John Nicks doesn’t remember exactly how old Sasha Cohen was when he first saw her skate. She may have been 6, maybe 7 or 8.
What he can’t forget is that Cohen was buzzing around a rink in Costa Mesa, Calif., faster than any of the other little kids.
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“She almost knocked me over a couple times, so I got out of her way,” Nicks said.
Nicks, 76, has dealt with the willful Cohen in a similar way ever since. That was abundantly clear when the skater chose to defy conventional wisdom–and the coach’s wishes–by deciding she was too exhausted to practice Wednesday after the excitement of winning Tuesday night’s Olympic women’s figure skating short program had made her too hyper to sleep.
“I agree it’s unusual,” Lee Marshall, Cohen’s agent, said of her absence from the Palavela rink, where she will try in Thursday night’s free skate to end her reputation as a skater too mentally fragile to be a champion.
“She took a day of rest, which is fine,” two-time Olympic champion Katarina Witt said. “She is physically prepared, and maybe she doesn’t need that day of pressure with everyone watching her.”
Cohen did the same thing at the 2002 Winter Olympics, according to Charlie Cyr, who was the U.S. figure skating team leader in Salt Lake City. The result? She dropped from third to fourth.
“Sasha breaks every rule I’ve always had about how you go about competing,” 1988 Olympic champion Brian Boitano said Wednesday night. “I would want to do a clean program run-through to build a backlog of confidence.”
No skater since Witt has epitomized the idea of a sequined diva the way Cohen does. Witt, however, submitted to the iron rule of her East German coach.
Not so with Alexandra Pauline Cohen–Sasha–who at times seems a law of nature unto herself.
At 21, Cohen’s porcelain complexion and girlish proportions blend with the fiery expressiveness of an operatic prima donna and the breathtaking flexibility of a prima ballerina to create one of the most intriguing leading ladies the sport has seen.
“When Sasha does her program, she definitely takes the character of whatever she is skating,” teammate Kimmie Meissner said.
The problem is what is missing from the person behind the image: a major international title.
To get it, Cohen will have to hold the razor-thin lead she built in the short program over reigning world champion and judges’ favorite Irina Slutskaya of Russia. Japan’s Shizuka Arakawa, the 2004 world champion, is less than a point behind the two.
Meissner, 16, is close enough to harbor medal hopes, especially since her four-minute free skate will include the most impressive array of jumps among the 23 women.
Compatriot Emily Hughes, 17, seventh after the short program, would do well to hold that position.
“If you win the short, you start thinking, `I’m ahead,’ and get more nervous,” Boitano said.
The short program leaders at the last three Winter Olympics–Nancy Kerrigan in 1994 and Michelle Kwan in 1998 and 2002–did not win the gold medal.
Cohen, world silver medalist the last two years, has seemed particularly vulnerable to the pressure of elevated expectations, failing to hold leads in the long program at the 2000 and 2004 U.S. championships and 2004 worlds.
In Turin she also is dealing with wear and tear on her body, including stiffness in the groin that Marshall said she has been managing with ice and physical therapy much of this season.
“It is definitely going to be tough for everyone to do great longs with the pressure,” Cohen said after a short program performance in which she fought impressively to land her final jump. “I’m going to believe in myself and expect the best.”
She has tried everything over the last three years to get it, enduring back and hip injuries, changing coaches three times in 28 months, dragging willing family members from coast to coast to coast in her quest. Not long after she patched up her relationship with Nicks, whom she had unceremoniously dumped after the 2002 Winter Games, Cohen’s parents separated.
Her mother, Galina, is a Ukrainian Jewish emigre who had studied ballet. Cohen, an Orange County resident who seems like a prototype girl straight out of “The OC,” is enamored of all things Motherland. The evidence is in everything from her program music choices to her nickname (a Russian diminutive) to her cross-country move from Nicks to Tatiana Tarasova, coach of the 1994 and 1998 Olympic men’s champions.
Cohen’s grandfather performed as part of a children’s gymnastics troupe for Stalin, and her mother started Cohen in gymnastics. Galina Cohen worried that her daughter was too much of a free spirit for a sport where intense concentration was needed to prevent injury.
Fortunately, Cohen fell in love with figure skating the first time she tried it on a rink in 1992 in Pasadena, Calif.
Athletes and physical artists, like dancers or skaters, are necessarily self-absorbed. Cohen acts especially so. She seems oblivious to the presence of other skaters during practice, frequently close to collisions out of what sometimes can look like either disdain or intimidation.
“Every time is my time,” said Cohen, answering the question of whether this Olympics would be her moment.
“I love my day, and it’s just about me.”
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Nicks, whose skaters have won world and national titles but never Olympic gold, was spending his days fishing when Cohen asked if he would take her back.
“Yes, Sasha, I will. Yes, Sasha, I will. Yes, Sasha I will.”
Coaches act like moths drawn to the flame of Cohen’s dazzling innate talent, especially her feeling for movement. As Nicks once put it: “It is impossible for Sasha to assume an ugly body position.”
Cohen said: “Some skaters are trained to the fingernail–this is where the head goes, this is where the arm goes. I feel the music and let it move me. I have always had a huge part in the choreography of my programs.”
At 15, when she finished second to Kwan at the U.S. championships for the first of four times, Cohen began to look like the next great thing.
She already had an understanding of music rare for skaters, explaining her choice of two Baroque pieces because both were in a minor key.
Cohen’s erratic work ethic frustrated her two East Coast coaches, first Tarasova and then Robin Wagner, who coached 2002 Olympic champion Sarah Hughes.
Nicks believes Cohen has realized her shortcomings and worked to overcome them.
“She has been very much more mature,” he said.
One thing hasn’t changed. The little kid who nearly knocked Nicks over has grown up, but she still creates a buzz on the rink.
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