More Surprise Winners Than Ever in Skating

By any standards, this has been a strange season for figure skating.

No, there haven’t been any knee-bashings or judging scandals. Such soap opera fodder usually is saved for Olympic years.

What there have been in most of the major singles competitions are upsets. Major international championships were won by Emanuel Sandhu, Brian Joubert, Fumie Suguri and Julia Sebestyen.

You’re excused if you haven’t heard of most of them -- except Suguri, who won bronze at the last two world championships. But just bronze.

Johnny Weir, with no significant victories in his young career, leaped to the U.S. championship. Only Michelle Kwan, the one constant in the sport these days, held form by winning her seventh straight national crown and eighth overall.

Otherwise, well, chaos.

“That’s what makes figure skating interesting; you never know what’s going to happen,” says three-time U.S. champion Michael Weiss, the runner-up to Weir at nationals. “You have the favorites all the time, then someone you’ve never even heard of comes out and wins it all.”

At the expense of some of the sport’s biggest stars too. That means next month’s worlds in Dortmund, Germany, could be slippery even for Kwan, whose only significant competition this season was at nationals, where she blew away the mercurial Sasha Cohen.

“It is a wonderful thing to see, with new faces to shake things up,” says Robin Wagner, who coached Sarah Hughes to a surprise gold medal at the 2002 Olympics and now works with Cohen. “It’s more exciting and challenging to those at the top and it’s good for our sport.”

But certainly not good for the favorites. Where pedigree once meant almost everything in the sport, it now has rightfully taken a back seat to performance.

So Evgeni Plushenko, unbeatable last season, gets upset in the Grand Prix final by Sandhu, a Canadian with few international credentials. And Suguri, the leader of a wave of rising stars from Japan, defeats Cohen at the same meet.

The event was held under the experimental points scoring system that seems destined to be adopted in all international competitions at the ISU Congress this summer. The points system, in which results of the short program carry over and every technical element has a specific value, was a great equalizer in the Grand Prix final.

Plushenko admitted the system hurt him then, particularly when he did a third combination jump that received no points. But he also lost last week at the European championships to Joubert, a Frenchman who rarely pushed Plushenko in the past. And that was under the old 6.0 scoring format.

“Things like this happen,” Plushenko said. “It is not the end of life. I am already a three-time European and two-time world champion. I have many titles.”

Telling words. Perhaps Plushenko, bothered by a torn meniscus in his right knee, has become too comfortable, particularly with the Winter Olympics two years away. With his main rival, 2002 Olympic champion Alexei Yagudin, retired because of a hip injury, maybe Plushenko didn’t sense a challenge was possible from the likes of Sandhu and Joubert. And now Weir.