Friday, February 15, 2002
No contest
By TERRYJONES -- Edmonton Sun
SALT LAKE CITY -- Alexei Yagudin pulled a David Pelletier. He kissed the ice.
But no problem. No controversy. No contest.
The judges got it right this night.
The 6.0s the judges didn't give Jamie Sale and David Pelletier were there for the Russian. Four of them!
No skater in Olympic history has ever received more than two of the treasured perfect marks.
Yagudin won an uncontested, undisputed Olympic gold medal here last night with the most extensive and exceptional program ever skated in men's singles.
"I kissed the ice because I live here and I won the gold medal here," said Yagudin, who resides in Newington, Conn.
The judges gave him 5.9s across the board on the technical line and four 6.0s and the rest 5.9s on the artistic line.
The German, American, Romanian and Azerbajani gave him the perfect marks.
Yagudin, 21, became the first to win three world championships and an Olympics since Scott Hamilton and only the second to do that in more than 40 years.
Landing a quad-triple-double combination for openers, he followed with a quad-triple followed by six singles.
Defending world champion Evgeny Plushenko of Russia, who messed up his short program and went into this sitting fourth, came close to putting it all together in the long, close enough to put him securely on the podium.
You can't move from fourth to first in the long program unless the leader crashes and burns. And three-time world champion Yagudin wasn't going to do that with the podium set up for him when he skated.
So it ended up with Yagudin winning the gold and Plushenko the silver as a great many people predicted. The biggest surprise was young American Timothy Goebel winning the bronze. He landed three quads to do it, a first not only for the Olympics, it has yet to be accomplished at the world championships.
But this night belonged to Yagudin.
"Actually I began to dream of this four years ago when I went to Nagano. There, I finally realized I can do it."
2002 Games Figure Skating Coverage
