Swans never fly very high either. What is it about Michelle Kwan, American’s most mythic ice skater, sent home from the Olympics this week with a groin injury, her gold medal hopes now finally dashed?

At 25, Kwan has aged out of a sport that requires the twisting, leaping hard-impact landings that damage tendons and jar spines. It’s not enough to be ballerina perfect, a figure skater must be a toughened athlete.

A winner of five world titles and an astonishing nine national championships, Michelle Kwan was that — and more. Lithe of form, powerful of limb, beautiful of face — she had a huge gay fanbase. A huge world fanbase, to be precise. Turino will be her last Olympics.

“Kwan cried when she won silver in Nagano,” recalled the Associated Press this week — one of many media postmortems on the skater’s career. “Wept after having to settle for bronze in Salt Lake City. She skated through her adolescence and into adulthood chasing a gold medal that always seemed so tantalizing close yet was always so far away.”

Like the swan in a dark Tchaikovsky fairytale, Kwan seemed cursed. “No athlete exemplified grace, class and character more than Kwan. No skater was so identified with her failures.” Mistakes so unlucky and unexpected that they had an almost fated quality. The AP takes it a step further. Kwan’s series of Olympic washouts, the writer contends, made it “almost impossible to appreciate her accomplishments.”

The AP explains:

Kwan was beautiful in her sport. The images many will remember will be of a majestic skater so fluid on the ice and so precise in her jumps that, when she was on, she could leave a crowd breathless.

But on the world’s biggest stage, the images were far more stark. Kwan was the gold medal favorite in 1998 in Nagano and skated well but was reduced to tears when Tara Lipinski skated a magical performance to snatch the gold away from her.

Four years later in Salt Lake City, she sobbed so much her makeup came off after winning only bronze while youngster Sarah Hughes got the gold. The next night more tears streamed down her face as she wore a gold costume and performed to the song Fields of Gold in the exhibition final.

Unfortunately for Kwan, she will be remembered more for what she didn’t do than what she did. Like Ernie Banks, who never got into a World Series, or Dan Marino, who made the Hall of Fame without ever winning a Super Bowl, she will be the great athlete who couldn’t win when it counted most.

Never before has the phrase charmed life taken on such a bittersweet connotation. Of all the tributes we’ve read in the last few days, the one we found most fascinating — most psychically attuned – was written by Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post. Vargas took a mystic view of the skater, bringing in a mythological, almost Jungian perspective:

After handicapping her career — how she isn’t the fastest or highest jumping — Vargas detailed the Michele Kwan that shimmers above her achievements, Michele as myth:

A graceful, ethereal, classy Olympian who will be remembered as one of the greatest athletes never to win the gold. She is Sisyphus, rolling her hope up Mount Olympus, doomed to watch it roll down each time. But she is also the goddess Hestia, who is revered and respected as the keeper of the flame by every Olympian …

Kwan was Pygmalion [as well]. She transformed herself from a shy, awkward girl in a ponytail to a mature, marketable multimillionaire. Perhaps no other Olympic athlete, in either the Winter or Summer Games, has been written about so much.

“Her longevity, in a sport that’s known for chewing little girls up and spitting them out, has just been incredible,” says Christine Brennan, the USA Today sports columnist and the author of Inside Edge: A Revealing Journey Into the Secret World of Figure Skating. “To be at the top for so long. That’s been the key thing with Michelle.”

What is it about Kwan? Perhaps it’s the way each move — a jump, a spin, a footwork sequence, an outside-edge to inside-edge spiral — is precisely timed to the beat of the music, whether it’s Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 or Puccini’s Tosca or Peter Gabriel’s The Feeling Begins.

When the music soars, she soars right with it. When the music whispers, she’s so perfectly balanced on her skates that, unlike most skaters, you can barely hear the sound of her blades.

Every move means something. No emotion is left off the ice.

[The skaters at the Turino Olympics, even ones the hold world records that Kwan never achieved] will be skating, now and forever, in the shadow of Kwan the athlete and Kwan the myth — only 25 years old.