Athlete Bios
Figure Skating
Evgeny Plushenko
Last Updated: Tuesday, February 2, 2010 | 3:42 PM ET
New York Times for CBC Sports
Russia's Olympic champion Evgeny Plushenko returned to competition for the first time in three years this past October.
(Yuri Kadobnov/Getty Image)What would drive Russia’s Yevgeny Plushenko back into competitive figure skating after winning a gold medal at the 2006 Turin Olympics and a silver at the 2002 Salt Lake Games?
“I think he was missing that competitive spirit, the drive,” Alexei Mishin, Plushenko’s longtime coach, said in 2007, when plans for a comeback were first announced.
After a couple of false starts, Plushenko returned to competition for the first time in three years in October, winning the Rostelecom Cup, a Grand Prix event in Moscow. Though he jumped confidently, as he always has, Plushenko is far from guaranteed to become the first male skater since Dick Button in 1948 and 1952 to win consecutive gold medals.
While his flexibility and jumping are stunning, Plushenko, 27, has never been the fastest spinner or the most elegant in his style and footwork. In fact, Frank Carroll, who coaches Evan Lysacek, the reigning world champion from the United States, was dismissive of Plushenko’s return victory.
Carroll said he was not “the slightest bit interested” in the difficult combination jumps that Plushenko has been rehearsing. He saw the Rostelecom performance, Carroll said, adding, “The only word I can say is underwhelmed.”
It would be a huge mistake, however, to discount Plushenko’s gold medal chances. He appears to be ramping up the degree of difficulty in his jumping. His agent, Ari Zakarian, said at Skate America in November that the innovative Plushenko was rehearsing both a quad-quad combination jump and a triple Axel-quad jump, neither of which have been performed in competition. “He lives for this,” Zakarian said.
Married in September for the second time, Plushenko is seeking to keep men’s skating on a Russian axis even as the sport as a whole begins to tilt toward Asia in terms of influential performers. Russian men have won the last four Olympic gold medals (Victor Petrenko of Ukraine, skating for the Unified Team, won in 1992, giving skaters from the former Soviet Union five consecutive triumphs).
Plushenko’s achievement may be as unlikely as it is impressive. A three-time world champion, Plushenko was born in Russia’s Far East, along the Baikal-Amur Mainline railroad, whose final sections his parents helped to build. According to various versions of the story, the family lived in either a rickety house or in a wooden train car with other families. Plushenko was bothered by colds and pneumonia as a child and took up figure skating to improve his health after his family moved to Volgograd when he was four.
At 11, when his home rink closed and became an automobile showroom after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Plushenko moved to St. Petersburg to train with Mishin, who said that his young student “looked like a cheap chicken, green blue, no fat, very ecological.”
Eventually, the chicken took wing and became an Olympic champion.
