The Battle on the Ice

For the first time in over a century, the World Figure Skating Championships will be held in Russia – the country that dominates the sport like no other. At last year’s event, Russian skaters took three out of the top four honors; this year, from March 14-20, the planet’s best skaters will vie for a world title that will be a prelude to next year’s main event – the XX Winter Olympiad. A central story of this major sporting event will be two Russian champions: one who has achieved it all, the other who is still hunting for Olympic gold; one who is skating at the Worlds, one who is not. Theirs is an epic rivalry, each skater striving to be remembered by history as the sport’s best, to be honored by their compatriots as the most beloved.

For those who appreciate a jolt of adrenaline in their skating, there’s nothing like the men’s event for high, sweeping speed, huge jumps, and dramatic story lines. This year will be no exception. Reigning three-time world champion Evgeni Plushenko, a megastar in Russia, will fight to defend his title, and maintain his campaign towards Olympic gold, facing off against France’s Brian Joubert, the protégé of Plushenko’s long-time rival, Alexei Yagudin.

Yagudin, 24, the 2002 Olympic gold medalist is himself a four-time World Champion, and he now calls the US home. Prior to the 2002 Olympics, Yagudin had won three world championships before Plushenko surged, spending the entire pre-Olympic season stripping Yagudin of every major title.

Defeated and in despair, Yagudin considered quitting the sport, thinking he would never again be on top. Backed into a corner for a year-and-a-half by Plushenko, Yagudin finally came out swinging, and he didn’t stop fighting until the Olympic gold medal they both wanted was securely around his neck.

Yet in Russia it is the 22-year-old Plushenko whose image is emblazoned on magazines and billboards. Yagudin acknowledges his rival’s popularity in the motherland saying, “To be great in your own country is one thing. To be great in one not your own is a whole other accomplishment.” Across the world – Japan, America, and Canada – the popularity edge goes to the globetrotting Yagudin, who thinks nothing of giving over 100 performances a year to his millions of (predominantly female) fans, who look upon him with the adoration normally bestowed on a Hollywood icon.

In a TV piece created for the Olympics, Yagudin candidly acknowledged his relationship, or lack thereof, with Plushenko: “We sort of hate each other.” In private, he revealed, “My problem really isn’t with him – it’s his coach.” Plushenko is perhaps less personal: “I trained with one goal in mind – to crush him.”

What is at stake over the next year is hardware: if Plushenko wins in Moscow and again at the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, Italy, he will have matched Yagudin medal-for-medal at all major events. Some would say surpassed him, as every time the two have competed head-to-head at Russian Nationals, Plushenko won (victories Yagudin dismisses as pre-ordained by corrupt officials).

Yagudin, who retired in 2003 from the ranks of those eligible for the Olympics, tours as a lucrative headliner with the world’s largest skating tour, Stars On Ice, and now competes – and wins – pro events. When Plushenko makes his move to the pros, their on-ice duel will undoubtedly heat up again, as both fight to see who can maintain longevity in the sport, be remembered as the best, and earn the status of legend.

A Ghost and his Protégé

Meanwhile, Plushenko has more immediate concerns, namely Joubert, Yagudin’s protégé. It had been years since anyone but Yagudin had beaten Plushenko in competition, that is until Brian Joubert took away his European title last year. [Canadian Emanuel Sandhu technically beat Plushenko at the 2003 Grand Prix Final, due to a technical misunderstanding of the new points judging system.]

Some Russian media took Yagudin to task for his role in helping train the 20-year-old Joubert, whose victory denied Plushenko a fourth European title. They offered up provocative headlines like, “The Problem With the Traitor” and “Yagudin Continues to Make Life Difficult for Plushenko.”

Yagudin explained the relationship more matter-of-factly: “When the President of the French Figure Skating Federation phoned to ask me to help them as a coach, I immediately said ‘yes.’ I saw something irresistible in Brian,” Yagudin said, laughing, “A bit of myself. I want to become a recognized force and produce champions. I don’t want to do it for fun. I will set goals to be at the Worlds and the Olympics with students that can medal there, nothing less.”

At the European finals, the confident Joubert gave a brilliant performance, including two quads – the four revolution jump that only a few men in the world can consistently land. “Plushenko skated after me,” Joubert said, “and I think my performance made him nervous. He fell twice on his jumps, and then tried to improvise by doing them again later in the program. But he seems incapable of that – once he changes the program, he is lost.”

The irony of the situation was not lost on Yagudin, who recalled Plushenko’s coach, Alexei Mishin, once asking, “What is consistency?” Yagudin replied, “When you can land a jump nine out of ten times?” To which Mishin barked, “No: when you can do it when it counts!” This time at least, Plushenko could not.

