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Sochi Winter Olympic 2014
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15yo Russian prodigy Yulia Lipnitskaya becomes youngest Winter Olympics champion in history
Fifteen-year-old Russian Yulia Lipnitskaya has become the world’s youngest athlete to ever win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics after her splendid free skate in the team figure skating event.
She is six days younger than US figure skater Tara Lipinski was when she won a gold medal in Nagano in 1998.
Lipnitskaya's phenomenal performances in the short program and free skate in the figure skating team competition left Iceberg Skating Palace speechless. She received a standing ovation.
She has emerged as perhaps the biggest challenge to her rivals: Italian, Canadian, Japanese, and American female figure skaters.
In her spectacular debut at the Winter Olympics, she easily outskated far more experienced competitors including Carolina Kostner of Italy, for whom this is her third Olympics, and Japan's Mao Asada, who is competing in her second Games.
Although the Olympics is the first event of such scale for Yulia, she did not seem nervous. With no visible anxiety, she stood on the ice and performed as though she did it every day.
Her nearly inhuman flexibility, combined with brilliant rotation on her spins and deft soaring jumps, left the audience amazed and impressed the judges.
She showed the best result ever in ladies’ free skating at the Sunday event, scoring 141.51 points and earning a combined total of 214.41 under the ISU judging system. The current record holder is South Korean figure skater Kim Yuna, who was the 2010 Olympic champion in ladies' singles with 150.06 and 228.56 points, respectively.
Yulia said that in the so-called zone of "tears and kisses," where skaters await results, the festive atmosphere reigned after her performance.
"Maksim Trankov [figure skater] gave me a hug,” she said. “Evgeny Plushenko said that everybody should learn from me."
After her sensational free skate program to music from “Schindler’s List,” Yulia modestly told journalists that this was not her best performance.
“For me, this skate was not the best. We will work on mistakes so that on the individual championship there are no flaws,” she said. “It was annoying that I failed the last rotation,” she confessed. “And, yes, I could strengthen jumps. In the individual tournament, I set the highest goals.”
She will now fly back home to Moscow, where she trains, and return to Sochi in several days to compete for gold in the individual event.
Fifteen-year-old Russian Yulia Lipnitskaya has become the world’s youngest athlete to ever win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics after her splendid free skate in the team figure skating event.
She is six days younger than US figure skater Tara Lipinski was when she won a gold medal in Nagano in 1998.
Lipnitskaya's phenomenal performances in the short program and free skate in the figure skating team competition left Iceberg Skating Palace speechless. She received a standing ovation.
She has emerged as perhaps the biggest challenge to her rivals: Italian, Canadian, Japanese, and American female figure skaters.
In her spectacular debut at the Winter Olympics, she easily outskated far more experienced competitors including Carolina Kostner of Italy, for whom this is her third Olympics, and Japan's Mao Asada, who is competing in her second Games.
Although the Olympics is the first event of such scale for Yulia, she did not seem nervous. With no visible anxiety, she stood on the ice and performed as though she did it every day.
Her nearly inhuman flexibility, combined with brilliant rotation on her spins and deft soaring jumps, left the audience amazed and impressed the judges.
She showed the best result ever in ladies’ free skating at the Sunday event, scoring 141.51 points and earning a combined total of 214.41 under the ISU judging system. The current record holder is South Korean figure skater Kim Yuna, who was the 2010 Olympic champion in ladies' singles with 150.06 and 228.56 points, respectively.
Yulia said that in the so-called zone of "tears and kisses," where skaters await results, the festive atmosphere reigned after her performance.
"Maksim Trankov [figure skater] gave me a hug,” she said. “Evgeny Plushenko said that everybody should learn from me."
After her sensational free skate program to music from “Schindler’s List,” Yulia modestly told journalists that this was not her best performance.
“For me, this skate was not the best. We will work on mistakes so that on the individual championship there are no flaws,” she said. “It was annoying that I failed the last rotation,” she confessed. “And, yes, I could strengthen jumps. In the individual tournament, I set the highest goals.”
She will now fly back home to Moscow, where she trains, and return to Sochi in several days to compete for gold in the individual event.
