Rena Inoue

It wasn't part of their routine, and Rena Inoue was puzzled. She and John Baldwin were taking their bows last Saturday after their finale at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, waving to the crowd as they had done hundreds of times. But when she turned to face another section of St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center, Baldwin wasn't beside her. He was down on one knee, reaching for her hands. "I thought at first he was tired or something," Inoue said. "I was looking at him like, 'What's going on?'

John Baldwin remembers walking to a nightclub near the hotel where he and partner Rena Inoue were staying last month during the Grand Prix figure skating final in St. Petersburg, Russia. Inoue, tired after their exhibition performance and wary of venturing beyond the hotel, remained in their room while Baldwin and another skater went out with two women they had met during the competition. The group was together about an hour, until he went to search for a restroom.

Leave it to the L.A. guy, the one with the blond hair and bare chest, to celebrate skating history as if it were beach volleyball. Shortly after John Baldwin threw and twirled Rena Inoue from here to Turin, he shouted and pumped his fist at her. Then he made out with her. At center ice. "C'mon, I've kissed her before," Baldwin said. "But never, ever on the lips in public," his father, John Sr., said.

Rena Inoue hadn't felt good for a while. It was 1998, and she'd developed a cough, a persistent one that rattled her 4-foot-10, 95-pound frame. "And I noticed I got tired easily, much more than I should," said Inoue, who grew up in Japan and had been dispatched to Lake Arrowhead by her country's figure skating federation in 1996 to further her career. "I thought I had pneumonia or something, so I went to the doctor and checked it."

Rena Inoue thought she had consigned pair skating to her past. Competing for her native Japan, she had teamed with Tomoaki Koyama to finish 15th at the 1991 World Figure Skating Championships and 14th at the 1992 Olympics. Eager for something different, she switched to singles and finished 18th at the 1994 Olympics, inspiring the Japanese Skating Federation to send her to Lake Arrowhead in 1996 to further her training.

Rena Inoue had five stitches in her left knee, souvenir of a crash into the boards while landing a throw triple loop, and a grimace on her face. But after a series of terrible and often terrifying performances scrambled the standings Friday, she and her partner, John Baldwin Jr., had a bronze medal at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships and a berth at the World Championships. That made the Santa Monica couple's pain more bearable.