“What’s amazing”, says former President of the United States Figure Skating Association, Morry Stillwell, “is that the Russians can still win after partying all night, smoking like chimneys, and showing up late. I couldn’t figure out why they were beating our guys until I overheard one Russian say as he took the ice, ‘I hope I skate well tonight so I can buy my mom a refrigerator.’ It’s the economics: it doesn’t matter if they’re hung-over and can’t breathe. If they don’t perform, they’ve got nothing to go home to.”

Coach Alexander Zhulin, an Olympic silver medalist and ice dance world champion who teaches top competitors in New Jersey, has a different take on Russian superiority. “Our athletes do not simply train,” he said. “Under the government system, it is talent that is rewarded. If you have talent, you get to continue and move up. If not, you’re out. Money does not buy your security in the sport like it can here in America, because nobody in Russia has any. They compete with each other like bullfighters. Talent is the great equalizer, and because of it, the ice arena becomes a bullring, and the young skaters fight to survive.”

Parallel Lives

Plushenko, 22, was born near Solnechny, in the Khabarovsk region of Siberia. His parents worked for BAM, the Baikal-Amur railway, and, together with an older sister, the family lived in a trailer. It had no modern amenities, and adequate heat was a rarity. As a baby, Plushenko came down with double pneumonia, and spent many years as a sickly, pale, and skinny child. When he was three, his parents moved to Volgograd. There, by a twist of fate, the future champion tried figure skating.

Plushenko’s mother recalled that, at an outdoors rink, a cranky little girl complained she didn’t want to skate anymore and tossed aside her skates. The girl’s mother inquired if Evgeni would like to try them. His mother accepted, and, with that small gesture, the boy’s future was irrevocably altered.

Plushenko showed considerable talent from the start. But by the time he was 11 years old, the rink had been shut, so his coach thought it best to send the youngster to St. Petersburg, to train with Alexei Mishin. “When I moved, I was still really only a child,” Plushenko said, “but my parents knew it was the best thing for my future, and I wanted to go. At first I stayed in Mr. Mishin’s home, but then I was put into a communal apartment.

“It was horrible, all I had was a little corner of a room, and a cot to sleep on. Drunks would stumble in off the streets at all hours and I was always afraid. But I didn’t want to give up. And when my mom would take the train to visit me – and try to take me back to Volgograd – I would put up a fight and insist on staying. It was bad, but to have no future would be worse.”

Alexei Yagudin also grew up in a St. Petersburg communal apartment, the room he and his mother shared the only space he could call his own. He was still a child when his father left, the abandonment becoming a defining tragedy that created a gaping psychic wound – something only the world’s adulation could heal.  When Alexei was four, his mother saw an announcement posted to a lamppost, offering free skating lessons. Under doctor’s orders to get the young Yagudin more exercise and fresh air to fight chronic illnesses, she enrolled him in a class which was already full. The instructor agreed to take just one more student; little did he know this extra child was a future Olympic champion.

What kept him going during years of solitary confinement on cold ice rinks? “I wanted to be somebody in this life,” Yagudin said. “Without success in skating, I feared it would be a horrible life – that I would end up in a factory somewhere. We had all been raised under the old Soviet system, but now times are different. If you’re smart enough and have a powerful will, you can get somewhere.”

“We were poor,” said Yagudin, “and something like eating out in restaurants, which anyone in America would take for granted, I never got to do. I didn’t have anything in my life, everything I’ve done is just basically me doing it and getting it for myself.”  Within months of his Salt Lake City victory, Yagudin’s absent father finally phoned.  After what had seemed a lifetime of waiting, Yagudin said softly about the call, “It would have meant a lot more to hear from him before I became Olympic champion.”

Plushenko and Yagudin spent their early youths as training partners, both coached by the famed Russian jump technician, Alexei Mishin. Mishin became an authority figure to the fatherless Yagudin, but between the two skaters there would only be rivalry, never friendship, particularly when Yagudin felt that Mishin favored Plushenko. Mishin’s coaching style was decidedly unorthodox: he often unflatteringly referred to the two finest thoroughbreds in his elite training stable as “garbage” (Yagudin) and “trash” (Plushenko). The harsh strategy worked for a while, but not forever. Thoroughbreds are a temperamental lot.

When Yagudin bolted Mishin’s training group and set out on his own, he had only one thing of value: a world title to his credit. He flew to the U.S. and went straight into the fur-clad embrace of the woman he calls “Big Mama”: the legendary Grande dame of Russian coaching, Tatiana Tarasova (who is also the well-known daughter of the father of modern Russian hockey, Anatoly Tarasov). Tarasova is adored by Russians, who honor her father, but begrudged by the Old Guard of Soviet skating. As her top skater, Yagudin soon was judged guilty by association.