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Even Putin Is On His Feet Cheering For Skating Prodigy Yulia Lipnitskaya
On Saturday, Yulia Lipnitskaya made everyone's jaws drop to the floor with her first Olympic performance. The 15-year-old wowed the world with an absolutely flawless routine, and on Sunday night, she did it again.
After her radiant performance, the entire arena was on its feet, including President Vladamir Putin:
And the ovation was well deserved. Lipnitskaya who received the highest score of the night, and gave Russia another 10 points toward its team score, effortlessly danced through her routine with a passion that was hard to miss:
BBC announcers couldn't stop complimenting her perfect technique:
But on top of technique, Lipnitskaya has an incredible presence for such a young girl:
It's only the beginning for Lipnitskaya. The 15-year-old prodigy has already helped Russia secure gold in the team event, and we wouldn't be surprised if she got another gold just for herself.
On Saturday, Yulia Lipnitskaya made everyone's jaws drop to the floor with her first Olympic performance. The 15-year-old wowed the world with an absolutely flawless routine, and on Sunday night, she did it again.
After her radiant performance, the entire arena was on its feet, including President Vladamir Putin:
And the ovation was well deserved. Lipnitskaya who received the highest score of the night, and gave Russia another 10 points toward its team score, effortlessly danced through her routine with a passion that was hard to miss:
BBC announcers couldn't stop complimenting her perfect technique:
But on top of technique, Lipnitskaya has an incredible presence for such a young girl:
It's only the beginning for Lipnitskaya. The 15-year-old prodigy has already helped Russia secure gold in the team event, and we wouldn't be surprised if she got another gold just for herself.
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<iframe class="vine-embed" src="https://vine.co/v/MW7qWeIQM5g/embed/simple" width="600" height="600" frameborder="0"></iframe><script async src="//platform.vine.co/static/scripts/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Still lifting our jaws off the floor after 15-year-old Yulia Lipnitskaya's performance.
Still lifting our jaws off the floor after 15-year-old Yulia Lipnitskaya's performance.
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Russia still a figure skating power under Evgeni Plushenko
SOCHI, Russia — His time was over. Evgeni Plushenko was a creaking, 31-year-old Lada of a figure skater with a slipping transmission and busted shocks who likely would have hung up his costume if the Winter Games weren’t here and if the Motherland didn’t need him. A teenager had beaten him at the national championships in January and Plushenko had conceded his spot on the Olympic team.
Not so fast, said the federation, which insisted on waiting until after the European championships to make its decision. When Maxim Kovtun, billed as the country’s next star, fell apart there, Plushenko got the nod. And on Sunday night, with Vladimir Putin watching from the stands, Father Russia helped provide his country with its first gold medal of these Games at the Iceberg Skating Palace.
It was fitting that it came in one of the Motherland’s two hallmark sports, and since the populace didn’t have patience to wait until the final day to see whether the men’s hockey team would win (it hasn’t since 1992), the most meaningful gold needed to come in the new team event, where the nation that once ruled the sport as the Soviet Union wanted to prove that Russia could do nicely on its own.
“Russia will fight to the end,” declared ice dancer Elena Ilinykh after her teammates had piled up 75 points, outdistancing Canada by 10 and the United States by 15. “Russia is the best. Russian figure skating is coming back. That’s the message we want to send to the world.”
The rumor, proffered on Saturday by L’Equipe, the French sporting daily, from an anonymous Russian coach, was that Russia and the US had made a deal to cut the Canadians out of two gold medals, with the Yanks helping the Russians win the team event. To anyone that knew a loop from a lutz, that was ludicrous.
The Russians may be favored to win just one gold medal in the four individual disciplines (in pairs) but they clearly have the best team across the board. Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov are the world pairs titlists. Julia Lipnitskaia is the European women’s champion. Ekaterina Bobrova and Dmitri Soloviev are global dance medalists.
And while Plushenko may have a renovated back and Tin Man knees, he’s still a three-time Olympic medalist who’d been on the big stage often enough that he wouldn’t blow a gasket. “I was actually quite worried — not for myself, but for the other guys,” he said before the finale. “They are all very strong skaters but some of them were skating for the first time [at the Olympics], so I was a little nervous for them.”
