TURIN, Italy - The worst of them are lampooned for their camp antics and fright makeup, but if you ignore the Viva Las Vegas outfits and occasionally schmaltzy music and just think for a minute about what they actually do, you could argue that the long program in figure skating is the toughest four minutes in sports.

What other sport requires its athletes to practice the hours as a concert violinist, make weight like a jockey, exhibit the endurance of a distance runner, the flexibility of a gymnast, then throw acrobatic tricks and strength moves while tearing across a sheet of ice and land on a blade of steel about as wide as a chopstick?

A hockey player's average shift lasts about 90 seconds before they huff and puff a retreat to the bench. Way back when Englishman Roger Bannister broke the four-minute barrier in the mile, there was a famous photograph of him collapsing into the arms of a man at the finish line. But little American skater Sasha Cohen - all 95 pounds of her - will skate the equivalent of a mile, maybe more, Thursday night, then smile and wave like a pixie when it's over. So really, who are the bigger drama queens?

Like hockey players, skaters get stitches and contusions and concussions from spills, too. Some of their jumps have such a violent effect on the body, they dare practice them only sparingly. Some of the throws in pairs skating send the women flying twenty feet across the ice.

Thursday night when Cohen, fifth-place Kimmie Meissner and seventh-place Emily Hughes take the ice, they won't be merely hoping to finish upright. They'll be seeking perfection. After all, there are no do-overs in skating, no gift second chances to make the game-clinching free throw, no opportunity to punt and get'em next time.

To win or move up in the medal race tonight, the contenders will have to execute every trick they throw in their lung-searing program, every hip wrenching triple Axel, every backbreaking Biellmann move where they arch their back and pull their leg up by the skate blade until their heel is in the general vicinity of their ear. Along the way, they'll also have to create the illusion that it all comes easily for them.

Figure skating is the art of making the difficult look simple.

And pressure? You want pressure? American 1976 Olympic gold medalist Dorothy Hamill admits that she was among the legion of athletes who often vomited before she skated.

Cohen currently leads second-place Russian challenger Irina Slutskaya by just .03 of a point, which is like having no lead at all. Thursday night's free skate counts for two-thirds of the skaters' final score. When asked Wednesday to handicap whom among the top seven or 10 athletes still has as chance at a medal Thursday night, Carol Heiss Jenkins, the coach of Japanese challenger Miko Ando, laughed and said, “Oh, I think they all have a chance. That is one thing about this (new scoring) system. You can really move. It makes it very interesting.”

If everyone skates cleanly, it will be hard for Hughes to move up even a rung or two. But skating cleanly is a big if. Italian star Carolina Kostner, the third-place finisher at the 2005 world championships, fell during Tuesday's Olympic short program

Though just 21, Cohen is already a two-time Olympian and she has a lot of skating miles on the odometer. She joked that next to the 17-year-old Hughes and 16-year-old Meissner, she feels like the “grandma” of the U.S. team. But she's tough, too.

“Knowing Sasha, is more an attitude of, `OK. This is going to be my Olympics I want this to be mine,' ” Heiss Jenkins said. “It's not a conceit. It's just self-confidence. And you have to feel that way.”

Especially when you're staring at the toughest four minutes in sports just ahead.

Howard is a Newsday sports columnist