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Olympics

A Battle for Gold and Posterity

Kim Yu-na Seeks Consecutive Figure Skating Golds

By JERE LONGMANFEB. 17, 2014

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Kim Yu-na of South Korea trains for her chance at a second Olympic gold in women's figure skating. Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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SOCHI, Russia — Kim Yu-na had arrived on a long flight from South Korea to defend her Olympic figure skating title. This was her first practice, near dusk on Thursday, and dozens of reporters and photographers recorded every jump and spin and mop of the brow. The whir of cameras made a hushed, clattering sound like cards in the spokes of a bicycle tire.

Afterward, Kim was asked about her presumed top challenger, 15-year-old Yulia Lipnitskaya, whose poise, youthful jumping, blurring spins and gymnastic flexibility helped lift Russia to a team gold medal and made her an international sensation.

Women’s skating does not begin until Wednesday, but expectation has been growing since last month when an emergent Lipnitskaya won the European championship. This is probably the most eagerly awaited competition of the Winter Games.

Yes, Kim said through an interpreter, she watched Lipnitskaya compete in the team event on television before leaving Seoul. But Kim, 23, would not compare herself to anyone, except to say that this would be her second and final Olympics, while it would be Lipnitskaya’s first.

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Yulia Lipnitskaya of Russia with her gold medal in team figure skating. David Gray/Reuters

“The meaning is different,” Kim said.

Kim could become only the third woman after Sonja Henie of Norway (1928, 1932, 1936) and Katarina Witt of East Germany (1984, 1988) to win consecutive gold medals. Lipnitskaya would be the youngest gold medalist since Tara Lipinski, who was also 15 when she defeated Michelle Kwan at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan.

“To knock an Olympic champion off the top spot of the podium is going to take a lot,” said Kristi Yamaguchi, the 1992 Olympic champion.

“Yu-na will have to make mistakes for Lipnitskaya to beat her, but it’s possible.”

Each skater has her strengths and vulnerabilities. Kim is both a champion and a mystery. At the 2010 Vancouver Games, she gave one of the greatest Olympic performances ever delivered. At her best, Kim has an ethereal command on the ice, whispery speed, helicoptering height and graceful flow on her jumps. Last March, after seldom competing during the season, she won the world championship decisively.

“She can do a simple move, and it has you on the edge of your seat,” Yamaguchi said.

Yet, Kim missed weeks of training and the entire international Grand Prix circuit in the fall while recovering from a metatarsal injury in her right foot. She has competed only at a less visible event in Zagreb, Croatia, and at the South Korean national championship.

Her practices here have been impressive, but there will be no day of rest between the short and long program, no time to recover physically and emotionally, which left the conclusion of the Olympic men’s competition drained and messy.

“Who knows what Yu-na Kim is going to show up?” said Paul Wylie, the 1992 Olympic silver medalist. “She could just take all the air out of the room, but I think she’s going to struggle against a perfect performance from Lipnitskaya.”

There is a diffidence about Kim, a sense that these Games are as much about a closing of a career as an opening to history. She said she was focused more on taking part than winning. When asked about Henie and Witt, Kim said, “A lot of time has passed and our abilities are different.”

Kim does have at least two potential advantages over Lipnitskaya: maturity and experience. She breezily handled the pressure of the Olympics in Vancouver and has grown accustomed to dealing with widespread celebrity, which can pin a person like a butterfly to a spreading board.

She is one of South Korea’s most popular athletes, featured on billboards and in television commercials for products like cosmetics, fine jewelry, air-conditioners and fabric softener. Some popular South Korean actors and boy-band members have said they would love to date her.

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There is a gravity about Kim, too. As a good-will ambassador for Unicef, she has donated money to earthquake victims in Haiti, typhoon victims in the Philippines and children displaced by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

“She can handle whatever’s thrown at her,” Lipinski said. “Her lifestyle is probably so different than any of these other skaters. That’s an advantage. She’s had to learn to deal with so many things and still stay calm.”

Composure is also one of the most impressive aspects of Lipnitskaya’s skating. Contrary to what many people believe, Lipinski said from personal experience, young skaters are not fearless and immune to pressure.

“If anything, I think the young ones have it harder,” Lipinski said.

“They don’t have the experience to put things into perspective. When you’re young, it’s your entire life. When you step on the ice, it’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m here for a party.’ It’s intimidating.”

Lipnitskaya’s intense, blinkered drive has led to a reputation for haughtiness. In Moscow, where she returned to train after the team competition, her mother, Daniela, told The Associated Press: “I’m almost afraid she’s going to mouth off to someone. She’s a girl with character; she’s capable of that.”

She is said to be devastated if she misses even a few minutes of practice time, a teenage obsession that Lipinski said she found familiar. Yet there is also something adult about Lipnitskaya, a depth of emotion and an actor’s sense of drama.

It was evident in the way Lipnitskaya put on a baseball cap to celebrate Russia’s team victory before an adoring crowd at Iceberg Skating Palace. And it was especially so in her gestures of grim endurance and failed hope in portraying an ultimately doomed Jewish girl in a red coat from the Holocaust movie “Schindler’s List.”

“She’s kind of got that old soul in her for 15,” Yamaguchi said.

Lipnitskaya also has a snowballing momentum and the backing of a voluble home crowd, which, in a subjective sport, can influence perception and judges’ marks. And she is a mesmerizing performer with her exceptional pliability, seeming to raise and stretch her leg beyond 180 degrees in her layback spin.

“She has no spine, but she has iron in her bones,” said Gracie Gold, the American champion.

Still, Lipnitskaya is a teenager in an event designated as ladies’ skating. Her double axel is not fully developed and some question whether she correctly launches her lutz from a back outside edge of her skate. A number of skaters jump from the inside edge, a move called a flutz.

There is also some debate about whether Lipnitskaya receives overly generous artistic marks for skating skills, transitions, performance, choreography and musical interpretation.

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“I do think she’s wonderful, but she’s a little girl,” said Frank Carroll, who coaches Gold. “Should we call it the little girl Olympics or is it the Olympic ladies’ champion?”

And lest anyone forget, also competing is Mao Asada of Japan, the reigning Olympic silver medalist, who has struggled with her triple axel but who is an engagingly lyrical skater.

“If she skates well,” Yamaguchi said, “I think she has all the necessary things to be Olympic champion.”