The Shizuka Arakawa Text

Shizuka Arakawa (Arakawa Shizuka, born December 29, 1981) is a Japanese figure skater who won the 2004 World Figure Skating Championship and the gold medal at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. She is the first person from Asia to become an Olympic figure skating champion.
Å@Arakawa is from Sendai in the Tohoku region of Japan. Her coach Nikolai Morozov is a former figure skater from Belarus. Her previous coaches were Tatiana Tarasova and Richard Callaghan. She was also coached by the 1994 world champion Yuka Sato's mother, Kumiko Sato, at one time.
Å@Arakawa landed her first triple-jump when she was eight years old, and competed in the Olympic Games in Nagano in 1998, at the age of 16.
Å@Some critics say Arakawa's academic studies may have affected her skating performance. She holds a Bachelor's Degree in Education from Waseda University, one of the most prestigious universities in Japan.
Å@She currently lives and trains in Simsbury, Connecticut in the United States.
Å@At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, Arakawa was in third place behind Sasha Cohen and Irina Slutskaya after the short program. Although Cohen and Slutskaya were the heavy favorites for the gold medal, both fell during the long program. Arakawa made only 1 minor error in her skating routine but otherwise turned in an artistically and technically sound program and earned the gold medal. She became the first Japanese woman ever to win an Olympic gold medal in Ladies' Figure Skating. In an interview with Sports Illustrated, Arakawa said, "I still can't believe this." Her gold medal in women's figure skating on the evening of Thursday, February 23, 2006 gave Japan its first medal of the 2006 Winter Olympics.


Here are the fixed expressions/collocations/idioms that we found:

figure skater
previous coach
at one time
academic studies
to affect a performance
one of the most (~s)
the heavy favorites
minor error
the first ever/ the first (~) ever to (do something)
I (still) can't believe this!

These are the specialized dictionaries we used:

The Oxford Dictionaries of Collocations
The Collins Cobuild Learner's Dictionary
The Collins Cobuild Dictionary of Idioms
The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations
The LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations