Months ago, figure skater Michelle Kwan and former Olympic champion Christopher Dean huddled at a practice session, listening to a piece of music -- Ravel's Bolero -- that Dean and Jayne Torvill had used in a legendary performance. As they planned choreography for this winter's competitive season, they sought the perfect mix of passion, emotion, drama, power and richness.
And mathematics.
For the first time in her career, Kwan recalled, she clutched a piece of paper while on the ice, studying point values attached to various spins, jumps and footwork. Kwan, one of the most popular and accomplished skaters in the sport's history, wasn't sure if she needed creativity to make the challenging piece come to life, or a calculator.
Because of her decision to sit out the past two International Skating Union Grand Prix seasons, Kwan has yet to face the sport's new computer-oriented judging system in which a panel of judges grades each element of a skater's program as it unfolds. The system made its debut more than a year ago in the aftermath of a judging scandal at the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics in which a French judge and her federation president were banned from the sport for attempting to rig the outcomes of the pairs and ice dance competitions.
It is aimed at bringing more objectivity to a sport once considered rife with corruption and cheating. There have been questions, however, over whether its focus on scoring a program's technical aspects could constrain skaters like Kwan, a five-time world champion whose artistry has been known to bring judges to tears.
Kwan said final preparations for the Jan. 11-16 U.S. figure skating championships in Portland, Ore., her only tuneup before the world championships, have been anything but relaxed. The U.S. championships will be contested under the old scoring system, a far more subjective one in which judges rank skaters only in two broad categories on a 6.0 scale. How she will fare under the new judging system remains the biggest mystery of the skating season.
"It is a little nerve-racking," Kwan, 24, said in a telephone interview after a recent skating practice at Lake Arrowhead, Calif. "Getting ready to compete with new footwork, new spins, it seems like there is a lot on my plate. I've got to do this and I've got to do that. . . . I've always had great success under the 6.0 system. I'm very curious about how I will be judged under the new system. . . . I also see it as a challenge: Either you step up to it, or you don't."
Kwan's absence from the Grand Prix circuit has been analyzed by many and criticized by some, given the opportunity those events afforded to test the new system -- an opportunity every other elite skater has seized. Kwan, who said she bypassed the circuit to allow her preparations to move at her own pace, has done just five major competitions since the fall of 2002 -- two U.S. championships, two world championships and Skate America in 2002, entering as a last-minute replacement.
Russian judge Alexander Lakernik said skipping the Grand Prix was "not the best way" for Kwan to ready herself for the 2005 world championships. Another international judge, who requested anonymity, speculated that Kwan was apprehensive leaving the comforts of a system that has rewarded her with a record 50 6.0 scores over the years.
"I think it scares Kwan," the judge said. "She knows she's not going to see 6.0s anymore."
Indeed, Kwan will see just cumulative point totals, lump sums of judges' element-by-element evaluations of her program, rather than strings of 5.9s or 6.0s from the entire judging panel.
Kwan admitted the menu of changes and challenges this season is daunting, but no more, she said, than in the past. She rebounded from a disappointing 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, in which she finished second to Tara Lipinski. In the fall of 2002, she had to decide whether to continue in skating after earning a crushing bronze medal at the Salt Lake Olympics.
That winter, she wasn't sure she would even compete at the U.S. championships until weeks before the event.
"It is never boring," she said. "It's never for a moment smooth sailing. You're back to square one all of the time. . . . It's never ending."
Besides the annual string of competitive questions, Kwan seems to have struggled to find the perfect match in a coach, leaving longtime coach Frank Carroll in 2001, spending a year coaching herself, signing on with Scott Williams in 2002, then switching to Rafael Arutunian, a Russian technician, last fall. She said she joined with Arutunian in part for his energy and knowledge, and partly because of his skills in working with skates and blades.
In some ways, adapting to the new judging system, as complex as it is, has been easier for Kwan than the more emotional issues of the past, which taxed her psyche and tested her motivation. The new system makes things at once complicated and very, very simple: All any skater must do is connect the dots technically while, as Kwan put it, "keeping the integrity of your own skating." It's all documented in lengthy explanatory paragraphs from the International Skating Union.
"It's up to her," U.S. judge Lucy Brennan said. "Michelle is very, very talented. . . . If she wants to raise the bar, she is capable of doing it."
Kwan said she has focused unusual attention on spins and transitions, the weakest parts, she determined, of her old programs when measured against the new system. The work has been different, occasionally exhausting, routinely stressful and somewhat awkward, but it has also been straightforward and, in many ways, deliciously challenging.
"I've improved a lot," Kwan said. "I have a different perspective in skating under the new judging system. It's interesting; I'm working on things I wouldn't have been if they didn't change the rules. It's mathematical now. It's all taking your body and putting it into the numbers."
Kwan said she sought advice from several judges, including Lakernik, who visited her home rink in August. He said he offered Kwan a few suggestions without proposing wholesale changes. Lakernik said if there were any questions about whether Kwan was willing to change, she answered it for him at those sessions.
"She is definitely trying to do what the new system demands," Lakernik said by phone from Moscow. "New kinds of spins, steps and so on. . . . This demands work. As far as I had seen, she was doing that."
Lakernik said he expected Kwan to adapt gracefully to the new system. What remained uncertain, he said, was whether she could adeptly handle the new wave of competition.
"Last year, Michelle was third in worlds," he said. "To come back to first place, she must skate better than last year. The challenge is not so much for her whether it's the new system or the old system, the challenge is she must really present an interesting program, a program of a very high standard."
Indeed, Kwan realized after last spring's world championships in Dortmund, Germany -- the last contested under the old system -- that the day was long past in which she could lean heavily on a friendly artistic mark to rise to titles. She had her worst finish in nine years, claiming the bronze medal after having won five golds and three silvers in her previous eight championships.
After that performance, Kwan acknowledged that she would have to improve her jumps to fend off the young skaters attempting triple-rotation jumps in combination and even quadruple-rotation jumps. But that is one area in which she has hit something of a plateau, failing to achieve the great leaps others have literally made.
"I've been working on my combinations," she said. But "I have to listen to my body. . . . I'm not 13 anymore."
If maturity has presented some physical constraints, it has had the opposite effect on Kwan's imagination and vision. She did not shy away from Bolero, despite its strong association with Torvill and Dean because of their gold-medal success with it at the 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo.
"Their performance will never be tarnished," she said. "It's untouchable. It's unbelievable. But everyone has their own touch to a certain piece of music, their own heart to put in it."
Kwan's labors over Bolero and her attempts to cater to the new judging system have pushed her closer to the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, but, even a mere 13 months from the Olympics, she says she cannot guarantee her commitment to participating.
"I don't know what committed is anymore," Kwan said. "I've been playing it by ear for the last three years. There's something that drives me. I'd love another shot at the Olympics. I'm doing all the steps to lead up to the Olympic period, but as far as saying I'm 100 percent committed, that's just all talk."