Lincicome: Kwan has earned the right to attempt to become a golden oldie at Olympics

Published January 30, 2006 at midnight

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Michelle Kwan gets to wave goodbye, and there is nothing wrong with that.

As again America prepares to care about games it does not play - otherwise known as the Winter Olympics - it is reassuring to see a familiar name among the inventory of quadrennial strangers.

That would be Kwan, the little darling on ice skates, more famous than Bode Miller or Apolo Anton Ohno or anyone who slides down a hill on his back.

She has been with us since, oh, the sport of figure skating was nothing, as it was until Nancy Kerrigan got whacked in the knee.

By now and by rights Kwan should have slid off into the skating follies with Kerrigan and Scott Hamilton and others whose names refuse to come to me.

That's the way with figure skating. Medal winners get to be Snow White and medal losers get to be Deputy Dawg. The whole bunch goes off and skates at a dinner theatre and we get a new lineup at the next Winter Olympics.

Except that Kwan has been around and around and around. The Winter Olympics without her would be a kennel club without a poodle, pastry without filling, a tuxedo without a cummerbund, a . . . I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

Kwan has won Olympic medals, but not the Olympic medal, and since this chance comes only every four years, her time should be up, even if she did come to notice at age 13, that Kerrigan year.

She was kept from skating at the Olympics with that team by Kerrigan, who petitioned for a place because of Tonya Harding and all that, just as Kwan is now keeping young Emily Hughes an alternate, and excuse me, please, for the unfortunate pairing of Harding and Kwan in the same sentence.

Kwan was allowed to spin and slide around in front of folks who figure these things out rather than to compete for the U.S. title she has won nine times. They said, sure, she looks good enough to them and off to Turin it is for Kwan.

It would not be figure skating without these sorts of precious commotions, and it occurs to me that, really, the way to get the Broncos into the Super Bowl would have been to let them practice in an empty building in front of a few judges instead of having to play the Steelers.

It is not surprising to learn there are those who think Kwan has stolen something that is not hers. Well, so what if she has?

The rules (yes, there are rules in figure skating) allow her to do what she did, and while it would have been cleaner and more inspirational for Kwan to have won her way onto the team rather than the other way, if anyone deserves a little slack it is little Michelle.

She lost the gold medal to Tara Lipinski at Nagano, and I still have my notes somewhere, full of exclamation points and astonished underlining.

She was robbed.

At Salt Lake City, Kwan was too old, by that I mean, she was out of date, as she is more so now. She is 25, which for figure skaters means that Deputy Dawg costume is moving closer to the front of the closet.

There is an unfortunate impatience with elegance and style these days among skating judges, and those things are Kwan's strengths. The game is now all leaping and twirling in the air. My theory is that this comes from seeing the same thing from the same people over and over again.

Judges get bored with beauty. If Renoir were a figure skater, they would have insisted he put a few poker-playing dogs in the boating party.

So, Kwan has an Olympic silver and an Olympic bronze and if she were to get either one again, it would be more remarkable than being five-time world champion, which she also is.

It is fair to ask: Does she not have enough? Why does Kwan so cling to regret that she risks losing her dignity, much as Brian Boitano and Katarina Witt once did as dated relics?

Because it makes a wonderful story. And the Winter Olympics need all of those it can get.

It is OK to get caught up in the coming hype that will focus on Kwan's failure to get the big prize, her determination to postpone her life to get it, to be the aging underdog competing on fragile memory and desperate hope, armed with only the belief in herself to fill the empty hole in her heart.

Ah, enough of that. Let NBC write its own sob copy.

And it will. My eyes are wet already.

lincicomeb@RockyMountainNews.com

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