Jayne Torvill & Christopher Dean
Evgeni Plushenko
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Evgeni Plushenko leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Jayne Torvill & Christopher Dean at #8 and Evgeni Plushenko at #12.
Head-to-head FAQ
Who leads more shared metrics?
How do the published ranks compare?
Are these live stats?
The case for Jayne Torvill & Christopher Dean
The most famous four minutes in the history of the sport. At Sarajevo in 1984 the Nottingham pair skated Ravel's Boléro and received nine perfect 6.0s for artistic impression, the only unanimous set of maximum marks ever awarded in an Olympic figure skating event, part of twelve 6.0s across the whole competition. The program was itself a rules exercise: the free dance limit was 4 minutes 10 seconds and the clock started when a blade moved, so they opened kneeling on the ice for the first 18 seconds to fit their 4:28 arrangement inside the rule. They won four consecutive world titles from 1981 to 1984 and four European championships, turned professional, then returned under reinstatement rules to take bronze at Lillehammer in 1994. Their influence on ice dance was structural rather than decorative: they replaced ballroom pastiche with narrative choreography and theatrical staging, and every free dance judged on composition since works in the vocabulary they built.
The case for Evgeni Plushenko
The last great champion of the 6.0 system and the first to master the one that replaced it. Plushenko won four Olympic medals across four Games: silver at Salt Lake City 2002, gold at Turin 2006, silver at Vancouver 2010 and team gold at Sochi 2014. He added three world titles, seven European championships, four Grand Prix Finals and ten Russian national titles, a haul no male skater of the modern era approaches. He was the first to land a quadruple toe loop, triple toe loop, triple loop combination, in 1999, pushing the era's technical ceiling while retaining the flexibility for a Biellmann spin that almost no man had attempted. His long rivalry with Alexei Yagudin, settled when Yagudin swept Salt Lake City with a free skate that drew perfect 6.0s, produced the most-watched men's competition in Russian skating history. A career shadowed by more than a dozen operations on his back and knees ended at Sochi, where he withdrew from the individual event minutes before he was due to skate.