The Sports Illustrated Olympic Daily is published in Salt Lake City and available in event venues and on newsstands for 16 straight days during the 2002 Winter Games. Here are some sights and scenes from today’s edition.

Russian Winter

Evgeni Plushenko has competed for years against rival Alexei Yagudin, but this week will be different. Beginning tonight, gold is at stake

Having spent the first two years of his life sleeping in a railway car in Siberia, Plushenko has come a long way. Heinz Kluetmeier

By E.M. Swift

To Alexei Mishin, the leprechaunlike Russian who trained them, they are the prodigy and the prodigal son.

The prodigy: 19-year-old Evgeni Plushenko, the reigning world champion, a mop-haired, hawk-nosed, scarecrow-limber Rod Stewart on ice.

The prodigal son: 21-year-old Alexei Yagudin, world champ from 1998 through 2000, obsessive, dramatic, powerful and so insecure in his brilliance that he left his coach, family and homeland rather than share Mishin's time and attention with Plushenko, the up-and-coming star.

Not since 1988 and the Battle of the Brians, in which Boitano of the U.S. edged Orser of Canada for the gold in Calgary, have two men been so far ahead of the field and so evenly matched in an Olympic year. Between them, Plushenko and Yagudin have dominated their sport for four years, winning the last four world championships, the last five European championships and finishing one-two in the last two International Skating Union Grand Prix finals, each winning once. Along the way they've continually ratcheted up the difficulty of their jumps, so that they're now attempting combinations unheard of four years ago, when Yagudin finished fifth in Nagano and Plushenko failed to qualify for his country's Olympic team.

Both are planning to do a quadruple toe loop-triple toe loop-triple loop combination in these Games (competition begins today at 5:15 p.m., with the short program), a dizzying aerial array never before landed in competition. Plushenko has further hinted that he hopes to become the first skater to land a quad Lutz. Yagudin hopes to match that feat with a quad toe loop-half loop-quad Salchow combo. It begins to sound like a quadruple helping of mumbo jumbo to the average fan, who needs to know nothing more than this: Plushenko and Yagudin are extending the frontiers of figure skating in a way no one has done since Dick Button began introducing triples some 50 years ago. Never close friends, their rivalry has magnified their differences to the point that it's inconceivable that they won't collide. One will win, and the other will resent it for the rest of his life.

Their story begins with the diminutive Mishin. A former pairs skater, Mishin, 60, is head of the St. Petersburg Figure Skating Academy. Internationally acclaimed for his ability to teach flawless jumping technique, Mishin has groomed, among others, Alexei Urmanov, the 1994 Olympic gold medalist. It's the goal of every young hotshot in St. Petersburg to train under him, and his goal is to turn every student into a champion.

Yagudin is one of the lucky ones. An only child, he started skating when he was four after his mother, Zoya Yagudina, a single mom who worked as a computer programmer, saw an ad in a newspaper for tryouts. Skating soon became serious work. For five years Yagudin practiced twice a day, 90 minutes each session, hustling between a small rink, his school and the family's St. Petersburg apartment. "My mom was like father and mother," Yagudin says. "If I didn't do a jump in practice, she used to take away the cable TV. I used to watch an American soap opera called Santa Barbara, so this was the worst threat she could make: No jump, no TV."

When Yagudin was 10, his coach, Alexander Mayorov, took a coaching job in Sweden. Mayorov had been a student of Mishin's, and before he left he passed the star pupil on to the master.

Plushenko's route to Mishin covered many more miles. He was born in Siberia and spent his first two years living in a railway coach car while his parents worked for the Siberian railroad. Temperatures routinely dropped to -40° in winter, and young Evgeni developed a chronic cough. Seeking a better climate, the Plushenkos moved west to Volgograd. When Evgeni was four, his mom, Tatiana, following a doctor's advice, signed him up for skating and dance classes. He excelled at both, but there are only so many recreational hours in a day. "The dance coach said, 'You must dance, not skate,'" Plushenko recalls. "The skate coach said, 'You must skate, not dance.' My mother said, 'You must choose.'"

So he skated. His mother was not an athlete, but she proved to have fine instincts by encouraging him to be unique. She was intrigued with the Biellmann spin, in which a skater's free leg is lifted behind the back and held over the head while spinning -- a feat of flexibility no male skater had ever performed on a world stage. His mother wanted Evgeni to learn it, so every night in the kitchen she stood behind him and pulled his leg up into the Biellmann position, first the left one, then the right. Plushenko still frowns at the memory. "I told her, 'It's so much pain. I don't need this.' But we work and stretch hard. Now I say, 'Thank you, Mommy.'"

Plushenko has a Biellmann to die for, but the energetic Yagudin won’t go down without a fight. Todd Korol

Plushenko's first coach was a former weightlifter, Mikhail Makoveyev, who'd learned figure skating techniques by attending a sports academy. Plushenko and Makoveyev trained at the only rink in Volgograd, but in 1993, when Plushenko was 11, the arena was closed and converted into an auto repair facility. "My mother said, 'O.K., let's play soccer or karate,'" Plushenko says, "but I'd skated seven years, and I told her, 'Maybe I'll go to Moscow or St. Petersburg, where the rinks are.' My mother said, 'We have no money.' But my coach said he had a friend who would take care of everything."

Makoveyev's friend was Mishin, who already had Urmanov and Yagudin training with him. Mishin remembers the 11-year-old Plushenko as a skinny kid with a big nose and a resilient nature. "It was not so easy to see he would become what he is today," Mishin says, "but I saw he had feelings for beauty. He also had a strong soul. The others picked on him in practice and made him cry every day. He would do his Biellmann, and they'd bop him on the forehead with their fingers and tell him to stop. The other skaters were jealous of him."

