Epochs pass, governments fall, but Russians still win figure skating medals. And Evgeni Plushenko is a thorough Russian. Russians skate like they own the ice, and others skate like they're afraid of falling on it. The difference between the Olympic gold medalist and everybody else in the world was this simple: He was Russian, and they weren't.
The martial, cymbal-clashing Russian anthem boomed through the Palavela, just as it does at every Winter Games. Skaters from the former Soviet Union have now won five straight men's gold medals, and no one will challenge them in this sport any time soon, judging by Plushenko's leaping, dominant performance, skated to a hopped-up version of the theme from "The Godfather." To other countries, figure skating is a sport, but to Russians it is a matter of cultural identity.
"It's everything, everything," Plushenko said afterward when asked why his country does this every Olympics. "I have a great coach, I have also something inside me."
It's his supreme Russian-ness that makes Plushenko's victory particularly significant for his countrymen, and not just another piece of hardware. "Getting gold medals for Russia, that's what I do," he has said. Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, rival countries have been waiting for Russian skating to erode. But it hasn't. The question is, why not? When someone answers that one, they will have figured out what it takes to beat a Russian.
The Russian skating progression began in 1908, when Nikolai Panin-Kolomensky won the gold medal at the Olympics in London. It survived the 1917 revolution, when authorities discouraged it as too aristocratic. And it has been in full and unabated flourish since 1964, when Lyudmila Belousova and Oleg Protopopov won the Olympics pairs title in Innsbruck. Including that one, former Soviet Union skaters have won 12 consecutive pairs gold medals. They've won more than 75 gold medals overall in the world championships over the past 40 years.
Plushenko's gold proves that Russian skating has survived yet again. It has survived another government overthrow, and the devastating loss of state sponsorship. Most importantly, Plushenko proves that it has survived a mass post-communism exodus of Russian talent to other countries so they could live more comfortably.
Plushenko never left. In fact, he was reared in the heart of those hard times for Russian skating.
His first rink was a frozen outdoor pond in his hometown of Volgograd. Later, his mother took him to a local indoor rink, and asked him if he wanted to learn to figure skate. He stood at rinkside watching the other children, and said, "I like it very much."
At age 11, Plushenko was sent by his parents to St. Petersburg to train with the famed Alexei Mishin. His parents, who worked on the Siberian railroad, couldn't afford to move. At times, Plushenko was so poor he had to depend on Mishin for meal money.
As state funding dried up, the rinks became dilapidated, and skaters had to fend for themselves. Still, Plushenko and his coach stayed in St. Petersburg. "You know that Russia has had a lot of problems and difficulties," Plushenko said once in a Russian TV interview. "I want to say that all these difficulties are useful because they harden your character."
At one point, the rink where he trained was so run down that he needed to put on multiple sweaters, a hat, and gloves while he trained. The ice deteriorated, as it was never resurfaced. "It was extremely cold, unreal conditions to skate. Ice was awful. It wasn't refreshed for a long time."
By remaining under Mishin in St. Petersburg, Plushenko absorbed the pure Russian skating tradition, which is based in the best ballet in the world. Plushenko studied with a choreographer from the Mariinsky Ballet theater -- formerly the Kirov -- who saw such talent in him that she offered to train him as a dancer instead. Plushenko chose to remain with Mishin, but everything he does as a skater is intensely balletic, like all great Russian skaters.
But what's really at the root of Russian greatness is a fundamental belief that the creative part of skating, the expressionism, is not anti-athletic but in fact leads to greater technical perfection. While other skaters spin across the ice like spirographs, the Russian skater makes clean carved circles in the ice, perfect as a glasscutter.
"The high level of emotions is a friend of the technique component," Mishin once said.
Thanks to skating patriots like Mishin and Plushenko, Russia's program is no longer as poor as it was. In the last four years, the Russian government under Vladmir Putin has increased its funding of the sport by tenfold. The skaters now have government stipends, and all the free ice time they need. In St. Petersburg, skating is so popular that the rinks are overcrowded with aspiring children, who can be seen training even in the cloakrooms, corridors, and foyers.
Champions are replaced by other champions. And Plushenko has taken his place among them.
