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COMMENTARY

Tara
routs
fears

* Something told her, more than an hour before skating, that Friday was her night.

By Tom Archdeacon
 Published: Feb. 21, 1998

   NAGANO, Japan - In just over 90 minutes she would skate onto the Olympic ice and try to make history. In 90 minutes, she would have what she considered "the most important moment of my life."

Seeing her free-skating scores, Tara Lipinski reacts just as any 15-year-old Olympic world champion should.
DOUG MILLS ASSOCIATED PRESS
   Tara Lipinski was eating spaghetti in a Nagano hotel room with her parents when she looked up and said, "Dad, it's time. I need to talk to Mom."

   This is a precompetition ritual and Jack Lipinski dutifully got up and left the room. "I get nervous and worried when that moment comes," Pat Lipinski said. "I don't ever want to say the wrong thing. So tonight, I just said 'eat your spaghetti, Tara.' But then I looked at her and saw her eyes were tearing up. Finally she said, `Mom, I think I'm scared.'''
   Pat nodded to her 15-year-old daughter and then reached for a holy card on the table next to her. "That's OK to be scared. These are the Olympics. So just think about the person who always looks after you. Think about St. Theresa of the Roses," Pat said.
 Lipinski's American rival Michelle Kwan was nearly perfect in the White Ring Arena, but selected a more cautious program that failed to impress the judges enough to win her the gold in Nagano.

  

DOUG MILLS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
   The Carmelite nun died a century ago at age 24. She was known for her courage in difficult times and looking after little children. Tara believes in the nun's powers so much that she wears medals of her, prays to her daily and last summer made a donation to a Pontiac, Mich., hospital in memory of St. Theresa.
   With that, Tara took the card and left the room. A minute later, Pat said she heard a knock at the door. "It was Tara. She grinned and said, 'Tonight, I am going to do it!'"
   And did she ever!
   She left the hotel, headed over to White Ring ice skating arena, and - showing courage in difficult times - pulled off one of he biggest upsets of these Winter Games. Skating a perfect free program that was fast and joyful and technically challenging, Lipinski and her irrepressible smile overtook a suddenly tentative Michelle Kwan, her American teammate and everyone's favorite.
   Tara had won the Olympic gold medal in women's figure skating.

Tara Lipinski shows gold medal form in her long program, Feb. 20, 1998.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
   The 17-year old Kwan had been heads above everyone in Wednesday night's short program and most people believed that short of falling Friday night - especially when you consider the way judges so often seem to vote by preordination, not performance - the gold medal was hers.
   But Kwan's program - though without major blemish - was also safe and not as technically difficult as her upstart challenger. Tight and cautious, Kwan underperformed. The judges voted by sight, not script, and Tara Lipinski is Little Miss America on Ice.
   This victory does seem to come with a St. Theresa touch. After all, Lipinski is one of the little children. At 4-feet-10 and just 82 pounds, she was America's smallest Olympian.
   And though her medal is the most prestigious of the games - an award said to be worth as much as $15 million in endorsements, appearance fees and personal signature items - Lipinski is still very much the little girl.
   The past two weeks in Nagano, she and roommate Jessica Joseph, a 15-year-old ice dancer, have with giggly girlishness checked each other's bangs, lipstick and makeup before every photo opportunity. In passing conversation, Lipinski offered that Disney World is her favorite place in the universe and she's been there 13 times, and she admitted that now she wants a puppy.
   At 15, Lipinski is the youngest person in Olympic history to win the gold medal in women's figure skating. She also becomes one of only six Americans - Tenley Albright (1956), Carol Heiss ('60), Peggy Fleming ('68), Dorothy Hamill ('76) and Kristi Yamaguchi ('92) - to wear the Olympic figure skating crown.
   As to what that will do for her, consider the popularity of Olympic gold medal gymnasts of the 1996 Summer Games - then multiply by 10. Before Nagano, Lipinski already was chatting it up with David Letterman and Rosie O'Donnell, modelling DKNY kids clothing on her own website, doing endorsements for the likes of Chevrolet, Minute Made and Campbell's soup and already had her own autobiography out.
   Heady stuff for any 15-year-old, but Lipinski - a bright, friendly, effervescent kid - seems to take it all in stride. Actually, she had been planning for Friday night's crowning almost since the day she could stand.
   "When she was two years old, she used to keep her toys in a Tupperware box," Jack Lipinski said Friday night. '"And one day, Pat turned around from the kitchen and there was Tara, standing on top of the Tupperware as she watched TV. It was during the Summer Olympic Games of 1984 and Tara was mimicking the athletes standing on the podium as the anthems were being played. She was so caught up in it that she asked her mom for flowers and a ribbon around her neck - she didn't know a medal was connected to it."
   Late Friday night in Nagano, she got the whole works - medal included. "It was kind of sad when they made me get off that podium," she said. "It felt so great, I could have stood out there all night."
   That's the way Lipinski took to everything at these Winter Games and it's the primary reason she - and not the suddenly reclusive Kwan - could glide through the pressure and find golden moments on almost a daily basis at these Winter Games.
   You name it, Lipinski did it in Nagano.
   She marched in the Opening Ceremony, met with Sumo wrestlers, including the 500-pound Akebono, posed for pictures with the Mongolian cross country skiers, hung out with German speedskaters and Bulgarian snowboarders, and cheered on her training partner, Todd Eldredge, at the men's competition.
   She had her nails done at the Amway salon in the Athletes' Village, played virtual reality games in the arcade, traded Olympic pins, answered questions on her own home page, ate lunch with the U.S. women's hockey team and approached the rowdy U. S. men's hockey team, innocently asking to meet Eric Lindros.
   Told he played for the Canadians, she blushed: "I thought because he played for the Philadelphia Flyers he was with you guys."
   "The smartest thing we ever did is let her stay in the Athletes Village and not with us in a hotel," Pat Lipinski said afterward. "That way she had fun at the Olympics. Even if she didn't win, she would have enjoyed herself. She had so many things going, she couldn't focus on one thing. It took the pressure off."

