Turin – Shizuka Arakawa had it all planned out. She would finish the 2003-04 season and retire from figure skating at the ripe old age of 22. Then she would watch the Turin Olympics from her home in Miyagi, Japan.
But Arakawa took a strange turn toward figure skating’s most coveted prize Thursday night. She got good. Retirement, suddenly, seemed foolish. She felt she had a shot here. And after a horrible 2005 season that nearly sent her back to the living room couch, she stood atop the podium with a gold medal.
“It’s surprising right now,” she said through an interpreter. “I can’t find the certain word for it.”
Nowhere are they more surprised than Japan. Arakawa was only the third-best skater at nationals. Counting Mao Asada – arguably Japan’s best skater but at 15 too young for the Olympics – Arakawa came into the Olympics the No. 4 skater in her own country.
It was these kinds of downers that nearly forced her out of the sport. She is probably the eldest member of Japan’s growing posse of skating stars. She had been around seemingly for eons, since she was 5 years old and saw all the pretty costumes the skaters wore at her local ice rink.
However, she never reached her potential and time was running out. She hadn’t placed higher than eighth in the World Championships and missed the 2002 Olympic team after making it in 1998. She looked at 2004 as her last year. But she left Detroit and coach Richard Callaghan for Connecticut and famed Russian coach Tatyana Tarasova.
The new coach improved Arakawa’s flexibility and choreography and she shocked the world in Dortmund, Germany, that March by beating Americans Sasha Cohen and Michelle Kwan for the world title.
Why quit? Turin was only two years away. But Connecticut was awful. Arakawa had skate problems, injuries and homesickness. Turin seemed an eternity away. She skated like it, too, finishing ninth at the 2005 World Championships in Moscow.
However, Arakawa couldn’t leave the sport in the dumps. She wanted to give it one more shot.
“After 2005, I made my way more clearly,” said Arakawa, 25. “I thought about all the persons that helped me the last several years.”
After Moscow she improved but wasn’t great. While never finishing lower than third in Grand Prix events, she never won any, either. That all changed in Turin. She skated a clean solid short program Tuesday, and her third-place points of 66.02 were only .71 behind Cohen, the leader.
Skating her free skate Thursday right after Cohen crashed and burned, Arakawa was one of only two skaters in the final group to not wobble or fall on a jump. She scored 8.0 points for a triple salchow-double toe-double loop combination and 7.5 for an opening triple lutz-triple loop.
The only flaws were turning two triple-triple combinations into triple-doubles. It didn’t cost her. Her 191.34 total easily topped Cohen’s 183.36.
“I tried the triple loop and it came to a double loop,” she said. “While I initially tried a triple-triple on the second one, I couldn’t. It was the only part I was missing.”