Not that Plushenko himself hadn’t felt butterflies before Thursday’s short program. “It was so difficult to skate, so difficult to calm down, with applause from here, from there, from behind, from everywhere,” he said that night. “It was like I was knocked down.”
The squeeze was off on Sunday. Russia had a 6-point lead on Canada and everybody else was using their backup guy, with the Canadians subbing Kevin Reynolds for three-time world champ Patrick Chan, the Japanese putting Tatsuki Machida in for short program victor Yuzuru Hanyu, and the Americans replacing bedeviled Jeremy Abbott with Jason Brown, who does no quadruple jumps.
So Plushenko figured that he could get away with his “B” game, which he did, by a whisker over Reynolds. Instead of a quadruple-triple-toe combination and another quad, he did just a solo. And after he tweaked his back going for a triple salchow, Plushenko decided to play it safe and doubled his loop and axel. Then he sat back and watched the 15-year-old Lipnitskaia, the youngest female skating gold medalist in 78 years, dispose of Gracie Gold to wrap things up. “I love being first,” proclaimed Plushenko, whose other gold medal came in 2006 in Turin.
It’s unlikely that he’ll collect another, that his back will hold up for four programs across nine days. But if Plushenko can just make the podium, he’ll surpass Sweden’s Gillis Grafstrom, who won three golds and a silver between 1920 and 1932, for the most Olympic medals by a figure skater. That doesn’t mean that he’ll call it a career, though. Pyeongchang and a fifth Games is only a quadrennium away. “I’ll just be 35 years old,” Plushenko mused. “No one has ever done it before. Why not? Perhaps I should try. I don’t know.”
Plushenko doesn’t need more hardware to secure his legacy as his country’s greatest male skater (co-cauldron lighter Irina Rodnina is the undisputed female). But he likely wouldn’t object to a statue.
There’s one of Nikolai Panin, Russia’s first skating gold medalist from the 1908 Summer Games, in the lobby of the Iceberg Skating Palace. Panin, who won in special figures, didn’t finish the singles event. Plushenko didn’t do figures. Between them is the ultimate Olympic champion.
SOCHI, Russia — His time was over. Evgeni Plushenko was a creaking, 31-year-old Lada of a figure skater with a slipping transmission and busted shocks who likely would have hung up his costume if the Winter Games weren’t here and if the Motherland didn’t need him. A teenager had beaten him at the national championships in January and Plushenko had conceded his spot on the Olympic team.
Not so fast, said the federation, which insisted on waiting until after the European championships to make its decision. When Maxim Kovtun, billed as the country’s next star, fell apart there, Plushenko got the nod. And on Sunday night, with Vladimir Putin watching from the stands, Father Russia helped provide his country with its first gold medal of these Games at the Iceberg Skating Palace.
It was fitting that it came in one of the Motherland’s two hallmark sports, and since the populace didn’t have patience to wait until the final day to see whether the men’s hockey team would win (it hasn’t since 1992), the most meaningful gold needed to come in the new team event, where the nation that once ruled the sport as the Soviet Union wanted to prove that Russia could do nicely on its own.
“Russia will fight to the end,” declared ice dancer Elena Ilinykh after her teammates had piled up 75 points, outdistancing Canada by 10 and the United States by 15. “Russia is the best. Russian figure skating is coming back. That’s the message we want to send to the world.”
The rumor, proffered on Saturday by L’Equipe, the French sporting daily, from an anonymous Russian coach, was that Russia and the US had made a deal to cut the Canadians out of two gold medals, with the Yanks helping the Russians win the team event. To anyone that knew a loop from a lutz, that was ludicrous.
The Russians may be favored to win just one gold medal in the four individual disciplines (in pairs) but they clearly have the best team across the board. Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov are the world pairs titlists. Julia Lipnitskaia is the European women’s champion. Ekaterina Bobrova and Dmitri Soloviev are global dance medalists.
