A Golden Skater, a Golden Child

Tara, Tara, Tara.

When Tara Lipinski skated her brilliant freestyle program Friday night, I tried to recall what I might have been doing in the winter after my 15th birthday. I remember in particular Algebra I, JV basketball and summoning up the courage to call girls for dates.

I can assure you that I performed in none of the above with the poise, determination or skill required to become an Olympic gold medalist.

If you didn’t have a Tara sighting in Nagano, you weren’t getting out much.

She was everywhere--marching in the opening ceremony, hanging out with other athletes in the village, cheering on her U.S. teammates in other sporting events, shopping in the department stores.

When the stores exhausted their supplies of snowlets, she became the Games’ mascot.

All that and she won a gold medal too, becoming the youngest individual winner in Winter Olympic history.

World-class figure skaters often say they would rather perform the programs of their lives at the Olympics than win a gold medal. I’m never sure whether they’re telling the truth.

In Lipinski’s case, it didn’t matter. She skated her best and won a gold medal.

Her technical superiority over her competitors has never been disputed. The question was whether she could impress the judges that she was more than merely a young teen who was trying to skate like a woman and earn artistic scores high enough to upset Michelle Kwan. I had never seen Lipinski do it before, so there was no reason to believe she could do it here.

She did it.

Somehow, she found the maturity within to skate beyond her years on both nights, especially in the four-minute freestyle program Friday night that earned her the gold medal. It was as clutch a performance as I’ve seen in the Olympics since Brian Boitano upset Brian Orser in Calgary in 1988.