You forgot the most overmarked skater too!!
Ant
You forgot to add that actually he does not win because he is overmarked!
Well I like that he gets credit for what he does particularly well, but not that areas he is not that exceptional in he is marked as if he is. Nobody who watches him skate can honestly say he is a master of spins, choreography, transitions, or even interpretation. Yet the judges score as if he is. Even his footwork, while excellent I find overrated to an extent, only in that the greatest foowork guys of the last 5-6 years like Yagudin, Browning, even Stojko did their footwork all as a unit, while Plushenko's is broken down into different segments for each part of the body, not working in any kind of cohesion I find.
That pretty much sums up why i think his footwork is completely overated. I would bet a lot of money that if he had to do the footwork at half the pace and actually hit some edges and hold some positions in his footwork he would fail and he would fall. He cannot hold his balance on twizzels and he even struggles to execute clean three turns - he nearly always skids or jumps them.
Ant
IMHO there are two things about Plushenko's skating that, when he was at his prime, put him head and shoulders above his rivals. The obvious thing is the jumps. When someone else comes out with two secure quads, one in a 4T/3T/2Lo combination, and two triple Axels, one in combination -- and does this time after time after time -- then we can talk.
The second thing is his command and presence on the ice. This is not so obvious on TV, but when you see him compete in person, he is a man among boys.
The vid I was talking about is here (lots of thanks to the person who made it):
http://www.savefile.com/files/104258
Plenty of twizzles and three-turns (after 2:00 min. mark) and he neither falls nor looses balance ( I especially like the way he changes foot between twizzles).
Took me some time to search through my files but I uploaded a much better example (again, thanks to the person who made the vid)
http://www.savefile.com/files/104692
The footwork is slow, right on the beat of the music, executed on one foot, lovely deep edges, controlled twizzles (it's after 2: 30 min. mark).
I get a message saying "http server is not alive" but is quite an amusing warnign message i'd never seen before - who knew that servers are alive and dead!!!
In all seriousness though i can't get the link to download.
Ant
Checked the link and it works fine for me. Maybe the server was just sleeping
Just downloaded it and its just an audio file with windows visual effect stuff going on while it plays...
Ant