Throwing All Caution to the Wind

Top U.S. Pair Will Attempt Unprecedented Throw Triple Axel in Long Shot Bid for Olympic Medal

TURIN, Italy, Feb. 10 -- Four years later, figure skating has a new judging system designed to prevent cheating. The French judge behind the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic scandal remains barred from the sport. And gone are the Russian and Canadian teams that controversially shared the pairs gold medal in Salt Lake.

There's one thing, though, that isn't new. The United States is considered all but an afterthought in the pairs competition, which opens the figure skating program at the 2006 Winter Games with Saturday's short program.

The top U.S. pair, Rena Inoue and John Baldwin, are not given much hope of breaking the United States' 18-year medal drought in the event, competing against a field that includes Russians Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin, who have won two straight world titles, and a host of strong teams including fellow Russians Maria Petrova and Alexei Tikhonov, China's Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao, and Germany's Aliona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowy.

Inoue and Baldwin, however, hope to surprise. They have something newer than the judging system and, they hope, even more influential than the French judge.

It's called a throw triple axel.

Technically, it's a move in which a woman is thrown through the air, facing forward when she takes off, rotating three times before landing.

Historically, Inoue and Baldwin are the only pairs team in the world to have achieved the move in competition.

Statistically, it's worth a lot of points in the new judging system, in which skaters receive base values for each element (the values can be decreased or increased, depending on the level of execution).

Interestingly, Inoue and Baldwin will attempt the move even in their short program. They have only landed it once in competition, in their long program at the U.S. championships in January, but they figure they have nothing to lose by trying, and, perhaps, a major move in the standings to gain.

"I just want to do something special," Inoue said. "That nationals was something special. We definitely had our moment there."

The moment had its roots in training that began more than a year ago. During the summer of 2004, they tried the throw at their home rink in Santa Monica, Calif., for the first time. The idea seemed better than their execution, so they tabled the trick until last summer. By September, they felt confident enough to try it in competition, bringing it out for the first time at Skate America in Atlantic City, N.J.

It didn't work out so well: Inoue fell hard.