Nagano 1998: Figure Skating: Michelle Kwan: Amazing Grace

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She was on a beach in Florida, strolling on a hot, muggy night in October. Her coach was nowhere in sight, but Michelle Kwan still had only one thing on her mind: skating. Very quickly she transformed the soft sand into an accomplice to ice. First, she turned one foot on its side and walked on it for a minute, then she switched to the other foot and did the same. There was a reason for the bizarre exercise, she explained to TIME. "Sometimes when you don't land a jump properly, even if you're a little crooked, you can still have cat feet and land and be stable--if you have strong ankles." And foot by foot, ankle by ankle, against the sand of Daytona Beach, she worked up her strength.

Out of such earthbound perseverance has emerged an amazing grace, with no trace of strain, as Kwan last month won the U.S. national title and the honor of leading America's women figure skaters to the Olympics next week. It was a victory that gave no evidence of the pain that shoots through her left foot when she lands one of those seemingly effortless triple jumps. The only expression on her face was that beatific smile, won by defiance of every sort of gravity, not just the earth's but the body's and the mind's as well, dangerous forces that cannot just bring a skater down but keep her down too. At the Winter Games in Nagano, Kwan will be joined on Team U.S.A. by two others who can smile in the face of gravity and adversity: Tara Lipinski and Nicole Bobek. All have been national champions. And, yes, they are all veterans, even Lipinski at 15, of juggling skating careers with public adoration, of living life on the edge of a blade and calculating victory or defeat in the split second it takes to leap from the ice. Don't let the sequins and lace and the perfect coifs fool you; these ice princesses could kick a hole in the Titanic. And Kwan is perhaps the toughest of them.

She has overcome fall after fall, and the memory of those falls, with the iron will to fly. Kwan skates three 45-min. sessions each day and sets goals for herself at each practice, devoting one session to the combination spin, improving the speed of the whirl and smoothing out the changes in direction, and another session to a jump. Kwan admits that when she has a "bad skate," her coach Frank Carroll will say, "It's O.K." But, she says, "I tell myself, 'You're not getting off the ice.' He knows I torture myself and put myself through all kinds of tasks." It was the punishing workouts that last November caused a months-old stress fracture in her left foot to become so painful that Kwan could not walk, let alone skate. She had to wear a cast for two weeks. As the nationals approached last month, Kwan still had not resumed her full training schedule. After a particularly frustrating practice session around Christmas, she asked Carroll, "Why is this happening to me?" And if physical pain was a burden, the psychological stresses were even graver. Self-doubt can never be truly exorcised, and on the eve of what would be a remarkable reconquest of the national title, Kwan was anxious. "I wasn't skating the greatest," she said. "I think I did one clean long [program] before the competition, and I thought, 'How am I going to do it if I haven't done so many clean longs?' "