Cohen Finds Spotlight Could Finally Be Hers

TURIN, Italy, Feb. 12 -- Sunday morning dawned a crystalline blue with a sky big and wide and clear all the way to the mountains. This is what greeted Sasha Cohen as she woke up to learn that the cloud that has loomed over her figure skating career these past five years had finally lifted.

She did not take the news of Michelle Kwan's departure from these Olympics lightly, rather she said she was shocked to hear the skater who repeatedly pushed her to second place would not be here. Her coach, John Nicks, said they were "looking forward to a good battle." They expressed concern and support for the woman who has been Cohen's greatest foil.

Then Cohen, poised rigidly on a news conference dais, tried to talk about her skating even as the questions about Kwan continued.

It has been the story line of her career. Ever Kwan, always Kwan, all the way back to a practice at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City when Cohen was alleged to have intentionally bumped her rival while the two worked on their routines. Even last December, in a made-for-television event in which the fans picked the winner, Kwan -- besieged by groin problems -- was chosen despite struggling with the landings on her triple jumps.

In the past Cohen conceded this deference to Kwan bothered her. Sunday, she said it didn't matter anymore.

"In sport people want to know about your competitors," Cohen said. "It's hard but I learned to turn the focus on myself. You can ask the questions [about Kwan] but they just bounce right back."

Her world has changed, she said. And most of this is age. There is a great difference between being 21 and 17, a great difference between this Olympics and the last in Salt Lake, where she finished fourth and trailed not only Kwan, who won the bronze, but also fellow American and gold medalist Sarah Hughes.

That difference, she said, is not Kwan. It is maturity.

"I came into my first Olympics really nervous," she said. "I was going to win the Olympics and that was it."

When she didn't, she was crushed, which led to an anxious period of changing coaches, moving from California to Connecticut to New York and back to California, altering routines and trying essentially anything to catapult herself past Kwan. Ultimately the path led her back to her old coach, Nicks, to her old home turf of Orange County and to a place that was better than the one she left right after the Olympic disappointment.

Her cadre of coaches -- current and deposed -- have all said roughly the same thing over the years: Cohen needed to stop trying to be perfect and instead concentrate on having fun.

At last, she said, the message stuck. She learned through a trial-and-error process of barging forward in one direction, only to discover it was the wrong way and going back.

"I want to enjoy the process," Cohen said. "I don't just want to win a medal, enjoy 20 minutes of a ceremony and two or three days of publicity and then hang the medal on the wall and not be happy until I win again. I'm really starting to enjoy the journey and not so much the destination.

"Of course I want to skate great, skate amazing and the best way is to take the pressure off and enjoy it."

This is the philosophy she took into the U.S. championships last month, an event she won for the first time. And while many made the point that Kwan missed the competition with a groin injury, suggesting that Cohen simply won because Kwan wasn't there, Cohen kept saying she was the one who had changed. Not Kwan.

Cohen said she thinks the new figure skating scoring system favors her, with its reliance on building up points by rewarding difficult moves and not allowing the skaters to wow the judges with smiles and flash. Her confidence, she insisted, has grown tremendously.

"To be very honest, going into this competition, Michelle was not the favorite," Nicks said after Cohen's workout on Sunday. He added that he had feared other skaters such as Russia's Irina Slutskaya and Italian Carolina Kostner more than Kwan, who had been battling injuries for months.

Before Nicks spoke, Cohen glided across the ice at the Palavela with seeming assuredness, twirling through her routine as dozens of Olympic volunteers peeked around the corners of the area to watch. She said she spent her first night in Italy in the athletes' village and loved the atmosphere. But planned to leave Sunday night for a mountain retreat where she will practice for 10 days and otherwise stay out of the limelight. She'll return just in time to skate her short program a week from Tuesday, the first night of the competition.

Her only companions, aside from Nicks and her family, will be a copy of "The Constant Princess," a historical novel based loosely on the life of Catherine of Aragon, the first of Henry VIII's wives, and a DVD set of "Sex and the City." If there are parallels between Cohen and the heroines of either work, she didn't comment on them. Rather she smiled stiffly but politely during her news conference on the day Michelle Kwan dropped out of the Olympics.

"Everyone has a different trajectory for when they peak," she said.

Maybe at last, prime antagonist or not, she has reached hers.