 |
 |   |
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Multimedia Central Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities Work in Sports
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE |  |
Wonderful Odyssey Kwan outduels Russian rival Butyrskaya
Posted: Tuesday January 04, 2000 02:26 PM
TOKYO (AP) -- Skating cleanly but conservatively, Olympic silver medalist Michelle Kwan of the United States beat her Russian rival Maria Butyrskaya, the defending world champion, in the Honda Odyssey Cup Tuesday. In the men's competition at the one-day international open figure skating tourney, two-time defending world champion Alexei Yagudin of Russia adopted the same tactic to edge out U.S. champion Todd Eldredge. He and Kwan each took a US$40,000 winner's prize. "I'm pleased with my result today, although it wasn't my best skating," Yagudin said. "And it's so interesting for Olympic-eligible skaters to compete against professionals because they are not so strong in jumps, but they are really good in artistic expression." No skaters tried quadruple jumps since the pro-am event put greater emphasis on their interpretation of music and artistry than on technical difficulty. The pairs title went to Olympic gold medalists Oksana Kazakva and Artur Dmitriev of Russia. The Russian pair of Maya Usova and Evgeny Platov, also Olympic gold medalists, won the ice dancing event. "I hope I can come back here next year. I love coming to Japan," said Kwan, who has now won all three women's titles of the Honda Cup, inaugurated in 1997 but skipped the following year because of the Nagano Winter Olympics. "I feel really good about my performance today. My jumps were very solid and I had a lot of fun doing the program," said the 19-year-old college freshman. "It's very different competing against professionals. In the national championships or the world championships, you're more focused and think about doing seven triples in a program, while in a pro-am program you are allowed to do only three," Kwan said. "I'm getting more and more confident as I approach the world championships. I have a lot of things to work on before the competition, but I'm hoping that I'll be 100 percent ready and consistent in my jumps," she added. Kwan won the world championships in 1996 and again in 1998 before placing second to Butyrskaya last year. The world championships are scheduled for March 27 through April 2 in Nice, France. In the short program before a capacity crowd of 8,000 at Yoyogi National Gymnasium, Kwan skated flawlessly but with more loop jumps than technically difficult jumps like the flip and lutz. Butyrskaya ventured, but her triple lutz was reduced to a double midway through the short program. In the interpretive free program, Kwan stuck to her strategy, landing a triple-double combination and two more triples in between a graceful repertoire of spins, step sequences and spirals.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