Plushenko could do all the triple jumps by the time he was 12, and he landed his first quadruple toe loop at 14. Yagudin won the world junior championships in 1996 at 15, and when he didn't defend his title the next year, Plushenko won it at 14. His Biellmann spin was a sensation internationally, and Mishin called the young star "the future of skating." None of which sat well with Yagudin.

In 1998, just shy of his 18th birthday, Yagudin came into his own. A powerful skater who seemed to levitate when launching his big jumps -- quad toe, triple Axel -- he won both the European championship and the world title that year. (Plushenko, still a coltish 15, finished second and third, respectively.) Then Yagudin told Mishin he was leaving. "Mishin had so many good students that he couldn't work with just me," he says. "I like it when I can't escape the coach's eyes."

He was hoping, of course, that Mishin would choose him, the new world champion, over Plushenko. Mishin wouldn't do it. "He said, 'I'm not going to beg you to stay,'" Yagudin recalls. "'It's your life.' When I left him that day, I felt so empty inside. I couldn't sleep for two nights."

Yagudin is nothing if not willful, however. He called another coach, Tatiana Tarasova, who'd coached Ilia Kulik to the 1998 gold medal in Nagano but was left without a pupil after Kulik turned pro. A match was made.

Tarasova was working in New Jersey at the time, so at age 18 Yagudin had to leave Russia to start anew. "All my life changed in a few months," he says. "I knew very little English. I was alone. And I was young."

It seemed a recipe for disaster, but Tarasova is a brilliant coach in her own right. Known primarily as a dance coach, Tarasova (whose father, Anatoly Tarasov, is called the father of Russian hockey) brought out Yagudin's theatrical side. She taught him not to just hear the music but also to feel it and to respond to it from the soul, not the mind. "After one month with Tarasova my mom saw me on TV and said, 'I don't recognize you,'" Yagudin recalls.

Although he won the next two world championships, in '99 and 2000, off the ice Yagudin developed what might be called the Oksana Baiul Syndrome: partying too hard and training too little. In the summer of '99 he was thrown off the Champions on Ice tour for inappropriate behavior stemming from an underage-drinking incident. No charges were filed, but Yagudin was developing a reputation as a loose cannon.

Plushenko, meanwhile, continued to mature. He beat Yagudin in the Russian nationals in '99 and 2000 and in the Europeans in 2000. Then, in '01 he asserted the kind of mastery that appeared to signal a changing of the guard. Yagudin began the season out of shape, and Plushenko -- focused and fit -- beat him in the Russian nationals, the Europeans, the Grand Prix finals and the worlds.

For Yagudin the 2001 season served as a wake-up call, and he turned his lifestyle upside down last summer. He went on a crash diet and stopped drinking and smoking. He started jogging 45 minutes at night after two training sessions during the day. To make sure he stayed on the straight and narrow, he moved into Tarasova's house in Newington, Conn., where they now train. "I became perfect person," Yagudin says wryly. "I had a couple of glasses of wine the whole summer. No parties. Every night asleep by 11. It was like a sickness for me to lose weight. I was on the scale 100 times a day. I understand now about girls with anorexia."

The 5'8" Yagudin went from 172 pounds to 150 in a month. Tarasova told him he should stop starving himself. "I said, 'No, I'm going to win the Olympics,'" he says.

His regimen left Yagudin feeling reborn -- a new physique, a new attitude -- but when the 2001-02 season opened in September with the Goodwill Games in Brisbane, he experienced what he now calls the lowest point in his career. Weak, unsteady and unable to land any of his big jumps, Yagudin finished a distant third to Plushenko and Michael Weiss of the U.S.

The wretched performance brought about a catharsis. Yagudin sat by a river in Brisbane and cried, then he took two weeks off. "I'd done everything, and this is how I end up, third place," he recalls. "So I decided I'm going to be the same Alexei I was five years ago. I'm going to have fun, to eat normal, to party, to go to discos if I want. Not to be crazy, but to have fun."

Yagudin regained some weight, settling in at 158 pounds, and took a more fatalistic view toward the Olympics: What would happen, would happen. As he relaxed, Yagudin rediscovered the passion of his skating, and the next time he faced Plushenko, it showed. At the Grand Prix finals in December, with both of them performing their Olympic programs, Yagudin brought the fans out of their seats while edging Plushenko for the first time in over a year, four judges to three. Both skaters landed two quads, and although Plushenko held a slight edge in technical marks, Yagudin's energetic, artistic performance carried the day. "Figure skating's not track, where you just run fast to win," Yagudin says. "You must be an artist, too. I still think Plushenko doesn't know what he's doing. Mishin says, 'Do this with your arms,' so he does it. But he doesn't feel the music."

It's the same criticism Boitano used to hear from the Orser camp in 1988: a jumping machine with the charisma of a robot. However, Plushenko is anything but robotic, and a different judging panel at the Grand Prix finals might have placed Plushenko first.

"Plushenko is cleaner and more polished," says Mishin. "Yagudin speaks to the audience with his arms and facial expressions, not with his blades and the ice. Yagudin has a higher triple Axel but only one style. Plushenko can skate a wide range of styles. They are like very big diamonds. If all diamonds were alike, none would be famous."

One of these men is destined to be more famous than his counterpart. It will come down to tonight's short program and Thursday's long program and perhaps the mind-set of a single judge. They are that close, and that far apart. "We are not friends," says Plushenko. "He is a good guy, and he is a good skater, but there's a lot of tension between us. He wants first. I want first."

This week, the Fates will smile on either the prodigy or the prodigal son.