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TORINO -- On Thursday night at the Palavela, the women's figure skating competition was so disappointing that it's too bad Olympic officials couldn't just give the gold medal to the deserving winner and send everyone else home empty-handed, with a suggestion to go back and work on how to handle the pressure of an Olympic Games.
How bad was it? Sasha Cohen, who had a bird's-eye view of the carnage, was so disheartened with herself after she skated that she put on her warm-ups, fully expecting that she was done for the night and would not get a medal.
Lo and behold, she won the silver.
"I think it was a gift," Cohen said, and she was right; it was. But even though she fell on one jump and stumbled on another in the first 30 seconds of her program, no one other than Olympic champion Shizuka Arakawa was better than she was.
Not Irina Slutskaya, who fell late in her program and looked uncharacteristically sluggish, uncertain and tentative. Not the elegant Fumie Suguri, who didn't fall but who didn't shine either, leaving out some of the intricacies that usually make her stand out. And not young Kimmie Meissner, who didn't fall either but turned her two planned triple-triple combination jumps into triple-doubles, and shaky ones at that.
Even Arakawa landed only five clean triple jumps, which was a far cry from the seven of Olympic champion Sarah Hughes in 2002, and Olympic gold and silver medalists Tara Lipinski and Michelle Kwan in 1998. But she won easily because no one was able to rise to the challenge, because one after another, her opponents fell by the wayside.
Chief among the also-rans was Cohen, who once again could not get through a competition without making a major mistake. Her right-off-the-bat meltdown was so awful that she said she still was in shock an hour later. The rest of a stunned figure skating nation joined her in disbelief.
How many times can one woman look so good and yet mess up so badly? With Cohen, the poor thing, the answer might reach infinity.
After a shaky six-minute warm-up in which she missed several jumps, she took to the ice minutes later already looking like a deer caught in the headlights. Not a good way to start your four-minute quest for the Olympic gold medal.
Even still, when she fell 15 seconds into her program on her first jump, a triple lutz, it was a shock to her, and to an audience that seemed so willing to believe she might finally overcome her nerves, if only this one time.
But that wasn't the worst of it, for 15 seconds later, Cohen was stumbling badly out of her second jump, the triple flip. Significantly, she did not fall, but instead reached out for the ice with her hands. By not tumbling all the way down, she saved herself a one-point deduction, and perhaps also salvaged a little measure of courage.
Coming up not long afterward was the pesky triple loop, a jump she fell on in the warm-up. Describing it later, she used a more direct term; it was, she said, a jump she "slammed." You have to give the kid credit: She is brutally honest.
Trying to regain some semblance of composure wasn't going to be easy with that jump looming. But Cohen decided that enough was enough. She summoned whatever confidence she had left and pulled off the jump masterfully and was on her way to one of the better three-minute skates in her career, landing four more triples along the way.
Cohen admirably did not try to explain away or sugarcoat her performance even as it became clear that she better hustle back into that dress of hers for the medal ceremony. She used the word "disappointment" often. She expressed "surprise" and mentioned the "gift" concept.
In other words, she knew. She knew that even though she was given the silver, she will be remembered for another squandered chance, for that terrible start much more than that fine finish. It's a shame, really. All that talent, all that grace -- and it ends up as just another missed opportunity on Cohen's resume.
But even if Cohen had been better, she might not have defeated the mature and stately Arakawa, 24, who turned heads all week with the best practices of the bunch. For the first time in 14 years, a non-teenager has won the gold medal in women's figure skating, and a veritable giant in this sport at that, at 5-foot-5.
If Cohen and early favorite Slutskaya wasted their golden opportunity, Arakawa from talent-laden Japan stepped up and grabbed hers.
On a less than stellar night, one strong four-minute effort might not be what we remember most, but it was enough.
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