Yagudin is far from the only top Russian skater living in the US. In a major exodus of talent, many of Russia’s best skaters live and train abroad, most in the U.S. Other former Soviet Olympic champions, like Ilya Kulik and Victor Petrenko, live near Yagudin, as does Olympic gold medalist Oksana Bayul, two-time Olympic ice dance champion Evgeny Platov, and dozens of other titled champions. Instead, it is Plushenko maintaining his residency in Russia that is becoming the exception. Plushenko, a diehard patriot, vows he will never leave. But this does not appear to have dampened Yagudin’s popular appeal at home: when a newspaper ran a “bride contest” for a dinner date with Yagudin, they were overwhelmed with 20,000 responses.

Yagudin’s stock with  the Powers That Be is another story altogether. The Russian Figure Skating Federation had banked, it seemed, on Plushenko. In a congratulatory meeting held for Olympians to be honored by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Yagudin’s invitation was somehow “lost in the mail” by the Skating Federation.

It was just the latest snub for Yagudin. But it was enough to make another Olympic champion – pairs skater Artur Dmitriev – take matters into his own hands and host a tribute show to Yagudin in his native St. Petersburg, on September 26 of last year. The Sport Federation’s leaders were invited, but did not show up. A huge gala ice showcase for Plushenko was scheduled two weeks after Dmitriev’s “Ice Olympus,” and the officials turned up en masse.

In September, just minutes before takeoff, Yagudin was settling into his seat at New York’s JFK airport. He had not skated on home ice, or for a home audience, in over three years. The most titled Russian skater in the world, he had not received a  single invitation from the Federation in all that time. “I’m worried about the show,” he said, speaking from his cell phone, “what if it is a disaster? What if nobody shows up? We haven’t had much time to prepare and advertise, and the budget is not huge. I can’t help but wonder if people will remember me, or even care enough to come.”

His worries were misplaced. Despite a lack of advertising, the arena was almost full to capacity. As the show progressed, Dmitriev presented a surprise: video clips of Yagudin’s Olympic performances. Fans wept.

A number of beloved and titled skaters performed at the Ice Olympus, including reigning Olympic pairs champions Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sihkaluridze, former two-time Olympic champion Ekaterina Gordeeva, widow of Sergei Grinkov, and their daughter Daria.

Yagudin performed three programs for the show, including his moody, biographical story of redemption, Overcome. Coach Tarasova – part sorceress, part trainer – had specifically created  this program in 2001, with the Olympic season in mind. “I thought the right thing to do was choreograph this program – Overcome – for him in the months before the most important competition in his life,” she said. “It is about how a person fails in life, and then rises, pulling himself up to go after his goal again, and finally reaches it.” It was art imitating life. (And, in the end, as Tarasova and Yagudin willed it, life imitated art. This month, Yagudin’s autobiography was released in Japan. The title: Overcome.)

At the end, Yagudin came out and skated a lively rendition of his famous Olympic short program, Winter. One minute into it, the roaring crowd was on its feet offering an enthusiastic standing ovation.

Tarasova then took the microphone. In a nod to the obvious absence of even a single high-level Russian sports manager, she said pointedly, “In reality, I’m glad that those who have only created barriers to our victories in the past are not in the arena with us today. Here are only those who supported us and had faith, and I’m very happy that I had a chance to see it with my own eyes.”

Worldwide, internet sites were abuzz with glowing reviews of the show, and with reports of an unlikely sighting in the audience: Evgeni Plushenko. Asked if he’d be attending his rival’s show, scheduled just two weeks later, Yagudin gave a tart reply, “You should know I don’t go to the arena to watch – I go only to skate.”

Rivalries Never Die

Plushenko’s close personal friend and manager, Ari Zakarian, said, “It bothers me that Yagudin has basically turned on his mentor, Alexei Mishin. [Zakarian, it must be noted, is also a former Mishin student.] He has made him into a vicious enemy, and maybe it’s just been posturing, but I think all great coaches deserve respect, whether it works out or not on a personal level. Some day, if he would come and say ‘thank you’ to him, it could really gain him a huge respect from a lot of people.”

Asked how Mishin feels now about Yagudin – post Olympics – Zakarian said, “He says Alexei is physically extremely strong, and has an extraordinary fighter personality. He is a person who simply cannot give up. He can endure pain and difficulties, yet thrive. But,” Zakarian added, “Mishin felt he was doing a good job with Yagudin when he was his coach. He knows that in the business of figure skating, clever as you may be, when you have two top guys in the same group, jealousies will arise. As soon as they get close in abilities, there is going to be a problem, and there was.

