Russian Yevgeny Plushenko announced his retirement from competitive figure skating, more than three years after the four-time Olympic medalist’s last competitive skate.
“As for me, I won’t go [to the 2018 Olympics] as an athlete,” Plushenko said on Russian TV on Friday, according to a Russian news agency TASS translation. “I have wrapped up my skating career. I’m opening my own academy where I will work as a coach. If we together with the athletes manage to prepare for the Olympics, maybe I will come.”
Plushenko, 34, last competed at the Sochi Olympics, taking team event gold and withdrawing from singles after his short program warm-up due to a back injury.
Plushenko had announced his retirement in Sochi but went back on that claim later in the Winter Games.
“If need be, I’ll have another 10 operations … I’m not ruling out that I’ll go for a fifth Olympic Games,” he reportedly said in February 2014. “I am not ruling out that I want stay in sports, to prove [something] to many [people] and myself.”
Plushenko was re-added to the Russian national team but never competed, though he has done many ice shows. He has undergone back and neck surgeries in recent years.
“I look at how the youth has grown up and men’s figure skating as well, it is now impossible to compete with young [athletes] it seems to me,” Plushenko said, according to TASS. “I have undergone 15 surgeries, and it is difficult to take part in my fifth Olympics, I’m fed up with it.”
Plushenko had perhaps the greatest career in men’s modern skating. He is one of only two skaters in any discipline to earn four Olympic medals, the other being Swede Gillis Grafstrom of the 1920s and ’30s.
He burst onto the scene with a bronze medal at the 1998 World Championships at age 15, after just missing the 1998 Nagano Olympic team.
Under the guidance of coach Alexei Mishin, Plushenko blossomed into a world champion in 2001 and Olympic silver medalist behind Russian rival Alexei Yagudin in 2002.
In 2006, Plushenko came to the Olympics with a personal-best score more than 20 points higher than any other skater under the new judging system. He delivered on that massive-favorite status by winning gold in Torino by a whopping 27.12 points.
Plushenko returned after three seasons off, largely due to knee injuries and surgeries, for the 2010 Olympic season. He won the short program in Vancouver but was surpassed by American Evan Lysacek in the free skate and had to take silver, beaten by a man who didn’t attempt a quadruple jump.
Plushenko barely competed the next four seasons leading up to his global competition return at the Sochi Winter Games. He was awarded Russia’s lone men’s singles spot despite being beaten at the Russian Championships.
In Sochi, Plushenko’s total score in the team event — 259.59 — would have earned bronze in the singles event that he skipped.
Plushenko’s bravado was unmistakable. Perhaps the best illustration was the title for his final competitive performance, “Best of Plushenko,” a free-skate compilation in Sochi commemorating the highlights of his career.
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