Eldredge Wins Gold, Galindo Earns Bronze

Todd Eldredge, a fisherman’s son, could not pursue the family business because of seasickness. He remained on the water, but it was the frozen kind as he chased an elusive goal from ice rinks in Pennsylvania to Colorado to California to Michigan.

On Thursday night, before a capacity crowd in the Edmonton Arena, he finally achieved it, winning the men’s title in figure skating’s world championships. Another American who knows something about persistence, Rudy Galindo, finished third.

In between was Russia’s Ilya Kulik, a dynamic skater who came within one triple jump of winning the world championship in only his second attempt. At 18, he is younger than Eldredge by six years and Galindo by eight and probably represents the future of men’s figure skating as the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, approach.

But on this night, the focus was on the moment. No one enjoyed it more than the many flag-waving U.S. fans as they watched two American men mount the medals podium since the first- and second-place finishes by Scott Hamilton and David Santee in 1981. Eldredge, of South Chatham, Mass., is the first U.S. champion since Brian Boitano in 1988.

Eldredge and Galindo did not win their medals by default. The local hero, two-time defending champion Elvis Stojko of Canada, called his performance earlier in the evening the best of his life. It earned him scores of 5.9 on a 6.0 scale from five of the nine judges, a two-minute standing ovation and so many bouquets that it took 12 flower girls to clear them from the ice.

Then Stojko sat back and watched two men, Eldredge and Kulik, outskate him in the 4 1/2-minute long program, which counts toward two-thirds of the final score. Stojko, in seventh place after Wednesday’s short program, improved only to fourth.

“This was the finest, the toughest, the greatest,” said Doug Leigh, Stojko’s coach, of the competition. “It was quality, total quality.”

In many other years, Galindo would have been the winner. But that would have been too much of a made-for-TV movie ending. Exhausted by a career in which two coaches and a brother have died of AIDS-related illnesses, he quit after an eighth-place finish in last year’s national championships. But, supported by his coach/sister, he came back this year to win the U.S. title with a rousing performance in front of his hometown fans in San Jose.

He did not have the same energy here. But he had something else he has lacked over the years, consistency. He was fourth in the short program and fourth in the long program, good enough for third overall.

But while Galindo was steady, Eldredge and Kulik were spectacular. Each landed eight triple jumps, including two triple axels. The difference was that Eldredge did two triple jump combinations, Kulik one. Eldredge won first-place votes from five judges, Kulik three. The other favored Stojko.

It has been a long trip to the top of the podium for Eldredge, who has followed his longtime coach, Richard Callaghan, from rinks in Philadelphia to Colorado Springs to San Diego to Detroit.

Eldredge won national championships in 1990 and ’91 before illness and injury set him back. Just when he thought he was all the way back, winning his third national championship last year and finishing second in the world, he took a silver medal to Galindo’s gold in San Jose.

Acknowledging that gave him inspiration to train harder for this competition, he turned to the bronze medalist and said, “Thanks, Rudy.”