Skating rivals Kwan and Lipinski embrace during the awards ceremony. "I'm going to fight next time," Kwan later said. "I'll be there in 2002."
ERIC DRAPER / ASSOCIATED PRESS
   Kwan, meanwhile, skipped the Opening Ceremonies and stayed back in California to get treatment for a stress fracture in her left foot that had sidelined her a few weeks in November. When she got to Nagano, she ensconced herself in a hotel, trained at a private ring in Osaka, and ate with her mother in sushi restaurants, never mingling with other Olympians or attending competitions.
   That narrow scope became a constricting collar and that's how she skated. Just a month earlier at the U.S. Nationals in Philadelphia, she had turned in a serene, soulful performance that had the judges tossing perfect scores like rice at a wedding.
   "It's really hard to compare my performances in Philadelphia and here," she said. "In Philadelphia I was more free and flying. Tonight was more cautious. I took my time. But it seemed like I was in my own world...and I didn't open up."
   She had a moment's wobble when she came out of a triple flip early in her program and unlike Lipinski, had no triple-triple combination moves. Some of that has to do with her tender foot and some with a misguided belief that as long as she didn't fall, she'd win.
   After her performance, Kwan thought she had won. "When I got off the ice, I thought 'Oh, my God! This is a wonderful moment. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity.' It felt magical and I had tears in my eyes."
   Lipinski said she came out to have fun and not worry about the judges: "I like to be the underdog. It gives me something to think about." She had beaten Kwan in the past, so she wasn't necessarily intimidated.
   Lipinski skated to the music from the film The Rainbow . Before her performance, she explained her selection: "It's about a young girl growing up and facing fears and learning how to deal with things and just loving what she does."
   And Friday night that was her. When she finished she all but ran across the ice, squealed in joy, blew kisses to a crowd that was showering her with flowers and cheers, and then she grabbed her head in disbelief.
   During the medal ceremony, she said she remembered all those days at the rink the past 2 1/2 years - the sacrifices of leaving her suburban Houston home, moving to Delaware and now to Detroit to live and train and be schooled by tutors; all the hurt and fears and sweat - and that made this moment so very sweet.
   Kwan sat silently on the podium next to her and as she listened to the words - which told so much of her own story - her eyes began to brim over and the more she thought about what had escaped her, the more the tears rolled down her cheeks.
  

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File Created: 2-21-1998
Prepared by: Dayton Daily News Library staff
Sources: DDN reports