A Thin Line Between Joy and Pain

Sasha Cohen rests instead of practicing. She will vie for the gold medal today. (By David Gray -- Reuters)

TURIN, Italy -- The little tissue boxes stood ready on the sideboards of the Palavela arena, wrapped in red to make them pretty, but suggesting by their mere presence that somebody was going to need them. Sasha Cohen was resting in semi-seclusion. Irina Slutskaya refused to answer questions, because she didn't want anyone to know what she was thinking.

Even a day off in the Olympic ladies' figure skating event is a tense thing. A practice session is more taut and interesting than some of the actual events of the Turin Games. On Wednesday, symphonies blared through the half-empty arena and a handful of figurine-skaters swirled around the rink, like they were waltzing inside of a music box. But among them, there was a vacancy. Where was Cohen? The tiny American was absent, leaving a hole in the ice where the leader of the event should have been -- and turning the day before the long program into a competition in itself: Who could be a bigger mystery?

Cohen set the arena buzzing when she didn't show up for her assigned practice time. At 3 p.m., world champion Slutskaya stepped on to the ice in a muscle-limning full-length leotard, along with fifth-place American Kimmie Meissner and third-place contender Shizuka Arakawa of Japan. But no Cohen. Her coach, John Nicks, was there. Her music played. But Cohen did not appear. Instead, Nicks, dressed in a sheepskin coat, casually spread out a magazine on the railing and studied it. There were three possibilities: Cohen was tired, or she was injured, or she was playing the mother of all head games.

Afterward, Nicks appeared before a cadre of reporters and tried to assure them that Cohen was fine; she had simply chosen to rest instead of practice. Instead of skating, she slept in, had a late lunch of peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and walked around the athletes' village. But the questions and rumors swirled and eddied like the skaters on the ice: Was Cohen really saving herself for the long program, or was she actually nursing an injury, and didn't want anyone to know? Or was this simply Nicks's way of keeping his skater, so notorious for her lapses in concentration under pressure, calm and focused? And maybe of getting into Slutskaya's head?

"I'm very aware of what circumstances allow her to skate her best," Nicks said.

With Cohen absent, others could only guess at her state of mind. "Knowing Sasha, it's an attitude of, 'This is going to be my Olympics, I want this to be mine ,' " said former Olympic champion Carol Heiss Jenkins. "It's not conceit, it's just self-confidence."

Second only to Cohen in playing the woman of mystery was Slutskaya. The evening before, the dynamic Russian leaper had brushed off questions about her own state of mind.

"It's competition. I don't want to tell you what I'm thinking," Slutskaya said. "Why? Because it's mine. . . . I don't answer these questions today. Tomorrow maybe I'll tell you.

"But if I tell you, everybody will know and everybody will skate great. That's good in one way. But I don't want to share all my secrets in the Olympic Games."

Ratcheting up the tension was the fact that no one, from expert observers to coaches to the skaters, was able to predict how the judges would score the long program under the new and more rigid system. The old system, which was broken down into technical and artistic marks on a scale of 6.0, left a lot of room for corruption and favoritism. The new "code of points" system assigns each element in the program a set value based on difficulty -- a triple lutz is 8.8 and a quadruple toe is 9.0. A second set of marks rewards artistic content.

But one thing was clear: The gold medal promised to be a very near thing for whoever won it. Cohen and Slutskaya, separated by just .03 of a point, are a study in opposites: The Russian is all athletic explosion while Cohen is all artistry. But in overall quality, they are almost indistinguishable. Their scores seemed to perfectly summarize the agonizingly fractional difference between them. The competition is so close, "It's tangible," says former men's gold medalist and NBC commentator Scott Hamilton.

"Boy, is it close," said Jenkins. "It's probably just going to be who makes the least amount of mistakes. It really is very, very close."

If both skaters are healthy, and do their routines cleanly, it will come down to the judges. This drives a certain element of the sports audience crazy -- they argue that because figure skating is judged subjectively, it can't possibly be a legitimate sport. But name a sport that doesn't involve judging. Baseball? Umpires make judgments all the time. They judge strikes and balls, whether the ball is fair or foul, whether the runner is safe, or out, whether the pitcher balked. Football? If you watched the NFL this season, you saw officials judge whether a receiver made a catch or not, whether he was inbounds or out, whether a running back fumbled, whether a player broke the plane of the goal line.

The denouement of the figure skating promised to be as suspenseful as any event in sports. All you had to do was look at those tissue boxes lining the sideboard, to know that makeup would run with sweat, and somebody would be left crying.