Winter Of The Dueling Divas

By Nadya Labi Reported By Alice Park/Philadelphia

Only in the worlds of figure skating and Nabokov does the age of 17 seem old. But Michelle Kwan, all of 17 and already once an ousted champion, embodies fallibility and, yes, maturity as she crosses blades with her toughest competitor, Tara Lipinski, 15 (rid of her final baby molar only last year when she won the U.S. Figure Skating Championships). Hordes of sponsors and adoring young fans are choosing sides. Even bookstores are battlegrounds, with Lipinski's Triumph on Ice taking on Kwan's Heart of a Champion. A real showdown, though, took place last week at the 1998 Nationals in Philadelphia, from which only one could emerge with bragging rights as America's best at the 18th Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan.

By the end of the short program, Kwan, who spent much of 1997 in one prolonged tumble and the past two months recovering from a stress fracture of her left toe, showed no sign of faltering. Seven of nine judges deemed her presentation perfection, awarding the first 6.0s ever at the Nationals in the ladies' short program. And then, transported by Lyra Angelica, she seemed to float through every jump of her long program on Saturday night, even the triple toe loop that placed painful pressure on her toe. "I was like, I'm free and I'm gone," she said. "Cloud nine, here I come." The judges seemed giddy too, giving her eight 6.0s. She claimed the gold and the automatic top position on the team.

The ailing Kwan could have easily sat out the competition at Philly's CoreStates Center and still got to the Olympics. According to U.S. rules of Olympic selection, skaters who take first place in the Nationals are guaranteed spots in the Games. The U.S. Figure Skating Association fills the remaining positions by evaluating the past performance of all the athletes. Kwan's record made her a shoo-in.

But Kwan had something to prove, though she carefully avoids the dread R word. Rivalry, after all, doesn't have a pretty past in women's skating, thanks to the thuggery of 1994. (This year, the biggest worry is autograph seekers; top competitors are escorted to the practice rink by security guards.) When asked about Lipinski, Kwan told TIME, "We respect each other, and I don't like to focus on any one name when I compete. She's just like any other competitor." Perhaps, but she was the competitor who mattered in 1997.

Lipinski rocketed through figure skating's triple crown--the Nationals, Champion Series and World Championships--and made time to chat up Letterman and model DKNY Kids clothing on her Website. Chevrolet, Minute Maid and Campbell's soup are only a few of her endorsements, and her agent, Michael Burg, says, "Wherever we go, we see Kwan's people too." It all seems so cutthroat for a girl whose hometown is called Sugar Land, Texas.

Lipinski skates with a sort of fairy confidence in easy landings. And until last week, her biggest gremlin was her triple Lutz, dubbed the "triple flutz" because she cheats slightly on the takeoff by leaning heavily on the inside of her blade. Then she stumbled on the triple flip in the short program, drawing marks as low as 5.2 for technical merit. She dropped to fourth place and later insisted in a teary voice that the fall was "not a doubting thing or a technical problem, just a fluke." The flub was shoved into the past by her solid long program set to music from the film The Rainbow. "It's about a young girl growing up and facing fears and learning how to deal with things and just really loving what she does," said Lipinski. "For me, that's my skating." She fought to hold on to her landings and battled back for the silver--and another run at Kwan in Nagano. Bronze winner Nicole Bobek, 1995's National champ, will round out a formidable ladies' team.

The men's competition, by contrast, initially seemed like a competition of one. Four-time National champion Todd Eldredge, as staid as he is flawless, landed all his jumps in the short program, winning easily to the tune of Walk on the Wild Side from the movie Casino. It was clean and neat but hardly the stuff of high drama.

Enter challenger Michael Weiss, 21, who's been beefing up his rebel routine. He pumps iron with his father Greg, a former Olympic gymnast, for an hour every day in addition to half an hour of cardiovascular training, 45 minutes of stretching and four hours of skating. "Not being one of the favorites, it'll be important for me [at Nagano] to have something extra," he says candidly. That something extra is the elusive quad, the Holy Grail of men's competition--four revolutions and a one-foot landing. No American man has ever managed to nail one in competition.

All the hype about the quad rattled Eldredge. He opted for a skate on the wild side in the long program. Finding inspiration in the stirring strains of the Gettysburg sound track, he went for a quad toe loop, his first ever in competition. He landed on one blade cleanly--and fell. Weiss, who had stuck only 10% of his quad attempts in practice last week, remained a strong believer in the curative powers of adrenaline. In the long program, he attempted one of the hardest jumps, the quad Lutz. His landing was two-footed, but if the applause meter was any indication, he clearly won the testosterone title. Nevertheless, the judges ranked Eldredge higher, giving him his fifth National title. Both men will travel to Nagano. They will face Russia's Ilia Kulik, justly hailed as a Baryshnikov on ice, and Canada's Elvis Stojko, who may add a second quad jump to his long program at Nagano.

Kwan, in her wise-teen way, is looking beyond Olympic gold. "When I'm 80 years old and I look back," she says, "I want to see me. I don't want to see Salome [a role she once skated] or any other character but me." With a comeback dramatized by two transcendent performances last week, she got her wish, more than six decades ahead of schedule.

--Reported by Alice Park/Philadelphia