The Day After Victory, Hughes on a Real Roll

SALT LAKE CITY —  Forget the Olympic figure skating gold medal she won in one of the sport’s greatest upsets.

Sarah Hughes had a sandwich named after her Friday in her hometown of Great Neck, N.Y.

What greater tribute can there be?

The Deli on the Green’s “Golden Sarah Hughes” sandwich--maple turkey, Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato and Thousand Island dressing on a roll--sounds tempting. But it can’t be as much in demand as Hughes was the day after she rallied from fourth place to upset reigning world champion Michelle Kwan of Torrance and three-time world silver medalist Irina Slutskaya of Russia.

Hughes, who declared she’s less concerned about earning perfect 6.0s in her next competition than with reaching the high 1,500s on her college entrance exams, slept only about two hours after her bold, nuanced performance brought down the house and brought her to the medals stand.

She got an early start on a round of interviews and appearances, before Friday night’s exhibition gala.

Soon after she finished her last combination spin, her life changed forever. It’s a prospect the articulate 16-year-old finds enticing and, perhaps, a bit overwhelming.

“I think it’s great to have this medal, but there’s a lot of responsibility that comes with it,” said Hughes, who won the long program, 5-4, over Slutskaya to complete the improbable series of events that vaulted her past Kwan, Slutskaya and Sasha Cohen of Laguna Niguel, who finished second, third and fourth, respectively.

“I enjoy it, but there’s a sense of responsibility I have not only to my family, but to the skating community.”

While Russian Olympic officials, on behalf of Slutskaya, were lodging a protest--later denied by the International Skating Union--Hughes celebrated with her family Thursday night into Friday morning.

She’s the fourth-oldest of six children of John Hughes, an attorney, and Amy Hughes, an accountant turned full-time mom. They’ve kept the family together--no minor feat in elite-level skating, where it’s common for young teenagers to leave home and split up their families to train with renowned coaches. They’ve also kept her grounded from the time she was a toothy tot who performed as a sort of novelty act between periods of New York Rangers’ games at Madison Square Garden, through Thursday, when she aggressively and confidently performed a complex program she and her coach, Robin Wagner, reconfigured to make more difficult only a few weeks ago.

“When I got back to the hotel I was able to sit with my family and have a couple of laughs,” Hughes said Friday. “It was nice to see my little sisters, and my older brothers were funny.

“I just showed everybody my medal and they said, ‘Ooh, I can’t believe how heavy it is.’ I think sometimes they were more interested in the medal than me. I was like, ‘Hey guys, what about me?’”

What about her? And what does her victory say about her and the state of women’s figure skating?

Hughes’ triumph was as dramatic as it was unlikely in an event that produced the highest TV rating of the Salt Lake City Games. The NBC telecast of the women’s long program drew a 26.8 rating, including 31% of viewers in the Los Angeles area and 27.6% of the New York market. In the U.S., 79 million viewers watched at least part of the telecast.

They were treated to a spectacle. After her surprisingly flat third-place finish behind Kwan and Cohen at last month’s U.S. championships at Staples Center, Hughes and Wagner were advised by judges that Hughes’ long program needed some pizazz. So did Hughes herself.

The duo got to work. Hughes had her short brown hair cut and highlighted in the front with blond strands, the better to focus attention on her expressive face. She also got a new, lavender dress from Jef Billings that helped accentuate her long legs--at 5-3, she’s tall for a skater--and her line. Wagner redesigned her four-minute long program to incorporate a second triple-triple and re-edited the music of Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe” to end the program with a dramatic flourish.

But that would have meant nothing if she hadn’t been relaxed and confident, an approach that was easy to take sitting in fourth place after the short program.

While Kwan and Slutskaya had placements to protect, Hughes had a liberating absence of pressure. “I really had nothing to lose,” she said. “I thought there was no way in the world I could win ... so I went out and just let it go.”

Performing second in the final group of six skaters, Hughes went for every jump, finessed every spin, skated every stroke with controlled power. Her two triple-triple jump combinations posed a challenge none of her rivals could meet:

Cohen fell on her triple-triple combination and Kwan two-footed the first part of her combination and reduced the second part to a double. Slutskaya did a triple salchow-double loop-half loop-double salchow, but it was clumsily executed. She also over-rotated a triple flip, keeping her marks for technical merit to 5.7s and 5.8s, with one 5.9 from the Slovakian judge.

“I wanted to have fun with it,” Hughes said. “I always go out and I’m so worried about whether I’m going to do this jump or that, or whether I’m going to skate fast or spin well, and [Thursday] night I went out and just skated.

“That was the most important thing. I didn’t realize until it was over that that was just the greatest feeling ever. No matter what, that was my gold-medal performance. I didn’t think I dropped from fourth, and that’s pretty good, fourth at the Olympics.”

But it was Kwan who dropped from first to third after Hughes was ranked first in the long program--worth two-thirds of the overall score--and Slutskaya placed second.

For Kwan, 21, it was an eerie repeat of her performance at Nagano in 1998. The favorite then, as she was at Salt Lake City, Kwan inexplicably held back emotionally four years ago and finished with silver, to Tara Lipinski’s gold.

On Thursday, Kwan held back on the technical aspects of her skating, a bad move on a night Hughes was unassailable.

“I was a little more disappointed in Nagano just because I skated much better,” Kwan said. “[Thursday] was one of those nights where it just didn’t go my way. It’s different, but both times I ended up crying.”

Her agent, Shep Goldberg, said Friday she hasn’t decided whether she will compete in the world championships next month at Nagano. She must decide by next week to allow time for a replacement to prepare, if necessary.

“I enjoy competing,” said Kwan, a six-time world champion. “I do love the sport a lot. It gives me a lot of pleasure, a lot of joy.”

Hughes said she felt a little odd ascending to a higher step on the podium than Kwan, her childhood idol. “It’s really nice when you’re little and you have all these dreams and you finally meet the person and they don’t let you down,” Hughes said. “I think it was a lot harder for her to get a bronze than for me to get a bronze.”

Cohen’s coach, John Nicks, said the 17-year-old will compete at the world meet and plans to remain in the Olympic-eligible ranks for the 2006 Games in Turin, Italy. “It is early, but she’s very excited about her Olympic experience and she’s looking forward to the next one,” Nicks said.

By then, some other young girl--someone who might be 12 now, as Hughes was four years ago--might have arrived on the scene. But for now, Hughes sits atop the women’s figure skating world.

“It just felt magical out there,” she said. “I didn’t want it to end.”

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