Yep folks. Another article on MK
This time I'm posting up the link. Hope it works. There's also a couple of other articles as well.
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/brennan/2005-01-12-brennan_x.htm
Quotes:
Who are the two pure skaters Brennan is addressing here? I know one is Cohen but who is the other?
This time I'm posting up the link. Hope it works. There's also a couple of other articles as well.
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/brennan/2005-01-12-brennan_x.htm
Quotes:
Yet, playing by those rules, Kwan still has won seven national championships in a row, and eight overall, and should she win her ninth here Saturday, she will be tied with a legend from early in the previous century — Maribel Vinson from the '20s and '30s — for the most U.S titles ever won by a singles skater.
Kwan, 24, has accomplished this with hungry little jumpers gunning for her year after year. That she so far has been able to beat them all makes her the strongest U.S. competitor her sport has ever seen. Have there been better pure skaters? One or two. Better jumpers? A couple, perhaps. Better clutch performers in the era of the triple jump? No, except for one performance each by Tara Lipinski and Sarah Hughes, for a total of eight minutes over four years, albeit both coming on the grandest stage of all, the Olympic Games.
Who are the two pure skaters Brennan is addressing here? I know one is Cohen but who is the other?
Kwan's dominance is all the more remarkable considering the era in which she competes. You've heard of compulsory school figures, the painstaking tracings of figure eights that judges sometimes used to prop up skaters they favored? They're long gone now, but back in the old days they counted for up to 60% of the overall score in skating. Often, top skaters built huge leads in the school figures and had to do little more than show up for the long program to win the title. These were coronations rather than competitions and became the reason skating received such a bad name.
But Kwan has received no such help. School figures were eliminated in 1990; Kwan showed up on the national Olympic-level scene in 1993 and won her first national title in 1996. The national championships have become Kwan's stage the way the World Series was the Yankees'. Early on, her former coach Frank Carroll (who was coached by Maribel Vinson Owen, of all people) drilled into her just how important the national championships were. They were everything to him, and thus they became everything to his respectful little charge. She has said many times she lives to compete at the nationals.