“If Alexei could heal that former working relationship, I think we could between us all figure out a successful business plan to do a professional competition circuit. Think of it! The crowds would love to see the rivalry continue and everybody would benefit. Either way, as enemies or friends, they benefit.”

Asked if he thinks his client Plushenko would also be interested, Zakarian smiled, “I don’t feel he would do it, I know he would.”

Plushenko, in fact made it clear: “I am beginning to understand the business of figure skating. If someone were to present the right situation after the [2006] Olympics, I would consider it. I believe Alexei and I competing again, against each other, could open up the pro market in a big way.”

Added Zakarian, “people want to see them together, to play off each other again. But to make it happen, the past would need to be put behind them.”

Strangely enough, it was not this rivalry, but a normally simple ice show, which landed Plushenko deep in professional hot water. He’d been scheduled to compete in a number of Grand Prix competitions this winter, but opted to cancel the appearances,  citing slow recovery from pneumonia, for which he had been hospitalized, and otitis from early last summer. Plushenko announced he would perform in some shows, but not in any competitions until almost December. Additionally, Plushenko’s knee had been causing severe pain, especially on his jump landings, and a decision was made to minimize his training, which sealed the decision.

But then Plushenko agreed to perform in an ice show in November, which happened to be in Prague on the same day as the Olympic-sanctioned event he’d withdrawn from. His reasoning was quite sound: performing in a show and competing against your toughest rivals are two completely different things. Serious jumps and technical elements are not required in show performances. Money was also a factor, since the ISU – skating’s governing body – had drastically cut skaters’ prize money for the season.

“When Irina Slutskaya won her Grand Prix event,” Zakarian said, “the prize money – after taxes, travel, and the Federation’s ‘cut,’ etc. – it’s ridiculous – she ended up with $7,000! The World Championship in Moscow is the big event this season, and better for Evgeni to save himself, stay uninjured, and be ready to win at the main event – not to risk injury in a Grand Prix competition.

“Besides, why go to a competition if you’re not prepared and not ready? Why disappoint yourself and your fans? What is there to gain? Our concern is not the ISU, our concerns are him.”

Unfortunately for Plushenko, the ISU became very concerned with him, firing off a letter to the skating community, reminding them that they held the decision-making power over who would be considered eligible for the Olympics. And if certain skaters opted to skip events while performing in shows, they would seriously jeopardize their opportunity to compete. The ISU didn’t name Plushenko by name, but they didn’t have to. Everyone had already seen the scandalous headlines. Perhaps most shocking was the reaction of Valentin Piseev, President of the Russian Figure Skating Federation and longtime Plushenko supporter: he distanced himself from Plushenko and his camp, warning them to take the threat seriously.

When, at the Prague ice show, Plushenko took a microphone, instead of the ice, to address his fans and let them know that, for “reasons beyond his control” he would not be able to perform, the crowd went wild. People screamed, some demanded their money back, and the scene turned ugly. The show went on; after all, many other top numbers were booked to skate. But Plushenko had to repeatedly return to calm his fans.

“I was devastated with the events in Prague, heartbroken,” Plushenko said. “I sat in the back room of the arena in tears, while 15,000 fans let their disappointment be known. It was a miscommunication that in the end – who was it good for? Nobody.

“This competitive world is live or die. I did not want to enter mid-season with programs that were ‘cold’ and unseen. We need to get feedback on them, to see how they are received. Also, I get constant requests from many countries to come and make a show, and I thought, here was a chance to debut the programs to a large audience, please my fans, and maybe make a little money in the process. What is wrong with that? Why I was forbidden to do this, and why they waited until the last hours to inform me, I still don’t really understand, and my lawyers have advised me to leave it to them.”

it’s late at night and Yagudin

has spent the last twelve hours on the ice, fine-tuning his Stars On Ice tour performances. The troupe has its debut before a live audience in just a few days. It’s not only the first public viewing of their creative “Imagination” show, it’s also being taped for a national television network broadcast.

Yagudin’s arms are sore. He’s been dangling from the arena ceiling. Never content to stand still, he has incorporated Cirque du Soleil-type acrobatic elements into his big number, called simply, Passion. In it, he takes show skating literally to new heights, as he flies, dangles, and maneuvers his body high above the unforgiving ice below – a long ribbon of fabric his only support.

It’s uncharted territory for him, for any skater for that matter. But Yagudin is not content with “just” doing two solo numbers, and five group numbers – he has to continually up the ante to stay in the game.

No one is twisting his arm to do this. His physical – and mental – contortions come from within. The demands are self-imposed, as he still strives to stay ahead of the pack, always in front of whatever – or whoever – he feels nipping at his blades.  RL