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Feb. 24--TURIN, Italy -- Taking advantage of falls and mistakes by her two famous rivals, Japan's Shizuka Arakawa last night performed an eminently beautiful long program and won the Olympic gold medal in women's figure skating, the signature event of the Winter Games.
Arakawa, the first Japanese medal winner in these games and the first woman from her country to win Olympic figure-skating gold, awed a crowd of 6,200 at the Palavela. She skated the cleanest program, drew the loudest ovation and won the competition in a landslide with her rendition of Violin Fantasy on Turandot by Puccini.
American Sasha Cohen, the leader coming into the long program, skated just before Arakawa, faltered badly and took the silver medal. Russian Irina Slutskaya, the defending world champion and favorite of British oddsmakers, also squandered her golden opportunity and wound up with the bronze.
The first thing Arakawa said, through an interpreter, in the postskate news conference: "I'm surprised. I can't find a word for it."
Arakawa finished with 191.34 points. Cohen had 183.36 points, Slutskaya, 181.11.
Figure skating -- derided by some as a nonsport, held up by others as grand artistic expression -- is a game of monumental pressure at the Olympic level. Arakawa, Cohen and Slutskaya were in a virtual dead heat after the short program Tuesday. They entered last night's long program, or free skate, separated by fractions, with Cohen holding a 0.03-point advantage over Slutskaya and a 0.71-point edge on Arakawa.
It came down to grace under pressure -- four interminable minutes of incredible pressure.
Germany's Katerina Witt, who sat in a row of journalists last night, knows this as well as anyone. She won gold medals at the 1984 Sarajevo Games and the 1988 Calgary Games. As she watched Arakawa, Witt reacted the same way everyone else did -- she was floored.
"She was flawless," Witt said. "Her jumps were beautiful, the choreography -- everything was just beautiful."
Arakawa, 24, stepped out of a triple loop midway through her performance and removed some difficulty from two of her combination jumps. But her technical score, which measures the value of each of the components of a performance, and her program component score, the more subjective part of the judging, would provide her an insurmountable total.
Cohen, 21, had a tumble-filled warm-up and it presaged her performance. She fell on her very first jump and planted her hand on the ice on her second jump. In a span of 30 seconds, her gold-medal hopes were dashed.
"I was probably not nervous, but a little apprehensive knowing I'd missed the Lutz and flip (jumps) in warm-up," Cohen said. "It's kind of hard to feel like you're getting your focus. I stayed in the moment and got into the music. The jumps just weren't there."
Cohen, who said she was nursing a number of nagging injuries, rallied and won over the crowd during the last two-thirds of her program. She can be as graceful as Arakawa, and even more dexterous than Slutskaya, but she has never put two clean performances together in one competition. Longprogram woes, which cost her a medal at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, cost her the gold last night.
American Sarah Hughes -- Emily's sister -- won the gold medal at Salt Lake City. Slutskaya won silver and then argued that she was robbed by the judges.
Slutskaya, 27, sought redemption last night but didn't get it. She was the 24 th and final skater, poised for a series of difficult jumps that can draw big technical marks. But she eliminated the back half of a combination jump, fought through a triple toeloop and wiped out on a triple loop. Although her program component scores were high -- inordinately high, as this is not her strength -- the normal strength of her technical score was not there. She had nothing close to the score she needed to overtake Arakawa or supplant Cohen.
Slutskaya fairly sprinted out of the kiss-and-cry area when she saw her marks.
"That's competition -- you never know what's going to happen," Slutskaya said. "Other girls came and competed and got like 18 th and 20 th place. . . . I'm happy I got a medal."
marace@dispatch.com
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