Posted: Feb 2, 6:02p ET | Updated: Feb 2, 6:02p ET
The most elusive quality in sports is confidence.
If you've got it, it's all good.
If you don't have confidence -- there's not a chance.
Evan Lysacek's big breakthrough came at the end of last season, when he won the 2009 world championship in Los Angeles.
A few weeks back, he won figure skating's 2009 Grand Prix Final in Tokyo.
Because the Olympics make for such a grand stage and because the 2010 Vancouver Games men's figure skating competition promises to match superlative talents, including 2006 gold medalist Yevgeny Plushenko of Russia, it's all but impossible to proclaim Lysacek the man to beat.
Moreover, as they say, ice is slippery. Difference-maker quads can make the wrong kind of difference, indeed, and just that fast. At the 2010 U.S. Nationals over the weekend in Spokane, for instance, Lysacek fell on a quadruple toe, a new jump in his program.
Despite that stumble in Spokane, even though Russians have won the last five Olympic gold medals in men's figure skating, in Vancouver you still might want to really like Evan Lysacek's chances.
Because he sure does.
"I'm really confident in my programs," he said. "I like them a lot. I'm confident in the way they're constructed.
"... I'm just really concentrating on myself and on being a good skater pushing the envelope, pushing my own comfort zone, my own comfort level, being the best I can be by February, when that event rolls around."
That event -- the one that's unlike any other.
The one in Italy in 2006 in which Lysacek finished fourth.
The circumstances of that Torino Games fourth, however, bear repeating, for they speak to his bearing under pressure.
Lysacek's short program left him in way-back 10th place. That night, on the bus back to the Olympic Village, he ended up getting sick; it turned out he had the stomach flu. He was so sick he needed IVs for dehydration the next day.
After all that, his free skate was terrific -- the night's third-best. That catapulted him all the way up from 10th to fourth.
"The last time around, I was young," Lysacek said, referring to those Torino Games. "I was really inexperienced in the senior ranks. It was my second year as a senior. I was really just glad to be there. I wanted to see everything, meet everyone, experience everything.
"I wanted to talk to every member of the media who was there, tell them how excited I was, tell them I had gotten there two weeks early for the first practice.
"This time, I'm a different athlete. I'm stronger. I'm smarter."
And, it must be said, better. And, as well, a skater who has intelligently sought to take full advantage of all that the judging system now in place -- the one instituted after the scandal in Salt Lake City in 2002 -- rewards.
The points-based scoring system takes strength, speed and stamina. Artistry -- if you can show it, that's great. What matters without question is athleticism.
Plushenko, for one, has been working on quad-quad and triple axel-quad combos.
In winning the worlds last March in Los Angeles, Lysacek -- who had been nursing an injured foot -- didn't go for four. Instead, he skated a clean, eight-triple free skate.
Even so, Lysacek has made abundantly plain his belief that the quad is skating's future -- because with no 6.0, the quad is now what people know, and what they expect.
"I think the quad is essential to winning the Olympics," he emphasized in a conversation with Figure Skaters Online before the U.S. championships.
The Spokane 2010 nationals -- which proved critical for Jeremy Abbott and Johnny Weir -- were for Lysacek pretty much a practice conducted before a live audience and national TV. Abbott won, Lysacek finished second, Weir third.
Since the Grand Prix final in Tokyo, Lysacek has been working on a major upgrade to his program, intending to add to his technical score in Vancouver.
For Lysacek, Spokane was hardly the kind of elegant performance of the sort he delivered in Los Angeles last March, or at the Grand Prix final in Tokyo in December. Beyond the bungled quad, he held on -- barely -- to the landing of a triple axel-double toe combo.
"What happened here is absolutely no reflection of what I'm going to be like at the Olympics," Lysacek said after the Spokane free skate.
After Spokane, those who love to doubt Evan Lysacek will assuredly feel emboldened. History, they will say, is not on his side. No male skater since Scott Hamilton in 1984, in Sarajevo, has won Olympic gold as the current world champion.
A little more history as a rejoinder, albeit on the women's side: Going into the 1998 Nagano Winter Games, Tara Lipinski was the reigning world champion. She finished second at the U.S. nationals, behind Michelle Kwan. Who won gold in Nagano? Lipinski.
"I have mixed feelings," Lysacek said at the close of the nationals. "I'm so, so honored to be a part of a second Olympic team, and I'm saving my Olympic skate for that night."
About which he's genuinely confident. And about that confidence, he said, "I think that's my secret weapon right now."
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