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For Katarina Witt, 18, it was a matter of gathering her efforts into a winning program, and after four years of international competition, she did it just in time to win the gold. Leggy, sexy, with a saucy smile that flirts with the camera, Witt was the prettiest champion and one of the best. Indeed, Witt may be the synthesis of artist and athlete that women's skating has so badly needed in recent years. Until her Olympic appearance, one ideal had been sacrificed to the other. But grace and athleticism are not mutually exclusive, as Witt convincingly proved. Her free-skating program was the most technically difficult of all the competitors, and included three triple jumps and a triple toe loop in combination with a double jump that she performed faultlessly in the opening seconds. With that difficult maneuver safely tucked away on the judges' scorecards, she broke into a radiant smile that never faded through a medley of mostly Gershwin songs. Here, too, she taught the others a lesson, for rather than self-consciously choosing one approach or the other, she simply skated as the music demanded: lyrical to a love song, witty with a Broadway toe-tapper, intelligent and expressive in every mood and movement.
In Witt, the arguments ended, for here was a skater of both athletic power and aesthetic sensibility. She has a natural fizz that makes the efforts of most others look labored. In fact her coach, Jutta Muller, is a stern drillmaster who is accustomed to Olympic triumph: her daughter Gabriele Seyfert took the silver medal in 1968, and Anett Poetzsch, another pupil, was the Lake Placid gold medalist.
Among the Americans, Elaine Zayak, 18, dropped quickly out of contention with a weak showing in the school figures. Though she had no hope of a medal, Zayak refused to hang her head. She turned in a charming short program that scored higher on technical difficulty than did Sumners', and in the free skating, she put on perhaps the best performance of her life, cleanly landing four triples, including one in a combination with two other jumps. Her farewell was an emotionally satisfying slam dunk in her critics' faces, and earned admiration for her tenacious spirit.
Chin was already widely touted as the winner in 1988. Small and fragile-looking, she skates with elegant ease and has some of Witt's knack of making the Axels and the Salchows look simple. She was the crowd's favorite, swirling and swooping through a move she has patented as the "Chin spin": stretching out to brush the ice with one hand while she whirls with one leg fully extended. After finishing second overall in the combined short and long programs, she is no longer a comer, but the star of a new generation.