Issue No. 612
Sports
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14 - 20 November 2002 Issue No. 612 Sports |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Skate of success
EVENGY Plushenko won the Nations Cup title Sunday in Germany, skating to a free programme that paid tribute to Russian history.
Like other sensational skates in years past, Plushenko had little trouble in winning the Nations Cup title in Gelsenkirchen for the fourth straight year. Russian compatriot Alexander Abt came in second and Li Chengjiang of China was third.
Michael Weiss of the United States, the former two- time world bronze medalist, was fourth. Weiss moved up from seventh following the short programme despite missing an attempt at a quad lutz jump.
Plushenko was competing in his first Grand Prix event of a season that will culminate with the World Championships in Washington in March.
This was the third Grand Prix event using an interim scoring system. The changes were introduced after the pairs scandal at the Salt Lake City Olympics. At this event, nine judges were chosen randomly before the competition from a panel of 12. No one -- not even the judges -- knows which votes count.
Plushenko -- already a star -- is intent on improving his skating artistry, and has been assisted by Kyrill Simonov, a star of the Kirov Ballet of St Petersburg, Russia. He skated to "St Petersburg 300", music written for the 300th anniversary of the city in 2003.
"I want to give a present to St Petersburg," he said.
Plushenko performed a programme that featured a quadruple toe loop jump and eight triples. He had a small mistake on another quad toe loop and did not show a quad salchow that he had been trying in practice.
"It is not ready yet," he said. "In Russia I have also done a quad lutz and quad flip."
His marks of 5.6 to 5.9 for technical merit and 5.7 to 5.9 for presentation gave him all firsts in the current judging system.
Plushenko's major rival, Alexei Yagudin, is sidelined with a hip injury. Yagudin beat Plushenko for the Olympic gold medal and the two have been rivals for the past four years at the European and world championships.
Abt did a quad-triple combination in his programme to "Bolero". He was second also at Skate America.
"I now have two second places in my scoring events and I think that will qualify me for the Grand Prix final," Abt said. The Grand Prix final is in St Petersburg at the beginning of March, three weeks before the World Championships.
In the other events, Japan's Yoshie Onda nearly landed a triple axel Saturday in winning the women's event. She came down on one foot but the referee ruled that Onda did not complete a full 3 1/2 rotations in the air.
Two weeks ago two other women became the first to land it after a lapse of 10 years. Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo had no problem winning in the pairs using last year's routine to the opera "Turandot" by Puccini. They were third in the disputed pairs event in Salt Lake City, where two pairs were awarded gold medals. They later went on to the world title in the absence of the two other pairs.
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