HELSINKI, Finland -- The World Figure Skating Championships were marked by complaints that top skaters are having to do too much and suspicions that they're doing too little.
Michelle Kwan might have suffered from both factors.The championships also saw men doing plenty, with a record 14 quadruple jumps by nine skaters.
The Russian contingent could hardly have done more, sweeping the golds in all four events: Maria Butyrskaya and Alexei Yagudin in the singles, Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze in pairs and Anjelika Krylova and Oleg Ovsiannikov in ice dancing. It was the first time a country won all four events; Russians took six of 12 medals in all.
Butyrskaya, three months shy of turning 27, became the oldest women's champion in taking the title from 18-year-old Kwan, who got the silver.
This year's worlds were the first held under the new scoring system in which the qualification round counts toward the final score. In previous years, a top skater could go into the qualifying round confident of making the cut, but now is under pressure right from the start.
It's difficult for a skater to work up the concentration to perform the short program with full competitive fire twice within three days, and many resent it.
"This is too stupid," Yagudin said after his qualifying round, which lacked the vigor and control he later demonstrated in winning the free skate to take the gold medal.
Kwan's coach, Frank Carroll, also complained. "If you have 40 or 50 skaters . . . then some of those skaters should not be here. The reason for the qualification is to more or less weed them out, but I don't think if you're probably one of the top three, four or five skaters in the world that you need to be weeded out."
Kwan, a two-time world champion, shrugged it off, saying, "It doesn't really bother me." But her qualifying round, although solid enough to place her first, struck many as being short on her usually intense focus.
A qualifying round that counted in the final score was a particular burden on Kwan because it came as she was trying to overcome a head cold.
"The cold hit me harder mentally than physically," she said.
Whatever the cause, she fell on a double axel, usually a trouble-free jump for her, in the short program, and ended up losing her title to Butyrskaya.
There were suggestions that what Kwan needed was more competition, not less. Before the worlds, she had entered only the U.S. championships and several open competitions -- pro-am events that use ISU rules, but are not strictly competitions.
Asked whether the minimal schedule banked her fires, she said, "That wasn't the reason why I missed the double axel."