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[dustman]

http://www.smdailyjournal.com/article_p ... in+History

Seven years ago: Russia's Evgeni Plushenko beat world champion Stephane Lambiel of Switzerland by 27.12 points to win the gold medal in men's figure skating at the Winter Games in Turin, Italy. 　

[Gabry]

What a night it was at the Palavela!! He was amazing, everybody in the crowd were on their feet applauding Evgeni!! I'm immensely proud he claimed his Olympic Gold Medal in my hometown Torino!!! I love you, Plushy<3<3<3

[cekoni]

I'm a bit late to celebrate Evgeni's gold medal anniversary, but I've found two articles about his victory that were published on Italian newspaper La Repubblica in 2006 and I've translated them because I liked them very much

EVGENI'S MAGICAL BLADES – EVERYBODY FREEZE, THE TSAR DANCES TONIGHT
TURIN- “I was born under the zodiac sign of Scorpio, like Picasso, Voltaire, Bill Gates, Alexander Borodin and Marie Antoinette”, Evgeni often says. He was only four yeas old when his mother made him put his skates on, and took him to the patinoire in Volgograd. He was one year older when USSR broke up and become Russia. And he was eleven when the ice rink in Volgograd was crushed. But he already showed wonderful qualities withhis skates: he danced like an angel, so he was sent to train in Saint Petersburg, at the most important and exacting ice skating school in the world. There, his technical feats were tamed and driven to make him an outstanding dancer of ice.
But all this work doesn't have any essence if it doesn't become power and supremacy at the Olympic Games. He has to show that the rough gemstone has become a brilliant diamond, that the talented skater has become the number one.
Because the wonderful Evgeni Plushenko will make his blades shining of golden glances this evening more than ever, when dancing his free program of figure skating to Vivaldi's “Four Seasons”. Since he has never won at the Olympics: his distress, his limit. Plushenko would gladly exchange his three gold medals at the Worlds, his five ones at the Europeans and his seven ones at the Russian Championships with that medal that has the value of an Oscar and represents eternal Olympic glory.
He was twenty, in Salt Lake City in 2002, when he was defeated by the greatest skater ever, his fellow countryman Alexei Yagudin, who gained four perfect 6.0 - the maximum score – at the end of his wonderful, unrepeatable free program: no other man had ever received more than one 6.0 in the whole history of the Olympic Games. It's an indelible reminder for proud Plushenko: today for him there is nothing apart of measuring his value against Yagudin's absolute one, and shaping the legend of figure skating again.
Freud's theories are behind all this: the skater aims to gain new records of technical difficulties and artistic imagination. But his muscles aren't enough. It's the head that takes the body over its limits, that jumps with prowess and resolution, that performs amazing spins and shows a flexibility that astonishes the audience. Yagudin held these qualities: he was always new and different. Will Plushenko be able to do this, too? This evening his rival won't be Stèphane Lambiel from Switzerland, or American Weir or Brian Joubert from France: he already destroyed them on Valentine's night during the short program. Not only on the psychological side. With an abyssal score advantage. No: he will fight against the shadow of Yagudin, his genial rival who had to withdraw because of an injury, just after Salt Lake City, at the age of 22. Tragedy and myth. Yagudin made music live and gave the audience the emotions he felt on ice. Plushenko wants to overcome his trails. He wants to astonish with his intrepid stunts that need surgical accuracy and pretend to appear easy.
Skaters are capricious as classical dancers: they undergo similar training, sacrifices and eternal pursuit of technical and stylistic perfection. They live on rivality and comparison, they often make it become illness, sometimes the illness degenerates in psychosis.
Plushenko's psychosis is to surpass Yagudin. Yagudin's one was not to be surpassed by anyone. A challenge within the challenge will lead Plushenko's performance. The Americans, who always turn ice skating competitive tension into eternal challenges, have already passed “The King of Ice” and are expecting an outstanding performance to be broadcast worldwide. Ice skating has the highest television audience and the venues are always sold out. In Turin it has been “full” for months.
In the matter of judges, the other day they were quite generous – but Plushenko skated flawless and
nearly achieved perfection with his touching version of Puccini's Tosca arranged by violinist Edvin Marton.
His coach Alexei Mishin avoided the usual comparison with Nurejev, and we are grateful to him; he says that Plushenko's greatness in figure skating can be compared with Shakespeare's one in literature. Judges gave him 90.66, Evgeni's new personal best (his previous pb was 87.20, that he got at Cup of Russia last year). No one ever got a such a huge score in the short program, since the judging system has changed (four of five were higher than 8). If this is the premise, we could easy imagine the level of his free program: his interpretation arouses such intense emotions that really move the audience, and he can astonish people with his daring stunts, like his iconic combo 4-3-2 that he performed in competition in 1999 as the first skater in history.

