So this season Goebel turned to a new coach, Frank Carroll, to make his next giant leap an artistic one. Their collaboration didn’t start smoothly. Goebel (pronounced Gable) was mystified by his new regimen, which consisted of several specialists–including a ballet master–working on everything from his skating stroke to his posture to his finger extension. “It was unsettling,” he says. “We didn’t really even spend time on my jumps.” Carroll says Goebel would pout or shout, often “go ballistic,” as he struggled with the new approach. But the veteran coach, whose star student is Michelle Kwan, was unrelenting. “I know Tim was going through total hell inside,” he says. “But then the pieces began to fall into place and you think, ‘Oh, this is going to work out’.”
Just how well will be determined this week at the U.S. championships in Boston, where Goebel will challenge defending two-time champ Michael Weiss, as well as veteran Todd Eldredge, a five-time titlist in the ’90s. But Goebel’s confidence has never been higher. In his first competition under Carroll’s tutelage, Goebel, who stumbled to 11th at last year’s world championships, stunned Russia’s three-time world champion Aleksei Yagudin for the gold. “I know now that nobody is invincible,” he says.
Goebel’s prospects used to be limited by the chasm between his two competitive marks, the technical and the artistic. He would routinely receive lofty 5.8 technical scores (out of 6) for his difficult jumps. But then he’d register 5.4s for his pedestrian artistry. This season, though, his two marks have often been just one tenth of a point apart.
With the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City just 13 months away, the nationals are a critical test. Young stars must establish themselves in the pre-Olympic season if they expect Olympic judges to regard them as medal contenders. It was four years ago that Tara Lipinski upset Kwan at both the nationals and the worlds, a precursor of her Olympic victory a year later. “If I keep making the artistic strides, I can be a real threat in Salt Lake City,” says Goebel.
Carroll has urged Goebel to become more disciplined in his work habits, and he holds up Kwan as a model. “She doesn’t get torn down by emotion,” says the coach. “She does her work and gets the hell out of here.” But Kwan has lingered long enough to marvel at Goebel’s talent. “When I watch him do his quads, all I can think is, ‘Wow!’ " she says. Goebel, though, can’t afford to be wowed by his own lofty abilities. At a recent competition, he survived his quads only to flub a simple triple flip, a jump he hadn’t missed in years. His coach knows–and Tim will learn–that the ice is always most treacherous as the Olympics approach.
