World champion figure skater Patrick Chan has taken a dominant lead after the short program at the Four Continents Figure Skating Championships with a score of 87.95 points.
Chan’s score in the competition in Colorado Springs on Thursday beat that set by Russia’s Evgeny Plushenko on the way to his European Championship comeback win in Sheffield last month.
On that occasion, Plushenko set a score of 84.71 in the short program to take second place behind Artur Gachinsky, before taking his seventh European title with a dominant 261.23-point performance in the free skate, setting a new European record.
Chan is now the favorite to win the Four Continents competition, which does not allow European athletes to compete. Chan has a lead of 4.41 points over second-placed Takahito Mura of Japan.
Plushenko will not take part in the 2012 World Championships in Nice in March, which means he will not face his Canadian rival this season.
The current scoring system for figure skating was introduced in 2004 and focuses on individual elements of the program, in part to allow scores to be compared between competitions, although there is still some variation between individual judges.
Plushenko said in televised comments February 6 that he did not expect to win gold at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
"For me it will be a triumph just to take part in my fourth Olympics," he said.
