TURIN, Italy – Shizuka Arakawa skated what, on the surface, appeared to be a safe free program on Thursday, punting on fourth-and-1, bunting the runner over to second base, laying up instead of going for the green at the risk of dumping it in the sand trap, letting everyone else fall instead of her.
She is polite. She is shy. She doesn't seem to laugh much. One of her nicknames in Japan is “Cool Beauty.”
Don't buy any of it.
The Olympic gold medalist indeed may be the paragon of comportment when the music starts and she may have left the most perilous jumps out of her free program here, but that doesn't mean she is averse to taking huge risks. To taking chances that would make Vegas blanch.
Which is exactly what she did barely two months before the Turin Olympics when she picked up the phone and dialed Nikolai Morosov.
“Yes, of course, I was surprised,” Morosov says.
Arakawa was being coached by Russia's Tatiana Tarasova at the time, and you couldn't get much better. Tarasova has produced seven Olympic gold medals and is the only person to have skaters win in all four disciplines. Arakawa had come to Tarasova a few months before the 2004 World Championships. Tarasova switched a couple of things here, inserted a spin there, and Arakawa came out of nowhere to win. She went to bed that night with her medal.
Now she was on the phone with Morosov, an Olympic ice dancer in 1998 who worked as Tarasova's chief choreographer and branched out on his own four years ago. Arakawa had finished third at the Cup of Russia, her second straight third-place finish at a Grand Prix event and not enough to qualify her for the six-woman Grand Prix Finals. The Japanese championships were a month away. The Olympics were 21/2 months away.
She was getting worried.
“She wanted,” Morosov says, “to change everything.”
There is a reason skaters begin choosing their music and choreographing their programs and fitting their costumes and piecing it all together in the summer before the season. It takes time. Changing anything a month or two out from a major competition is considered a desperate and, usually, foolish act.
Arakawa was changing everything. Music. Programs. Costumes. Elements. Coaches.
Arakawa talks about skating from the heart and not a textbook, how if something doesn't feel right she tries something else. How the only true barometer of her skating and her career is her gut.
Even before she won the 2004 worlds, Arakawa said she planned to retire.
“It was very difficult to motivate myself,” she said. “I lost my motivation, my fire, and it took a long time – probably one full year – to regain it. After 2005, I saw my way more clearly. From that point, I decided, OK, I will complete my athletic career with enjoyment.”
She was ninth at the 2005 worlds, didn't qualify for the Grand Prix Finals and finished third at the Japanese nationals behind Fumie Suguri, who was fourth in Turin, and Mao Asada, who at 15 didn't meet the minimum Olympic age requirement.
Not your typical gold-medal buildup.
But Japan deserved a break after the Olympics it was having. Eight years after hosting the Winter Games and winning 10 medals, it had none through the first 12 days in Turin. Its big hope in snowboarding's halfpipe crashed on both runs and had to be taken to the hospital. Legendary ski jumper Masahiko Harada was DQ'd for using skis that were too long. TV ratings in Japan were plummeting.
All that changed in four magical minutes at Turin's Palavela arena on Thursday night.
The skating competition in Turin finished at about 7 o'clock on Friday morning in Japan, during rush hour. People stopped to watch TVs in store windows. Students at Arakawa's former high school in Sendai got up before dawn and watched from TVs in classrooms. Newspapers printed special late-morning editions.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi called Arakawa and told her: “All the Japanese people are rejoicing.”
Doughnut shops are already selling special pastries resembling the Turin gold medals, flat with the hole in the middle and sprinkled with gold leaf. Music stores are having trouble keeping “Violin Fantasy of Turandot,” Arakawa's free-program music, in stock. You can't flip through Japanese TV without seeing a replay of her gold-medal skate.
“I've started feeling the weight of the gold medal little by little as time goes by,” said Arakawa, who has barely had time to sleep, let alone visit with her parents. “Japanese people must have begun to pay much more attention to figure skating. I can't feel it directly now, but I guess the whole country is going wild. It must be an overwhelming situation.”
She is the ninth Japanese gold medalist at a Winter Olympics and only the second woman, Tae Satoya winning in moguls skiing in 1998. At 24, Arakawa also is the oldest Olympic ladies figure skating champion since 1920 and the first from Asia.
“It really took a long time,” Kenichi Chizuka, the head of the Japanese delegation here, said of Japan's first medal here. “But it's worth being patient. When I saw her win, I cried ... One gold is worth 10 bronzes.”
Mark Zeigler: (619) 293-2205;
mark.zeigler@uniontrib.com