16/02/06, Original Italian article by Leonardo Coen
http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2006/02/16/pattini-magici-di-evgeni-fermi-tutti.html

IN A FRENZY FOR PLUSHENKO'S ART
TURIN- On the ice rink of this beautiful Palavela where it is difficult to understand the border between architecture and engineering, even skater Evgeni Plushenko's exhibition is quite difficult to position: is it sport or art? It starts at a quarter past ten in a vibrating night and it ends four minutes and thirty-five seconds after: firm, fastest, perfect jumps that beautifully frame his unforgettable and charismatic gold medal. A medal he gained through a climax of beauty and wonder: our wonder, audience and witnesses of a world record, 258.33, the highest score ever since the new (and more complex) judging system has been introduced – twelwe judges, nine of whom are randomly drew every time, to avoid any cheats. The strong and popular soundrack of “The Godfather”, little by little modified and transfigured to allow the original choreography studied wit coach Mishin; Edvin Marton's mighty violin, Plushenko's ballet dancer moves that perfectly fit in with the notes and the overwhelming rhythm. Evgeni skates lightly and flowingly. Dressed in black, he who is blonde and pale: but with a little five o'clock shadow. Eyes like the sea, shades of rhinestones on his chest; one half of his costume was as dark as night, the other one contrasted it with its transparent squares and a red neckline, red as the fire of passion and emotion.
He ends his free program and gets a never-ending standing ovation, Palavela explodes, everything under the sun flew down from the stands, a deluge of flowers, thousands of flashes glowed from the terraces, he crosses himself, greets the audience, hesitates a bit on the ice to emerge again from competitive trance and come back as a man among men, after being the god of ice, the tsar of blades, for those longest four minutes and a half. He won, and then it's just wait: Stèphane Lambiel from Switzerland, who slips and wastes any illusion, if he still had one, and he has to content himself with the silver. American Johnny Weir, very good and very gay, who wasn't appreciated by judges as he deserved; Canadian Jeffrey Buttle, who got an unhoped-for bronze, in spite of a standard performance. Brian Joubert from France, with his garish costume and a brassy necklace with pendants: he makes mistakes, again and again, and gets lost at the sixth place: he started with the certainty of beating Evgeni. Daisuke Takahashi from Japan, with his sleeves covered by a light purple veil that wraps his shoulders; this charm is not enough to put him on the podium: he falls down at the first jump and darkness falls (is that possible that the judges were down on Weir and Takahashi's gay-oriented prettiness?) They all were pointlessly good, even though after the defeat Weir said he skated badly because he arrived late to Palavela. “The bus schedule has been changed and I wasn't aware of it. I had a short time to get ready and it weighed against my performance.” They were all good, but less, much less than Evgeni: he was enigmatic, meticolous and capable of conveying magical emotions. He was able to make daring jumps look as they were easy, and he seemed to perform them with no effort. He didn't dream about a flying zebra, as his rival Lambiel says. Dressed in a zebra-print, blue-sleeved costume (symbol of the sky), he entered the ice rink soon after Plushenko, but he fell down, unable to land on deep and sliding edges as Plushenko's ones. Maybe his knee betrayed him, after a triple Lutz- double Toeloop combo, very difficult toe jumps. No, it is Evgeni the one who flies on ice, who flies over his blades' trails, who attaches the jumps with prowess and determination, who rules the law of gravitation and coreography: figure skaters do not chase records, they don't break them because they don't have to improve times. They can just try more spectacular jumps. Closer jumps. The more jumps you can blast away, the more you are sure to win. Plushenko started with a quadruple Toeloop plus a triple Toeloop, a toe jump “that takes off and lands on the same backward outside edge”, as specialists say, and all this happened after just 18 seconds of competition, while the others waited about half a minute to face their first difficulties. It's as though a boxer would knock his rival out right away, at the first round.
Then the first triple Axel come, another uppercut of power, energy and acceleration; Plushenko shows his skill in multidirectional skating and makes you forget that he's wearing a pair of ice skates. His artistry in changing his front foot, in twisting and twirling around like a spinning top that stuns your sight; at times we had the percepton that the ice rink was small and Evgeni was big.
High-speed pirouettes, and those jumps always faster, always more thrilling. Never a wavering. Quite the contrary. He even displayed an unscrupoluos self-confidence – that's why he chose the music “The Godfather” instead of the more affected Vivaldi's “Four Seasons”, as it was supposed two days ago. He showed the attitude of lord and godfather who rules ice and the balance that ice denies. He is the lord and the godfather of synchrony: in his gestures, in his steps, in his moves that were never worthless. The comeback to joy and fun that Goethe, Klopstock and Lessing depicted in describing skaters' evolutions on frozen lakes in Germany and The Netherlands. Well, this is what happened yesterday night in Gae Aulenti's Palavela.

