No quad for Evan, just gold
No quad. Just a gold medal.
Naperville's Evan Lysacek scored 167.3 points in the men's figure skating free program Thursday night, overtaking defending champion Evgeni Plushenko for the gold medal.
Lysasek's total, including the short program, was 257.67. Plushenko, who started the night with a .55 lead over Lysacek, totalled 256.36. Daisuke Takahashi of Japan took home the the bronze with 247.23.
"I feel great about the performance," Lsyacek said before the competition had finished. "The whole season has sort of been building towards that, and I've been waiting for that clean skate the whole season. So to finally get it at the most important moment was pretty special."
Lysacek, fourth at the 2006 Torino Olympics, was clean all the way through. He knew he nailed it, pumping his fist even as he was completing his program with a change-foot combination spin.
The Pacific Coliseum crowd of 14,000 erupted in a standing ovation.
"It was definitely my best," he said. "That's what I wanted to do."
The world champion put himself in position for the win with a personal best 90.30 in Tuesday's short program.
He said before the competition he didn't plan to attempt a quadruple jump, having aggravated the part of his left foot where he suffered a stress fracture in 2009, however the pride of the DuPage Figure Skating Club didn't shut the door on the quad saying, 'if I really feel it in the heat of the moment I have been doing them every once in a while in practice and know that I can do it.
"So if I feel liike it's what I want to throw in and risk it, that option is definitely open."
No need and no temptation.
"No, especially because practice this morning my foot was really bothering me, " he said. "It was like a tough day because I wasn't sure how I was going to feel when I got here, but my coach (Frank Carroll) was by my side the whole day and telling me exactly what to think.
"I was really nervous but about two hours before the competition I started to think like 'What am I nervous for? I just have to do what I do every day,'"
His plan was to flawlessly execute. No quad needed.
"If it was a jumping compertition, they'd give us 10 seconds to run and do your best jump," he said. "But it's a four-minute and 30-second program and it's about sustaining that level of skating, excitement, endurance from start to finish. That's kind of what I've been working on every day."
Johnny Weir finished sixth and Jeremy Abbott was ninth.