Stojko Upstages With ‘All-Out Attack’

Alexei Urmanov pulled a groin muscle, Elvis Stojko pulled a quad and when Todd Eldredge couldn’t pull together a last-second scramble, the mantle of world supremacy in men’s figure skating changed hands Thursday.

The injury to Urmanov, the 1994 Olympic gold medalist, and a rally-killing sit-down by Eldredge, the 1996 world champion, thinned a star-glutted field that Stojko finally overwhelmed with eight triple jumps, one quadruple jump and a brawny, brawling long program he would later describe, quite accurately, as an “all-out attack.”

Stojko leaped from fourth place to first by outleaping everyone in the final group of five Thursday night at the World Figure Skating Championships, winning his third world title in four years.

Usually, that last group is six, but Urmanov, the Russian who led all 30 other skaters after Wednesday’s short program, pulled up lame during warmups and declined to skate.

That made it a two-man shootout, Stojko vs. Eldredge, Canada vs. the United States, and Stojko stepped to the ice first.

Skating to fantastical music from the movie “Dragon Heart,” Stojko slew a monster known as a “quadruple toe-triple toe combination”--seven rotations in the air, completed within two blinks of an eye--to raise the ante before his routine was a minute old.

Stojko added seven more triple jumps, all of them landed cleanly, to elicit a standing ovation from a Malley Center audience more easily impressed by acrobatic derring-do than artistic finesse.

Well before the end of his routine, Stojko had them in the aisles--fans, countrymen, even purportedly unbiased and objective journalists. For once, the nine judges saw it the same way as the crowd, awarding Stojko eight technical-merit scores of 5.9 and one of 6.0, from the Italian judge.

Yet Stojko was disappointed. “I have no idea what I need to do to get all 6.0s in technical merit,” he said.

His artistic presentation scores were good for Stojko--one 5.9, six 5.8s, two 5.6s--but not good enough to position him insurmountably ahead of Eldredge. Eldredge needed to complete eight triple jumps of his own, and maybe even a quad, a maneuver Eldredge has never tried in competition.

But there it was, in skating shorthand, Eldredge’s first scheduled element on the program description handed out to the media: “4T.”

Quadruple toe loop.

Once the music began, however, Eldredge passed on the attempt, going instead for a triple axel-triple toe combination. He made it, and five more triple jumps after it, skating cautiously but cleanly, until he singled a planned triple axel late in his program.

Suddenly, Eldredge was behind Stojko, one glitch to none, and needed to improvise, to toss in another triple jump in the final minute.

He tried one--a triple axel at 4:12, 18 seconds from maximum time--but couldn’t land it. And once he fell, the gold medal suspense was over.

“Obviously, I knew Elvis had skated great,” Eldredge said. “In order to leave it up to the judges, I knew I had to hit eight [triple jumps], and I needed one more.

“It was kind of a crazy takeoff, and I knew right away it wasn’t going to happen. I came out of it late. That’s why I fell.”

Eldredge received no marks of 5.9 and was outscored by Stojko, 8-1, on the judges’ ballots. Only the U.S. judge rated Eldredge ahead of Stojko.

Stojko’s quad was the fourth landed cleanly during Thursday’s competition. Zhengxin Guo of China handed two of them--and still finished 19th--and Konstantin Kostin of Latvia, who was 17th, accounted for the other. American Michael Weiss had planned to try one, but settled for a triple en route to seventh place.

But no quad was more valuable than Stojko’s. The men’s championship did not swing on those four swift revolutions, but they did help spin the medal in Stojko’s direction.

“I went out thinking everyone was going to go all out tonight and that I had to throw everything I had in,” Stojko said.

Except everyone didn’t go all out.

Urmanov, who also has a quad in his repertoire, was a scratch, unable to skate through a groin pull suffered during Wednesday’s short program--even after three pain-killing injections.

That, in the mind of Urmanov’s coach, Alexei Mishin, determined the outcome.

“It is my private opinion, but if Stojko and Urmanov do the same amount of elements, I prefer Urmanov,” Mishin said. “I think he had a chance to beat Stojko because, for example, in qualification, he for sure was the best. . . . He is unlimited in the technical elements.”

When Urmanov retired, Russia was left with only two skaters--bronze medalist Alexei Yagudin and sixth-place Ilia Kulik. To qualify three skaters for the 1998 Olympics, Russia needed three in the top 18, making the decision to pull Urmanov off the ice a costly one.

But not a difficult one, Mishin said.

“First of all, the concern is for the health of the athlete, not for points,” he said. “We are former Soviet Union coaches, but liberty brings with it liberty, if you know what I am saying. Before, we were rushing into the machine guns for the motherland. Now, we think about the health of the athlete.”