And while Plushenko may have a renovated back and Tin Man knees, he’s still a three-time Olympic medalist who’d been on the big stage often enough that he wouldn’t blow a gasket. “I was actually quite worried — not for myself, but for the other guys,” he said before the finale. “They are all very strong skaters but some of them were skating for the first time [at the Olympics], so I was a little nervous for them.”
Not that Plushenko himself hadn’t felt butterflies before Thursday’s short program. “It was so difficult to skate, so difficult to calm down, with applause from here, from there, from behind, from everywhere,” he said that night. “It was like I was knocked down.”
The squeeze was off on Sunday. Russia had a 6-point lead on Canada and everybody else was using their backup guy, with the Canadians subbing Kevin Reynolds for three-time world champ Patrick Chan, the Japanese putting Tatsuki Machida in for short program victor Yuzuru Hanyu, and the Americans replacing bedeviled Jeremy Abbott with Jason Brown, who does no quadruple jumps.
So Plushenko figured that he could get away with his “B” game, which he did, by a whisker over Reynolds. Instead of a quadruple-triple-toe combination and another quad, he did just a solo. And after he tweaked his back going for a triple salchow, Plushenko decided to play it safe and doubled his loop and axel. Then he sat back and watched the 15-year-old Lipnitskaia, the youngest female skating gold medalist in 78 years, dispose of Gracie Gold to wrap things up. “I love being first,” proclaimed Plushenko, whose other gold medal came in 2006 in Turin.
It’s unlikely that he’ll collect another, that his back will hold up for four programs across nine days. But if Plushenko can just make the podium, he’ll surpass Sweden’s Gillis Grafstrom, who won three golds and a silver between 1920 and 1932, for the most Olympic medals by a figure skater. That doesn’t mean that he’ll call it a career, though. Pyeongchang and a fifth Games is only a quadrennium away. “I’ll just be 35 years old,” Plushenko mused. “No one has ever done it before. Why not? Perhaps I should try. I don’t know.”
Plushenko doesn’t need more hardware to secure his legacy as his country’s greatest male skater (co-cauldron lighter Irina Rodnina is the undisputed female). But he likely wouldn’t object to a statue.
There’s one of Nikolai Panin, Russia’s first skating gold medalist from the 1908 Summer Games, in the lobby of the Iceberg Skating Palace. Panin, who won in special figures, didn’t finish the singles event. Plushenko didn’t do figures. Between them is the ultimate Olympic champion.
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SOCHI, Russia — Russia reasserted itself as the world’s dominant figure skating power Sunday at the Sochi Olympics, and it did so on the shoulders of a 15-year-old sprite.
With impossibly light triple jumps, contortionist spins and the mettle of a seasoned champion, Julia Lipnitskaia led Russia to gold in the inaugural Olympic team event, scoring first-place marks for her free skate one night after earning top marks for her short program, as well.
The gold medal was Russia’s first of the Sochi Games. And President Vladimir Putin, sporting a bright red track suit, was first to congratulate the host nation’s newly minted heroes as they came off the ice, wrapping 31-year-old Evgeni Plushenko in a warm embrace, patting Lipnitskaia on the head and sharing words of thanks and advice to each team member who played a part.
The United States took bronze, managing to narrow its deficit to Canada ever so slightly on the final day of the competition. But after a rocky performance relegated the Americans to fifth at the outset, the U.S. could mathematically do no better than third Sunday despite terrific performances by 18-year-old Gracie Gold, whose free skate was second only to Lipnitskaia’s, and world dance champions Meryl Davis and Charlie White, who were peerless.
The Sochi Games marked the debut of figure skating’s team event, created to maximize the strong international TV ratings for the sport.
Under the format, each of the 10 countries that qualified chose one man, one woman, one pair and one dance team to perform short programs, with point values awarded for each placement. The five highest-scoring countries advanced to the medal round, in which they performed free skates in the four disciplines, with substitute skaters permitted in any of them.
Russia took a commanding early lead, winning two of the four short programs (women’s and pairs), and entered the final day of competition with 47 points to Canada’s 41 and the United States’ 34. That was a staggering amount of ground for the U.S. to make up in Sunday’s three free skates — men’s, women’s and ice dance — given that the biggest possible point differential in a single event was four.
