Evgeni Plushenko and Alexei Yagudin at the 2002 Olympics

Alexei Yagudin replied to Evgeni Plushenko, who recently said that Yagudin did not know how to skate and accused Alexei of “striving to measure medals.” The conflict between former rivals on the ice flared up quite quickly, and before that, her coach Tatyana Tarasova already stood up for Yagudin.

Yagudin wrote on Instagram*.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Yagudin and Plushenko were leading athletes in Russian men’s single skating and the main rivals against each other in the international arena. For example, at the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, Yagudin won gold and Plushenko won silver. In November 2003, Yagudin announced that he was leaving the sport. Plushenko ended his career only in 2017.

Yagudin finished his speech.

The day before, Yagudin posted the statistics of face-to-face meetings with Plushenko on his Instagram* on the ice, according to which he gained an advantage in the medal standings. In response, Plushenko said that Yagudin lived in the past and accused him of giving false statistics. In his reply, Yagudin pointed out that Plushenko got the statistics from a well-known sports website, and that this refers only to face-to-face conversations between the two skaters, not about his entire career.

Yagudin noted.

Alexei Yagudin began a career in television after leaving the sport. The figure skater, who has acted as a participant in ice shows, has been the host of the Ice Age show in recent years. Last season she led together with Alina Zagitova. The other day, there were rumors that Yagudin could leave the show, as Ilya Averbukh uttered that a new presenter would appear. But it turned out that the Olympic champion Anna Shcherbakova will join only Yagudin and Zagitova.

After completing his career, Plushenko opened the Plushenko Angels Academy, where young athletes train. Plushenko has already had a rivalry with Eteri Tutberidze, an example that Yagudin advises to take, as some athletes move from one coach to another. For example, Alexandra Trusova, who won silver at the Beijing Olympics, studied in the Tutberidze group, moved to Plushenko in 2020, and returned to Tutberidze a year later (in October this year, the athlete moved to CSKA to Svetlana Sokolovskaya) .

*Instagram is owned by Meta, a recognized extremist organization in the Russian Federation.