What's the best thing on ice? Go figure

Sideline Cut: Of all the weird sports in the Winter Olympics, the last one I expected to fall for was the figure skating - and the men's version at that. Still, it has to be said, the five minutes when the Russian skater Evgeny Plushenko performed on the ice in downtown Turin on Thursday night provided easily the most captivating and impressive feat these Olympics have featured.

He was the 19th to take the ice, and for the previous two hours his opponents had gone through their routines with exceptional power and grace and concentration. But always, a crucial slip here or an awkward landing on a triple lutz there (the match programme, so to speak, thoughtfully contains a very detailed yet readable breakdown of each skater's routine so that even a klutz like myself gets to recognise a lutz, a salchow and all the other pyrotechnic twists and turns) reinforced the fact that these weren't just wind-up mannequins we were watching, programmed to shimmer across the rink in preconfigured moves.

Things could go wrong and did, all the time. The excitement in watching the figure skating is similar to gymnastics in that it is all about smoke and mirrors, trying to execute as near as perfect a routine so that the eagle-eyed adjudicators miss the tiny flaws and errors. Anything so crude as to be visible to the audience - a stumble or a slip or a crash onto the ice - is a virtual catastrophe, an advertisement that the last four years of the skater's life and his medal prospects have just vanished, leaving him with nothing other to do than bravely finish out the routine.

When Plushenko glided into view, the atmosphere became immediately charged because the expectation in the Palavela rink was that there would be no falls and no disasters and we would be witnessing an athlete who was master of the ice.

Other events had their moments. But downhill skiing, for all its danger and excitement, is a rather remote spectacle, the competitor moving all alone through the challenges of the course until the very last jump and sprint, when he materialises on the vast, steep course and races for home to rapturous applause.

Snowboarding and freestyle skiing have a surfeit of energy but they are too smug and self-consciously cool to feel truly real. The luge and skeleton are brave and extreme but almost too fast and technologically driven to understand.

Figure-skating, though, stays true to a relatively simple and conservative idea and today's most technically difficult elements are named after the skaters who invented them. And it is the one sport that, while having a rich television heritage, makes for a riveting and disarming live spectacle.

Plushenko is such a consummate front man, a supremely and quietly confident cat, that he just lapped up the attention he commanded during his warm-up, gliding around the ice full of the indifferent hauteur of the old East.

That such a premium is placed on elegance, and that the men's uniforms come with sequins and plunging necklines and trim little flares, and that a fair amount of mincing does occur in the paddock when the skaters are warming up - all those things do little to promote a tough-guy image. It would be easy to deride men's figure skating as camp, a bit Kenneth Williams.

It is probably true that walking down High Street, Scunthorpe, say, on a Friday night dressed like America's Johnny Weir would guarantee you a bit of a hiding outside the chip shop.

Weir, who described his mood as "princessy", entered the arena on Thursday night wearing a violently loud top with a purple front and an orange-and-black-stripe effect at the back. As someone in the crowd groaned, "F**k, is it wise to try and win gold dressed as a Bengal?"

Men's skating undoubtedly has its peccadilloes. But there is a savage, military streak to it that dictates the performer cannot complain and must literally get on with the show no matter how badly he may have erred or how low he may be feeling.

That iron-minded philosophy seems to form the basis for all figure skating, and when you compare it to the cossetted world of Premiership soccer, where impetuosity runs rampant, there is no question which sport seems tougher. And it seems safe to assume that Plushenko, born during the fading days of Soviet rule and a skate student when the country was in economic meltdown, knows a thing or two about the meaner streets of life.

It is the combination of hardcore athleticism and luvvie theatricality that makes the men's figure skating game such a disconcerting event and so far removed from the traditional male prerequisite for sport. You just have to go with it and trust it.

Once the music started and Plushenko began his routine, falling into perfect harmony with Edvin Merton's hypnotic score from The Godfather, well, you would have to have been blind not to be immediately hit by the man's unearthly athleticism. And when you hear the blades scoring the surface and the skater breathing like a sprinter and straining to keep his posture perfect and in sympathy with the music, you get a sense of the effort and level of performance that television, however excellent the images, cannot hope to replicate.

Just for the record, the highlight of Plushenko's routine included a triple lutz and double toe loop, straight into a change-foot combination spin, a flying camel spin and a change-foot combination. And you may be thinking, "So what? I've pulled off the same combination myself after a half dozen vodkas boogieing to Joe Dolan's Good Lookin' Woman." And that may be so, but trust me, it's not quite the same thing. Joe has played in some pretty wintry venues in his day but it is unlikely there was ice on the floor beyond a few melting cubes when you surrendered to the G-force of his climactic verse.

We can only guess, of course, at the untold hours and pain and agony skaters like Plushenko invest into their sport. Of course, they have world championships to compete for in between Olympic years, but in terms of a global audience, theirs is a butterfly existence.

As the auditorium rose to acclaim the victorious Russian around midnight on Thursday, there were rumours he would probably bow out of the sport now, at 23, having spent over a decade as the apprentice mage of the severe master Aleksei Mishin. But Plushenko was adamant he would be back to defend his gold four years from now in Vancouver. By then, he is bound to face new imitators or even potential superiors in his field, some from his own country.

Or his knees and ankles, the astonishing suppleness and balance and mental toughness may have betrayed him by then.

It hardly matters. During the five minutes that counted here in Turin, the decade of learning fell into place with charisma and daring - and the absolute certainty he would make no mistakes. His performance belonged to the richest Olympic skating lineage, so that by midnight, when the crowds finally headed out into the cold, foggy city, the strange theatre of figure skating had discovered its Olivier.