Up first for the U.S. was 19-year-old Jason Brown, who had started the morning awestruck over sharing the practice rink with Plushenko, the Russian icon he had watched on TV at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games.
With impossibly light triple jumps, contortionist spins and the mettle of a seasoned champion, Julia Lipnitskaia led Russia to gold in the inaugural Olympic team event, scoring first-place marks for her free skate one night after earning top marks for her short program, as well.
The gold medal was Russia’s first of the Sochi Games. And President Vladimir Putin, sporting a bright red track suit, was first to congratulate the host nation’s newly minted heroes as they came off the ice, wrapping 31-year-old Evgeni Plushenko in a warm embrace, patting Lipnitskaia on the head and sharing words of thanks and advice to each team member who played a part.
The United States took bronze, managing to narrow its deficit to Canada ever so slightly on the final day of the competition. But after a rocky performance relegated the Americans to fifth at the outset, the U.S. could mathematically do no better than third Sunday despite terrific performances by 18-year-old Gracie Gold, whose free skate was second only to Lipnitskaia’s, and world dance champions Meryl Davis and Charlie White, who were peerless.
The Sochi Games marked the debut of figure skating’s team event, created to maximize the strong international TV ratings for the sport.
Under the format, each of the 10 countries that qualified chose one man, one woman, one pair and one dance team to perform short programs, with point values awarded for each placement. The five highest-scoring countries advanced to the medal round, in which they performed free skates in the four disciplines, with substitute skaters permitted in any of them.
Russia took a commanding early lead, winning two of the four short programs (women’s and pairs), and entered the final day of competition with 47 points to Canada’s 41 and the United States’ 34. That was a staggering amount of ground for the U.S. to make up in Sunday’s three free skates — men’s, women’s and ice dance — given that the biggest possible point differential in a single event was four.
Up first for the U.S. was 19-year-old Jason Brown, who had started the morning awestruck over sharing the practice rink with Plushenko, the Russian icon he had watched on TV at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games.
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As expected, all the focus was on the ‘Queen of Figure Skating’ Kim Yu-na. The figure skater, who won Korea’s first-ever medal in figure skating at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games and won it in style with a gold medal and a world record, said that she would do her best to defend her Olympic title.
“This will be my second Olympics and the last competition of my career before I retire. I will enjoy every moment of these games more than ever,” said the champion during her press conference. “My new program requires more endurance and physical strength due to its faster tempo, so I will prepare to perfection.”
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they are all nice. you can support korea and japan in figure skating, and i will support russia. this time.
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Silver medalist Jan Blokhuijsen of the Netherlands, gold medalist Sven Kramer of the Netherlands and bronze medalist Jorrit Bergsma of the Netherlands during the medal ceremony for the Men's 5000m Speed Skating on day 2 of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics at Medals Plaza on February 9, 2014 in Sochi, Russia.
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Bronze medalists Gracie Gold, Ashley Wagner, Jeremy Abbott, Jason Brown, Maria Castelli, Simon Shnapir, Mery Davis and Charlie White of the United States during the medal ceremony for the Team Figure Skating Overall on day 3 of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics at Medals Plaza in the Olympic Park on February 10, 2014 in Sochi, Russia.
Silver medalists Kaetlyn Osmond, Patrick Chan, Kevin Reynolds, Meagan Duhamel, Eric Radford, Kirsten Moore-Towers, Dylan Moscovitch, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir of Canada celebrate during the medal ceremony for the Team Figure Skating Overall on day 3 of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics at Medals Plaza in the Olympic Park on February 10, 2014 in Sochi, Russia.
Gold medalists Yulia Lipnitskaya, Evgeny Plyushchenko, Ksenia Stolbova, Fedor Klimov, Tatiana Volosozhar, Maxim Trankov, Ekaterina Bobrova, Dmitri Soloviev, Elena Ilinykh and Nikita Katsalapov of Russiacelebrate during the medal ceremony for the Team Figure Skating Overall on day 3 of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics at Medals Plaza in the Olympic Park on February 10, 2014 in Sochi, Russia.
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