After a couple of good summer competitions, Bobek had a disastrous fall, landing nothing harder than toe or salchow (and sometimes not even that). She then came under heavy criticism (including from many in the USFS) by skating in the Nutcracker tour over Christmas instead of training for Nationals. The pre-Nationals coaching change didn't do her favors either. She went into Nationals with a lot of people seriously fed up and rooting against her.
If there was any outrage about her not receiving a bye (I wasn't online until the following years), her disastrous performance at Centennial on Ice - where she fell on all three jumps in the short program, doubled everything in the free skate, and finished last in both segments - quieted any second-guessing. Those performances would have had her last at Worlds, without a doubt.
I do think Bobek at her best would have been a multiple-time World medalist / champion. Her technique wasn't bad by 90s standards and wasn't a barrier when she was actually in shape, which was rare. She unfortunately crash dieted very often and spoke about being bulimic in the period leading up to 1998 U.S. Nationals. She was on fire in those practices, landing 3Lz3T, 3F3T, and 3T3T plus 2A2A sequence. Her actual competitive performances, as good as they were, were a let-down compared to the firepower she was showing in practice. The program itself, as originally choreographed by Robin Cousins, was not bad, but had become unrecognizable to the point that he was distancing himself from it.
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... Miss Overcooked and Miss Underbaked. How could something be so frozen and burned at the same time.
