The Russians came to Torino with all four reigning world champions, hoping -- and fully expecting -- to pull off an unprecedented sweep of the figure skating gold medals in Torino.
After pair's champions Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin and men's champ Evgeni Plushenko breezed to Olympic titles last week, Tatiana Navka and Roman Kostomarov claimed the dance title last night. It was no waltz. But they held off a spirited challenge by Americans Tanith Belbin and Benjamin Agosto, whose flamenco romp earned them a silver medal -- the best showing ever by a U.S. dance pair and the country's first dance medal in 30 years.
Three down for the Russians and just one to go -- the ladies', the showcase event of the Olympics. Irina Slutskaya remains the favorite to convert her Salt Lake silver into Torino gold. She is the reigning world champion and four of the last five Olympic titles have gone to the woman who holds that crown. But the competition, which begins with the short program tonight and concludes with the free skate Thursday, looms as the most competitive and wide open of the four competitions. Here's a look at some noteworthy competitors in the field.
Irina Slutskaya: At 27, an almost grandmotherly age in this sport where nobody over 16 has won the ladies' Olympic gold since 1992, Slutskaya hopes to make Torino the icing on her figure-skating cake. If she succeeds, Slutskaya would be the oldest Olympic ladies champ since the event was first competed at London in 1908, which interestingly enough was a summer Olympics. Slutskaya has won seven European championships, putting her one up on two of the most exalted women in the history of the sport, Katarina Witt and Sonja Henie. She is extremely popular with her competitors and has a compelling personal story, having cared for her mother, who has kidney disease and requires dialysis three times a week. And Slutskaya has fought back from her own serious ailment, an inflammation of the sac around her heart, which several years ago threatened her career.
Slutskaya is a technically sound skater with very solid jumps and an exuberant on-ice personality. Though she used to show some nerves in her younger days, Slutskaya has become the steadiest performer in the world, having lost only once since 2004. The only thing she isn't is spectacular; her routines sometimes have a mechanical feel, seldom attaining the majesty that we associate with the sport's Olympic greats. Still, very good is usually enough to win these pressure-packed competitions. And unless another performer produces the skate of her life, as Lipinski did in Nagano in 1998 and Sarah Hughes did four years later in Salt Lake City, Slutskaya is likely to glide home with the gold.
Sasha Cohen: Here's the lady who can dazzle, the one for whom American fans have been waiting to have that skate of her life. No skater can spin and twist her body quite like Cohen, who has got the Gumby factor going for her. She is also blessed with a marvelous musicality and theatricality. Her jumps, though, tend to be the wobbliest -- and costliest -- part of her repertoire. And she has a history of silver medals the hard way, when she has been positioned to win and makes a late blunder -- "bizarre," Dick Button told NEWSWEEK -- on what appears to be a routine move.
Cohen insists that her past mistakes have not been, as is often suggested, a matter of nerves, but of undisciplined training habits. After the Salt Lake Games, when she had a disastrous free skate to fall out of medal contention, she split with her longtime coach, John Nicks and sojourned from L.A. to the East Coast. She spent stints with two prominent coaches, the second with Sarah Hughes coach, Robin Wagner. Wagner tried to instill in Cohen the importance of endless repetitions to attain constancy in her routines, an approach that helped earn Hughes the upset gold in Salt Lake.
But last winter Cohen returned to Nicks to put the finishing touches on her Olympic dream. Nicks suggests much of the criticism of Sasha has been unfair, given that she has won silver medals in the last two world championships. "You don't skate badly and win silver," he told NEWSWEEK. Cohen certainly showed some grit in winning her first U.S. championship last month while battling off a flu bug. But without Michelle Kwan in the field, Cohen wasn't facing anybody who could match her talent or the kind of pressure that awaits her at the Palavela rink this week in Torino.
For the past week she has been practicing in the mountains away from the distractions of the big city ("a week that felt like a month") and had a shaky practice yesterday upon her return. She fell on a jump during warm-ups and glided through her short program without bothering to take her jumps. "It happens," she said afterwards. "We're not robots." Perhaps if she can be just little more robotic and not let the emotion of the evening sway her off her feet, Sasha could grab the ultimate prize -- which, of course, means becoming an American idol.
Mao Asada: The only important thing you need to know about Japan's Mao Asada, who this season, at age 15, won figure skating's Grand Prix championship by defeating Slutskaya, is that she is not here in Torino. Under recent age restrictions, she is too young to compete. That is very good news for the field.
The Japanese Women Who Are Here: Even without Asada, the Japanese boast the deepest squad in the competition. All three of Japan's competitors -- Fumie Suguri, Miko Ando and Shizuka Arakawa -- finished in the top 10 at last year's world championships. Suguri, 25, is the oldest, most experienced and most consistent. Ando, at 18, is the youngest, but still a two-time national champion. At 14 she became the only woman skater ever to land a quad in competition, a move that has been relegated to history -- too much risk with too little reward -- by the new scoring system. But if you like to place bets based on practice sessions, then Shizuka Arakawa, 24, might get a nod. She is very inconsistent though, having won the worlds in 2004, the first Japanese world champion since the great Midori Ito 10 years earlier. But then she delivered a poor ninth-place showing in defense of her title. Arakawa is extremely athletic and can create a torrid pace. When she broke Kwan's hold on the world title, she threw two triple-triple-double combinations and another triple-triple into the very beginning of her program. If Arakawa can do it again this week, she could be Japan's first-ever Olympic champion.
Carolina Kostner: She is tall and athletic -- her father was captain of the Italian national hockey team -- and she won a bronze behind Slutskaya and Cohen at last year's worlds. More important, she carried the Italian flag at Opening Ceremonies and will certainly skate as the hometown favorite. That remains a factor that can still sway the judges on those artistic marks. If she sometimes seems to lack passion, perhaps the fans can deliver that for her. A good performance in the free skate -- to "Four Seasons" by Vivaldi -- could bring the house down.
Other Americans: Kimmie Meissner, 16, and Emily Hughes, 17, are both legitimate skaters of the first rank. But neither is likely to contend. At last year's national championships, Meissner became the first American skater to perform a triple axel since Tonya Harding back in 1991. This year she won the silver medal behind Cohen at the nationals. Hughes, the bronze medalist, brings a lot of her sister Sarah's ebullience to the ice and can really warm up a crowd. But because her sister also finished third at nationals and was about the same age when she won the 2002 Olympics, the expectations for her have been a little over hyped. Her smile, however, is contagious and can light up the arena. If neither Cohen nor the kids medal, it would mark the first time that an American was not on the ladies' podium since the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. That year the U.S. team was still rebuilding following the plane crash that killed its national team on route to the 1961 world championships in Prague. The top American performer that year was 15-year-old Peggy Fleming, who finished sixth. Four years later she was, of course, her sport's unrivalled queen. Both Meissner and Hughes are likely to stick around to try and claim that distinction at the 2010 Games in Vancouver.
NBC: If the ratings are bad for this competition, then America has indeed undergone a seismic shift in taste and habits. The ladies always deliver the goods.