Oh ladies, you have captured Plushy's skating so beautifully! :plush31: A few of my favourite phrases from you all:
"I love Plushenko’s skating purely because his skating moves me in some way"
"Watching Plushy's best performances is like watching a Natural Wonder, it is easy to appreciate but hard to answer 'how and why'."
"Evgeni is able to give expression and form to all these different emotions and experiences, he has such a great range in his skating, because he has this range, all these different facets, inside him. To go out on a limb here, it's the size of his spirit. This is, perhaps, what I want to call his "connection to the truth"
"And then he started moving, and suddenly I was not tired anymore, and I didn't need to know anything about skating, or the jumps, or the scoring, or anything else, to know that...here was someone more special than anything I had ever seen."
As for me, I first saw him during the FS of the 2002 Olympics. Weirdly enough, it wasn't mesmerization at first sight. I saw Timothy Goebel, Plushy, then Yagudin. I was impressed with all three and remember being skeptical of Plushenko before his skate. Who was this blond kid with the long nose and a loud costume? But his program (Carmen) was nearly flawless and I found myself intrigued. However, I got distracted by Yagudin's more "typical" heartthrob looks and came away from the Olympics thinking I was a Yagudin fan. A year later, I was in China visiting relatives and skating was on TV. This beautiful sleek blond Russian glided onto the ice and I recognized him as the eye-catching kid from Salt Lake City. I pointed him out to my dad who commented, "wow, he's lethal like a stealth missile." And that was when it clicked. There was this aura about him. He hadn't even begun skating and you could feel his mood wash over every viewer. There was something magnetic about him - you wanted to watch him, you wanted to feel what he felt, and through him, you felt connected to something altogether bigger than either yourself, the rest of the audience or him. It's this fusion of truth, spontaneity, emotion and charisma that you've all mentioned. I feel that there's something elemental about Plushy's skating. When he takes the ice he IS the ice, but he is also a man and he is himself. He's not trying to dazzle with technique or artistry...he's a channel for truth - the truth about emotions, about the ice, about the human spirit and about Plushenko.