Leap of Faith

John Hughes couldn't stay in his seat. As his daughter Sarah glided onto Olympic ice for the ladies' long program, he stationed himself at the door between the arena and the cavernous hallway that girdles the Salt Lake Ice Center. His equally nervous wife Amy paced the corridor, on patrol between the gourmet coffee stands and the hot-dog vendors. With every element that Sarah polished off during her 4 1/2-min. program, John would bolt outside and report, "She's doing it. She's doing it!"

Amy already knew. The roar of the crowd was swelling as Sarah checked off jumps and spins with the precision of a sharpshooter until the crescendo drowned out the last few seconds of her music. When Sarah's final spin circled to a halt, John and Amy ran inside and joined in the thunderous applause for their 16-year-old daughter's history-making performance last Thursday. After her "top this" scores were posted, Hughes slipped backstage and did something she had never done before at the end of a competition--she called her mother. "Mom, I did it," she said. "I did it!"

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Since Hughes was the first of the medal contenders to skate, she didn't know exactly what she had done. Or that her program would weather assaults from Sasha Cohen, favorite Michelle Kwan and Russia's Irina Slutskaya to stand, at the end of the evening, as worthy of Olympic gold. As she came off the ice, none of that mattered. "Going in, I didn't think I had a chance for gold, let alone a medal, given who was skating here," Hughes says. "So I didn't hold back."

Sarah Hughes' performance was the pinnacle of a figure-skating competition tarnished by a judging scandal in the pairs competition that resulted in two gold-medal awards. It also had to withstand a protest by a cranky Russian Olympic federation demanding gold for Slutskaya and threatening to leave the Games over assorted alleged judging improprieties. Hughes refocused attention on the outstanding performances these Olympics offered across a menu of winter sports, before crowds that were full and festive despite an unprecedented level of security.

Hughes didn't just skate flawlessly. She became the first woman to land two triple-triple jump combinations--the triple Salchow-triple loop and the triple toe-triple loop--in one program. Even more impressive, she is the first skater to fight her way from fourth after the short program to first overall. "It was my greatest skate ever, and it was great that it could happen in my Olympic long program," she says.

Hughes and coach Robin Wagner made critical adjustments to her program away from the Olympic bustle, in Colorado Springs, during the week before the competition. To build up to a dramatic conclusion, Wagner decided to splice in heavier music in the last 90 sec. And to trade on Hughes' technical skills, they opted to boost the difficulty quotient by adding the triple toe-triple loop combination. Hughes' comfort with the program showed in her confident execution of element after element. Her seemingly hopeless fourth-place position in the short program helped free her to skate with abandon.

Hughes' cool performance chilled her competitors into stiff responses. The eye-catching Cohen, after a solid short program, could not hold the landing of her triple-triple jump, and though she skated on brilliantly, portraying Bizet's Carmen, her performance lacked the energy of Hughes' routine. She and Hughes will surely be fighting for honors for years. Kwan clearly lacked magic, skating with little speed and tumbling clumsily and uncharacteristically doing a triple flip halfway through her program. The powerful Slutskaya didn't fall but stumbled several times.

Still, John and Amy Hughes, thrilled with what they thought was, in the best-case scenario, a bronze-medal finish, learned otherwise only by watching Sarah and Wagner's reaction on the monitors. "It never dawned on me that she could win," says Amy. "Fourth in the short--I didn't understand how you could win."

In fact, it's unlikely to happen again. No other skater--in women, men, pairs or ice dancing--has ever made up so much ground at the Olympics. Too much has to happen. Given the contorted mathematics that is the skating judging system, it was not enough for Hughes to win the long program, which she did handily. Kwan, the initial leader, also had to finish third. So it was the final skater, Slutskaya, who would determine all. Barring a once-in-a-lifetime score of her own--unlikely, since her program was not as well constructed as Hughes'--her performance would decide whether Kwan or Hughes would become champion. If Slutskaya finished ahead of Kwan in the long program, which is worth two-thirds of the total score, then Hughes would win. If the Russian finished behind Kwan, then Kwan would win.

Slutskaya, who immediately followed Kwan, has in the past been too rattled to pull off a winning program in the American champion's wake. Normally a powerful, fast skater who achieves hang time with her jumps, she couldn't dazzle the Olympic judges enough to overtake Hughes. But her performance to Tosca was enough to surpass Kwan, who double-footed a landing on an early jump and then struggled to maintain her confidence in the rest of the program, falling on the later triple flip. "It just wasn't my night," said Kwan again and again. "I don't know what didn't go my way."