Kwan was the greatest to never win gold.

As time passes it will be interesting to see which Michelle Kwan the public chooses to remember. As unfair as it sounds, Kwan likely will go down in history for coming into Nagano and Salt Lake City as the prohibitive favorite then letting a gold medal slip from her grasp. It's a cruel fate for someone who has carried her sport for the better part of a decade now, winning nine U.S. titles and five world championships in the process.

Of course, Kwan's Olympic past has left us with many questions: Was she really hurt skating prior to  Lipinski in 1998? Was it a good move to ignore the simple accommodations of the Olympic Village and opt to stay in seclusion? Was there a conspiracy theory to get Kwan on the 2006 team? The truth is that we could examine Kwan's Olympic misfortune and mistakes from now until the end of time. That doesn't change the obvious gaping hole the sport has to fill without her.

Even in defeat, I believe that Kwan's greatest performance as a competitor came on this same Olympic stage four years ago. Hours after watching 16-year-old Sarah Hughes capture what nearly everyone assumed would be Kwan's gold medal. Kwan performed at the Champions Gala in front of a packed crowd at the Salt Lake Ice Center. In was at the time and still is her final performance at the Olympics, Kwan skated to Eva Cassidy's "Fields of Gold."� It was impossible to ignore the tears of emotion streaming down her eyes as she performed.

There was something so beautiful about that performance. For years, Kwan has been regarded as the consummate professional, almost machinelike. It was hard to understand, between all of the medals and trophies she had won, how much she wanted the only one she didn't have. In that one moment you understood how much it meant to her. In the cruel sport of figure skating, where one trains four years for four make or break minutes, Kwan gambled and lost. While the bronze medal was little consultation for her disappointment, there sheer beauty of that performance overshadowed, in my opinion, Sarah Hughes' miraculous victory pulled off the night before. It was like watching skating's own little Greek tragedy unfold before our eyes.

The fact of the matter is that beyond Kwan, figure skating in the United States is lined with question marks after these Olympic Games. Is Sasha Cohen going to stick around for another four years? It seems unlikely at this point. Will Emily Hughes and Kimmie Meissner carry the tradition of strong U.S. ladies into Vancouver? Maybe. Can Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto create an ice dancing phenomenon in this country? Unlikely, especially when people find out that Belbin is apparently off the market.

It is hard to believe that younger skaters like Meissner and Hughes don't remember the Kerrigan-Harding saga twelve years ago in Lillehammer. For the next generation of skaters, Michelle Kwan is the sport of figure skating. She came along following a period of unprecedented interest in her sport and carried it on her back for the better part of a decade. Both the Olympics and the sport just won't be the same without her.

Jake Duhaime is a contibuting columnist to Atomic Sports Media covering the Olympics in Torino, Italy. He can be reached at jake.duhaime@atomicsportsmedia.com.