Slutskaya and 0.71 in front of Japan's Shizuka Arakawa. Japan's Fumie Suguri, the USA's Kimmie Meissner and Georgia's Elene Gedevanishvili round out the top six.

Forever, it seems, Cohen has finished second. Second in the last two world championships to Arakawa in 2004 and to Slutskaya in 2005. Second to Michelle Kwan four times in the U.S. Championships until this year, when Kwan didn't compete because of injuries.

The knock on Cohen is she has never put together a clean short and long program in the same competition. Under the pressure-packed spotlight of the Olympics, doing it for the first time isn't easy. In the last five Olympics, only Kristi Yamaguchi in 1992 won the gold after leading going into the final night of competition.

So when Cohen didn't show for practice Wednesday, speculation among the skating wags ran rampant. Was she trying do duck the media, trying to shield herself from the unrelenting inquiries about her failures in big events? Was she injured? (After completing Tuesday night's short program, Cohen had ice wrapped around her right leg, which she dismissed as simply maintenance. "You get to be my age and already six or seven years competing at this level, you gotta take care of your body. You know, it's not brand-new," she said.) Or was Sasha simply being Sasha?

Consider that Meissner practiced twice Wednesday and said she would have triple-tripled her way to a third session if allowed.

When Cohen's longtime coach, John Nicks, appeared at the end of what would have been Cohen's practice, he was holding a well-worn issue of Power and Motoryacht magazine. He cracked that such a diversion keeps his mind off other matters, such as the media's fixation with, "Where's Sasha?"

Nicks explained that Cohen didn't sleep well Tuesday night after all the excitement of the proceeding hours. When she explained this to Nicks during brunch Wednesday, the two agreed she should rest.

Was she injured? No, Nicks said. "She has a few aches and a few pains, as we all do when we get older," cracked Nicks about the 21-year-old. (The Brit with the disarming wit is a spry 76 and moonlights as a judge on Fox's Skating with Celebrities.)

"There is nothing untoward," he explained. "Occasional muscle problems."

So did she skip practice so she could ditch all the questions that sound like a session on the couch with a shrink? So Sasha, how are you different from the 2002 Olympics? (In Salt Lake City, a medal was in reach after the short program before she two-footed a triple jump and fell on another in the free to finish fourth.) So Sasha, how much do you dream of gold?

"She's answered that a hundred of times, so a hundred and one more times wouldn't have made a difference," Nicks said.

So there you have it. Sasha just needed to rest, given her advanced age and all.

"I've trained a lot of skaters, and I made a lot of mistakes when I started 60 or 70 years ago," Nicks said. "Young, talented people are all different and need to be treated differently. Sasha and I have known each other a long time, and I think we have an understanding of what's good for her."

Four years ago would he have insisted that Cohen practice the day before the free skate? "I might have insisted, but it wouldn't have done any good," he said.

Nicks was also asked to describe Cohen's mood Wednesday. Was she moody because she hadn't slept well? Or was she ecstatic from the night before? "Sasha, moody?" he said, without missing a beat.

Anyway, Nicks should know. He first met Cohen, he recalls, when she was 6 or 7 at a rink in Costa Mesa, Calif. She was a promising gymnast but then switched to skating. "She was buzzing around the rink faster than everybody else and nearly knocked me over a couple of times, so I got out of her way," Nicks said.

Was that training for later -- getting out of the way? he was asked.

"You know the ladies," he said. "I spend all my time waiting for ladies. I waited for my sister, my mother, my girlfriend, my wife, my daughter, my granddaughter. And Sasha."

Waiting for Sasha. Sounds like a play. And for most of her dramatic career, the skating world has been doing just that. Tonight, will the wait be over?

There is plenty of indication Cohen just might rise to such an occasion. The maturity and focus that was lacking in the past was evident Tuesday. During the last jump of her short program, a tricky double axel, Cohen wasn't high enough in the air -- Nicks said she should normally be in the air 0.5 of a second and she was in the air 0.4 of a second -- but when she fell back to earth, she dug her silver blade into the ice to keep from falling. She pulled through.

"I was just really ecstatic to nail all the elements, and I wasn't too nervous as I was skating," she said after that competition.

Ice princesses don't normally reference the Wizard of Westwood, but moments after her short program Cohen talked about the legendary basketball coach and about her tendency to get ahead of herself, the temptation after a good short program to look past the long and on to the gold.

"I actually read John Wooden's book, and it was really good," she said. "You can't live in the past, and you can't live in the future. But the present and what you do now can have a huge affect on the future, so that's what I'm trying to do is to really stay in the present."

As for the past, specifically the failure to medal in Salt Lake City, she said, "I was a different person, a different athlete. I've learned so much, I've matured and I've learned how to handle the nerves a bit better since then and just evolved."

After 4 minutes and 14 seconds tonight, the world that has been waiting for Sasha might just see that, too.

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