Missed golds will define Kwan's brilliant career
Olympic dream ended officially with groin injury but reality is broken heart
 Yuri Kadobnov / AFP - Getty Images Michelle Kwan admitted Sunday that "taking myself off the team is the most difficult decision I've ever had to make, but it's the right decision. The injury prevents me from skating my best and I've said all along that if I couldn't skate to the level that I expected from myself I'd withdraw from the team." |
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TURIN, Italy - It ended in the middle of the night in the athletes’ village, not center stage on the ice. In a way, that was fitting because Michelle Kwan didn’t need one more public disappointment.
No athlete exemplified grace, class and character more than Kwan. No skater was so identified with her failures that it was almost impossible to appreciate her accomplishments.
Kwan cried when she won silver in Nagano, wept after having to settle for bronze in Salt Lake City. She skated through her adolescence and into adulthood chasing a gold medal that always seemed so tantalizingly close yet was always so far away.
Kwan wasn’t going to win it here.
Not at age 25 with her practice limited because of a strained groin. Not when she was competing under new rules she still wasn’t comfortable with. Not when she couldn’t land difficult combinations like triple-triples that other contestants routinely do.
There was no reason to humiliate herself trying.
She decided at 2:15 Sunday morning she wouldn’t, calling a doctor to get the official diagnosis and then her parents to let them know the dream she had nourished since she was a little girl was over.
It was a groin injury. The doctor didn’t get around to examining her broken heart.
“My parents always wanted me to be happy and for their baby to win the gold,” Kwan said.
She tried to do both, succeeding at one but finally failing at the other. Kwan didn’t officially call it quits Sunday, but she might as well have. The next Olympics are four long years away, and the thousands of spins, jumps and falls on hard ice have taken a toll on her body far beyond her years.
If she’s gone, she leaves with some remarkable accomplishments — and one giant hole in her resume. There were five world titles, an astonishing nine American championships and enough ancillary metal to stock the Federal Reserve.
Missing, though, was the Olympic gold that defines careers.
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“She was very eager to learn what she had to do to succeed,” Carroll said. “She wanted to succeed very badly.”
She wasn’t the only one.
NBC built two Olympics around her, and planned a third. You couldn’t miss her Friday night in the network’s coverage of the opening ceremony, and the story of Kwan coming back from a previous groin injury to be named to the team was critical to NBC’s drive for primetime ratings.
(NBC Sports is a partner in the joint venture that runs NBCSports.com.)
Instead, she’s heading home after just one practice session that went awry. The video the network beams out won’t be of Kwan looking dazzling on the ice, but those of her dressed all in black sitting so alone and trying to make sense of it all to a crowd of journalists who somehow sensed it coming.
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“If I don’t win the gold, it’s OK,” she said. “I’ve had a great career and I’ve been lucky. This is a sport and it’s beautiful.”
Kwan was beautiful in her sport, too. The images many will remember will be of a majestic skater so fluid on the ice and so precise in her jumps that, when she was on, she could leave a crowd breathless.
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