17/02/06, Original Italian article by Leonardo Coen
http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2006/02/17/in-delirio-per-arte-di-plushenko.html

hope you'll like them

[cekoni]

I'm a bit late to celebrate Evgeni's gold medal anniversary, but I've found two articles about his victory that were published on Italian newspaper La Repubblica in 2006 and I've translated them because I liked them very much
....

hope you'll like them

Grazzie dear

[lovplush]

Thank you Holly very much

I like the second one but do not agree with the comments on the jumps. I like the description about Plushy's artistry side though. Not so much at the first one though

[lala630312]

thank you Holly!!!

[Holly]

you're welcome, girls

I like the second one but do not agree with the comments on the jumps. I like the description about Plushy's artistry side though. Not so much at the first one though

I agree with you, some comments sound quite sharp here and there (actually, I didn't like the journalist's comments about the other skaters because I found them a little bit "superficial" in some points) but I loved Zhenya's portrait in the first article (before the Oly I didn't know him and I liked that epic-tale style in describing him and his challenges with Alexei Yagudin), and the description of the atmosphere on that night in the second one

[lovplush]

you're welcome, girls

I like the second one but do not agree with the comments on the jumps. I like the description about Plushy's artistry side though. Not so much at the first one though

I agree with you, some comments sound quite sharp here and there (actually, I didn't like the journalist's comments about the other skaters because I found them a little bit "superficial" in some points) but I loved Zhenya's portrait in the first article (before the Oly I didn't know him and I liked that epic-tale style in describing him and his challenges with Alexei Yagudin), and the description of the atmosphere on that night in the second one

Actually I do not like his portrait of Zhenya in the first article. Yes, Yagudin won 2002 Olympics, but Plushy at that time was not a lesser skater! So the tune of the whole article turns me down. To be honest, these two articles sounds like people following FSU or GS, so Yagudin is the greatest, but 2006 Plushy is untouchable because he can jump. The part I like very much is when he describe the effect of Plushy's skate cast onto the audience. But this is my personal opinion. So do not get mad at me

[wyldkard]

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[wyldkard]

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