Lords of the Rink

NAGANO, Japan —  These American-Canadian men’s figure skating rivalries that pop up at the Olympics every decade or so tend to be defined by the skaters’ first names.

In 1988, there was the “Battle of the Brians”--Brian Boitano edging Brian Orser in a near-dead heat for the gold medal.

In 1998, there is Elvis . . . and there is Todd.

Yes, you might say they are aptly named, even if Elvis Stojko happens to be the one from Newmarket, Ontario, and Todd Eldredge is the one who trains in Detroit.

Compare the personalities, contrast the skating styles.

Elvis is Las Vegas, with a bit of the pre-Elvis-Presley- enters-the-Army hip-gyrating rebelliousness sprinkled around the rough edges. He is splashy and showy and grandiose and, his critics charge, bombastic and tacky and as subtle as a Charo lounge act.

Todd is, well, Todd. Plain-wrap. Vanilla. Hold the mustard, hold the relish. Technically precise and easy on the eye, his performances please audiences, but rarely inspire the spasms of rapture Stojko elicits with one of his neon-bursting quadruple-toe loop, triple-toe loop combinations.

Side by side, their differences were never better illustrated than in the interview room at the 1997 world championships in Lausanne, Switzerland, where Stojko had just dethroned Eldredge for the men’s title.

Stojko dominated the question-and-answer session, waxing on at one point for several minutes about the movie “Dragonheart,” outlining in elaborate detail the story line of a knight, a dragon and a code of honor.

Heads began to droop, pens ceased to write, but Stojko rambled on and on, passionately recounting how the film had struck an inner chord, how it had moved him, how the soundtrack music wound up accompanying him to his third world championship in four years.

“When I saw the movie and heard the music,” Stojko concluded, “I said, ‘This is me!’ Do it with honor and passion!”

At which point Stojko finally paused, possibly to catch his breath.

Eldredge looked out at the crowd and, with a bemused grin, broke his long silence.

“Two thumbs up!” Eldredge quipped, and the room broke up in laughter.

Theirs is not a rivalry in the same sense as Boitano and Orser, who were close friends and clear-cut favorites to joust for the gold in 1988. Eldredge and Stojko are linked, primarily, by the polar opposites they represent on the ice and the flaws they continually overcome to retain their hold on every men’s world figure skating championship since 1994.

Russians Ilia Kulik and Alexei Yagudin are the preeminent stylists in the men’s field at Nagano, and you will hear arguments here of how the stiff and stocky Stojko is no artistic match for the Russians, how Eldredge lacks the jumping bravado to stay with the Russians.

Similar arguments have been made at past world championships, but here is the list of the last four winners:

1994: Stojko.

1995: Stojko.

1996: Eldredge.

1997: Stojko, with Eldredge the runner-up.

They have won in spite of their shortcomings, but they have never completely silenced their critics, who continually push them onto a yeah-let’s-see-him-do-it-again precipice.

In January, Eldredge won his fifth U.S. championship, which is one more than each of Boitano and Scott Hamilton, ranking him behind only Dick Button and Roger Turner, who each won seven.

Yet, for these Olympics, Eldredge is overhauling both of the programs that got him here. He is scrapping his two-year-old short program from the music on down, substituting music from “Les Miserables” for “Walk on the Wild Side,” which always seemed too ironic a selection for Eldredge.

Basically, judges were getting bored with “Walk on the Wild Side,” Eldredge and his coach, Richard Callaghan, acknowledged after discussing the program with international judges.

As for the long program, fans at last month’s nationals suggested a change might be in order. Eldredge’s fifth title was far from a crowd-pleaser; most of the audience at the CoreStates Center in Philadelphia preferred the more dynamic long program of runner-up Michael Weiss, who tried an unprecedented quadruple lutz, just two-footing the landing.

There were boos and hisses in the arena after the final standings showed Weiss second behind Eldredge.

Eldredge’s response: Maybe the fans had a point.

“I watched a lot of tapes from nationals,” Eldredge says, “and I didn’t like a lot of things. The footwork and the choreography through the whole thing, I was really happy with. It was up and maybe beyond the level of last year. But some of the program was suffering. The crowd wasn’t responding emotionally to it.

“All the different things between the jumps [were lacking]. It didn’t have the excitement level it should have. This new program highlights the jumps more.”

The same weekend, Stojko was winning his fourth Canadian championship with a long program that garnered six perfect scores of 6.0--four for technical merit, two for presentation.

Good enough for Canada, but how about the world? In his most recent international competition, last December’s Champion Series Final in Munich, Stojko lost to Kulik, leaving him open, again, to charges that he wasn’t graceful enough, wasn’t artful enough to win an Olympic gold medal.

“I’ve got a lot of feedback on that,” Stojko said in Munich, “and I’m listening. I think you’ll see I’m a little more artistic now. I do listen to what people say, but I also have to be who I am. I can’t become someone else. My skating reflects me.”

For better and for worse.

A martial arts expert, Stojko has skated in kung fu outfits, punctuating his program, sometimes clumsily, with karate jabs and kicks.

A dirt-bike enthusiast, Stojko has also skated in black leather, hurtling himself around the ice as if the rink were a motocross track.

It is a decidedly macho approach to figure skating, which has generally sat better with the average Joe in the stands than the purists sniffing and clucking in the media room.

“Everybody is always talking about getting in touch with your feminine side, about being sensitive and soft,” Stojko says. “But I prefer to get in touch with my masculine side.

“Skating can be done in a masculine way. I’m a man. I skate masculine. You can be sensitive and powerful, that’s the way I look at it.”

Stojko has been at the forefront of the recent rush-to-quad movement in men’s figure skating. Somewhat simplistically, the maneuver has come to be seen as a measure of a skater’s courage--or lack thereof if he doesn’t attempt the quad.

Eldredge has felt the sting of such innuendo, which may have contributed to him finally abandoning his no-quad stand at the last month’s nationals.

Eldredge and Callaghan long have argued that championships are won and lost on a skater’s “total package,” not one spectacular four-spin vault above the ice, but Eldredge broke down and attempted a quadruple toe loop during his long program in Philadelphia.

He landed it sitting down.

Afterward, Eldredge seemed pleased with himself and proud of the attempt, joking that now that he had gotten the quad out of the way, reporters can stop asking, “When are you going to try one?”

Callaghan, however, was not amused.

“I still believe the total program is going to make it,” Callaghan said. “If he starts focusing on this one jump because everyone’s asking him about it, is he going to lose his focus on the rest of the program?”

Eldredge says he has a “Plan A and a Plan B” for Nagano--one long program with a quad, one without--and will pull out one or the other, depending on the circumstances.

“It’s an ‘if’ thing,” Eldredge says of the quad. “Obviously, it’s going to depend on how everybody’s skating and how everybody’s doing, to see if I need it.”

Stojko will be doing the quad, rest assured.

“I do it because I can,” Stojko has said. “It’s that thing about pushing the envelope. I’m always looking for the next thing.”

Asked about the Stojko-Eldredge rivalry and/or clash of styles, Eldredge is typically polite and nonjudgmental in his response.

“He’s obviously very powerful,” Eldredge says of Stojko, “a great jumper who’s always going out to do his job.

“I don’t dislike anything. Everyone has his own style, and it’s very personal.”

The same can be said about judging in figure skating. If it comes down to Stojko and Eldredge in the long program next week, judges at least will not be confused as to their options.