Sarah's Finest, Fearless Hour
By Bryan Powell
On the night of Feb. 21, 2002, in the hour between 9.p.m. and 10 p.m.
Mountain Time, Sarah Hughes' life changed forever. As a full house at Salt
Lake Ice Center cheered her on, and while more than 34 million U.S.
households tuned in on television, Hughes delivered "the skate" of her young
life. Then she waited as, one by one, the last tumblers clicked miraculously
into place, unlocking the vault to the Olympic gold medal she had dreamed of
since she was a little girl.
But what was the defining moment of Sarah's finest hour? That instant when
she and her coach, Robin Wagner, learned that she'd won the gold? The moment
at the end of her routine when she spun to a stop and threw back her head in
joy and triumph? The burst of delight as she nailed her last jump, a triple
toe loop, lifting the crowd to a new level of frenzy?
No, the defining moment came earlier, when Sarah took the ice, her skates
rocking back and forth in parallel, like a race car driver warming the car's
tires before the green flag flies, like a hockey player preparing for battle,
just before the puck is dropped. As she circled the ice, for an instant Sarah
seemed to gaze straight into the camera, apparently just over Wagner's
shoulder, straight into the eyes of America, as if to say, "Here I am. I have
something to show you!"
As the crowd's applause began to rise, we saw something we wouldn't see all
night from any other skater who was about to perform.
A smile. A big, toothy, honest-to-goodness, I'm-so-glad-to-be-here smile.
This was the moment. Compare it to the tense, drawn faces, the pursed lips
and downcast eyes of the other skaters -- world-class athletes, one and all
-- as they prepared to take their turns on the ice. Compare it with Irina
Slutskaya huffing out big breaths of air as if she were about to bench press
the Kremlin.
When Sarah smiled, countless television viewers no doubt sat up on their
couches, knowing that something magical was about to happen, because clearly,
at that moment, Sarah Hughes was fearless. The pressure that was to wither
her rivals would not derail her. While Slutskaya, Michelle Kwan and others
shied away from their most difficult jump combinations or fell vainly in
their efforts, Sarah skated with an elusive blend of passion, athleticism and
surgical efficiency. Kwan and Slutskaya offered tentative, not-to-lose
performances. Sarah, freed from pressure and expectation by her fourth-place
standing after the short program, skated as if she had nothing to lose.
In this respect, Sarah Hughes is heroic. OK, certainly not heroic like New
York firefighters and police officers on Sept. 11, or like our troops
fighting in Afghanistan -- let's keep that perspective -- but heroic
nonetheless. For while Kwan faltered again in her quest for gold, displaying
what Newsday later described, rather severely, as a "fatal lack of guts," and
while Slutskaya failed to claim the bounty that lay before her, Hughes did
not fear failure. Nor did she cling so tightly to the hope of success as to
strangle its very possibility. Most importantly, she did not let a precious
experience in her life slip by without doing her best, and without realizing
the joy of the moment.
While her victory was foretold in the moments before her performance began,
what followed was no small feat. On one hand, it was merely the execution of
skating techniques that she had training toward virtually her entire life, as
she allowed her body to do what she had taught it through thousands of hours
of repetitive training and practice. On the other hand, it was, from a
standpoint of technical difficulty, an unprecedented performance in Olympic
women's figure skating.
The gold medal, the symbolic reward that will bring her fame and fortune, was
simply the validation of her accomplishment.
Beyond her achievement, or in spite of it, what makes Sarah so endearing, so
embraceable across lines of age, gender and ethnicity, is her absolute lack
of guile. She possesses a luminous air of sincerity and humility that suggest
that she is one of us, and that her accomplishment is simply an example of
what each of us could achieve if we were to set our minds and bodies to our
respective tasks.
Perhaps it's the product of her strong family unit, or her experience in
coping with her mother's illness and recovery, or her unusually personal
relationship with her coach, or her own innate drive to succeed, or a
combination of all these things, but in her Olympic performance Sarah
demonstrated that she has learned a few lessons about life that many people
forget too easily, or never learn at all. Among these: a sense of how
precious each moment in life is, and an awareness of the value of believing
in our dreams and in our ability to achieve them. These are lessons that she
will no doubt carry far beyond her career as a figure skater, lessons she
shared with us with a smile.
NOTE: Bryan Powell is a free-lance journalist and musician based in
Lawrenceville, Ga., USA.
Copyright March 14, 2002 Bryan Powell. All rights reserved.