It’s A New Age Ice Rivalry Teenage Skating Wunderkinds Bring New Excitement To Sport

Before America began such a mad love affair with figure skating that everyone seemed willing to watch anybody skate against anyone anywhere at any time, the sport thrived on rivalries. Katarina Witt vs. Debi Thomas. Brian Boitano vs. Brian Orser. Nancy Kerrigan vs. Tonya Harding. Now an old-fashioned figure-skating rivalry is brewing between two New Age American kids. New ages, anyway, as in 16-year-old Michelle Kwan and 14-year-old Tara Lipinski.

The rivalry was born this past month, when Kwan, regarded as a virtual lock for the Olympic gold medal next February in Nagano, Japan, was upset by Lipinski in back-to-back major competitions. Suddenly folks were asking: which wunderkind is more wunderbar? Kwan, the youngest American ever to win a world championship? Or tiny Tara, 4 feet 8 and 75 pounds, the youngest American to win a national title?

The question is probably a good thing for both champions. “Rivalry forces skaters to bring out the best in themselves,” says Linda Leaver, who coached Boitano to Olympic gold. “You’re not going to be able to handle the Olympics without experiencing something of a tough road along the way.” Next week the two teen sensations will take to that tough road again, at the world championships in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The Worlds are particularly critical because they have so often proved a springboard to Olympic gold. The last three Olympic ladies champs - Witt, Kristi Yamaguchi and Oksana Baiul - all won world titles in the pre-Olympic year. “I can’t really worry about Tara because at both competitions I beat myself,” says Kwan, who has handled her sudden adversity with the same grace she usually displays on ice. “It’s up to me to get my confidence back. I’ve learned the lesson that everyone works hard, everyone wants it - and, in the end, the strongest will win.” Tara has the strength to laugh at the notion that she’s now on a par with her older competitor. “She’s not my rival; she’s an idol of mine,” Tara says.

Skating judges, especially overseas, have been loath to embrace America’s young superstars, dismissing them as primarily leapers who lack the sport’s requisite artistry. But last season Kwan - sporting a new hairdo, adult makeup and a stylish skating program - broke through the resistance. “Now if you look and perform like a mature young woman - no matter your age - you’ll get good results,” says Tara’s coach, Richard Callaghan. New rules require skaters competing at Worlds or the Olympics to be 15 by the previous July. Lipinski would actually be ineligible this year if she hadn’t competed in the 1996 Worlds at the age of 13 and thus been “grandfathered” in.

The girls are skating against their own biological clocks as well as against each other. While Kwan’s coach, Frank Carroll, says he can’t explain Michelle’s recent problems, many young, female skaters have trouble adjusting as their bodies change. In the past two years, Kwan has sprouted from a tiny, stick-figure kid into a young woman. “Right now maybe she’s not too familiar with this new body she’s got,” Carroll says. “But whatever is happening, I’m glad it’s happening this year and not next.” Lipinski may avoid some of these problems; medical tests indicate she is very near her adult height.

At last month’s Nationals, Kwan crashed, butt down on the ice, on a combination jump, then “panicked” and crashed again. While the stunned Kwan was still catching her breath and fighting back tears, Lipinski was jumping and spinning with all the aplomb expected of Kwan. Said Callaghan, who had always pointed Tara toward the 2002 Olympics: “Tara is bright enough to accept that she had a great night and the champion didn’t.”

But then at an international meet earlier this month, the champ had an okay night, and Lipinski beat her again. While Tara’s second victory came by the slimmest of margins - one judge and .1 on the scorecard - it proved she was no one-night fluke. It also put added pressure on Lipinski, who now heads to the Worlds as, at the very least, a medal contender. “I’m not worried,” says Tara.

Lipinski has already had a taste of the pitfalls of great expectations. She was so ballyhooed as a youngster that at the 1995 Nationals, when she was 12 and competing at the junior level, she was already meeting the press. But she faltered there, taking a silver, and then finished fourth at the world junior meet. It was a bitter disappointment to her mother, Pat, who’d been living in Delaware, 1,200 miles from her husband, Jack, an oil executive in Houston, to ensure that Tara got topflight training. She fired Tara’s longtime coach and took her daughter on a nationwide audition of the country’s top skating mentors. They settled in Detroit with Callaghan, who’d just guided Nicole Bobek and Todd Eldredge to national titles.

Watching Tara skate alongside Eldredge, Callaghan quickly realized that rather than push, he had to rein in the youngster’s obsessive competitiveness. “Tara’s attitude with Todd was ‘Whatever you can do, I can do better.”’

Why change anything now when it’s all working so well? “I just try to skate cleanly,” she says, “and leave the rest up to the judges.”

Kwan, on the other hand, arrives at the Worlds desperately seeking to change her ways. “I’ve been skating not to lose more than to win,” she says. “That’s not how I won my championships in the first place. I’ve got to start going for it again.” Any talk of rivalry, the two will leave to others. “Two lovely skaters, two nice kids - what’s not to like?” says Carroll. For figure skating’s legion of fans, nothing at all.