- Joined
- Jan 25, 2013
That is not fine by your standard since you kept "correcting" other's opinion.
But you are right, why Plushenko should care about your critics? He certainly cares about critics especially for those questioning his patriotism, integrity as a athlete. That is why he might get a little bit angry/upset with all your comments about his withdrawing from EU is not due to injury but because of his bad performance (in this aspect, you are no better than that Z-something commentator). He replied some twits containing similar meaning after his surgery.
He certainly cares about critics about his skating when he thinks they have a point. He said critics kept him moving forward.
When it comes to things like interpretation and performance, which are subjective, I don't correct others since they are welcome to think what they think. But when it comes to tangible things like better spins or better transitions, I will call him inferior to other skaters, and I will call out those who suggest he has "better ones" - particularly those whose rationale is that he's the best so of course he has the best everything.
Before 2012, he might have cared about his critics about his skating but he certainly didn't do anything to change it... he continued to have programs with 2-footed skating and minimal choreography and his approach was "do the jumps. do the quad, and you'll probably win". I think any fan of his would certainly say his program in 2012 Euros was vastly superior to his program in 2010 or 2006 Olympics, so you have to ask yourself why he didn't improve/present that in the first place. It got to a point that his choreo in 2006/2010 was worse than that of 2002 because all he had to do was land the jumps and there was no Yagudin to challenge him. Now, I think he's embracing the fact that good choreography and transitions and difficult steps inbetween elements is actually significant and it's not all about landing the big tricks.
And I've said that I agree that he withdrew from Euros 2013 due to injury, but considering what was at stake (the gold/his reputation/his superiority to Fernandez-Amodio-Brezina and his own countrymen), I wouldn't have been shocked if we later found out that he wasn't injured at the time and his camp had cited an injury as an excuse.
Like I said, he was 6th, so there was no point further injuring himself, or shooting for gold when that was out of reach, and he would have needed one of his better skates just to make the podium.