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Lipinski skates with a sort of fairy confidence in easy landings. And until last week, her biggest gremlin was her triple Lutz, dubbed the "triple flutz" because she cheats slightly on the takeoff by leaning heavily on the inside of her blade. Then she stumbled on the triple flip in the short program, drawing marks as low as 5.2 for technical merit. She dropped to fourth place and later insisted in a teary voice that the fall was "not a doubting thing or a technical problem, just a fluke." The flub was shoved into the past by her solid long program set to music from the film The Rainbow. "It's about a young girl growing up and facing fears and learning how to deal with things and just really loving what she does," said Lipinski. "For me, that's my skating." She fought to hold on to her landings and battled back for the silver--and another run at Kwan in Nagano. Bronze winner Nicole Bobek, 1995's National champ, will round out a formidable ladies' team.
The men's competition, by contrast, initially seemed like a competition of one. Four-time National champion Todd Eldredge, as staid as he is flawless, landed all his jumps in the short program, winning easily to the tune of Walk on the Wild Side from the movie Casino. It was clean and neat but hardly the stuff of high drama.
Enter challenger Michael Weiss, 21, who's been beefing up his rebel routine. He pumps iron with his father Greg, a former Olympic gymnast, for an hour every day in addition to half an hour of cardiovascular training, 45 minutes of stretching and four hours of skating. "Not being one of the favorites, it'll be important for me [at Nagano] to have something extra," he says candidly. That something extra is the elusive quad, the Holy Grail of men's competition--four revolutions and a one-foot landing. No American man has ever managed to nail one in competition.
All the hype about the quad rattled Eldredge. He opted for a skate on the wild side in the long program. Finding inspiration in the stirring strains of the Gettysburg sound track, he went for a quad toe loop, his first ever in competition. He landed on one blade cleanly--and fell. Weiss, who had stuck only 10% of his quad attempts in practice last week, remained a strong believer in the curative powers of adrenaline. In the long program, he attempted one of the hardest jumps, the quad Lutz. His landing was two-footed, but if the applause meter was any indication, he clearly won the testosterone title. Nevertheless, the judges ranked Eldredge higher, giving him his fifth National title. Both men will travel to Nagano. They will face Russia's Ilia Kulik, justly hailed as a Baryshnikov on ice, and Canada's Elvis Stojko, who may add a second quad jump to his long program at Nagano.
Kwan, in her wise-teen way, is looking beyond Olympic gold. "When I'm 80 years old and I look back," she says, "I want to see me. I don't want to see Salome [a role she once skated] or any other character but me." With a comeback dramatized by two transcendent performances last week, she got her wish, more than six decades ahead of schedule.
--Reported by Alice Park/Philadelphia