Ladies' On Ice: The Showcase Event

The Russians came to Torino with all four reigning world champions, hoping -- and fully expecting -- to pull off an unprecedented sweep of the figure skating gold medals in Torino.

After pair's champions Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin and men's champ Evgeni Plushenko breezed to Olympic titles last week, Tatiana Navka and Roman Kostomarov claimed the dance title last night. It was no waltz. But they held off a spirited challenge by Americans Tanith Belbin and Benjamin Agosto, whose flamenco romp earned them a silver medal -- the best showing ever by a U.S. dance pair and the country's first dance medal in 30 years.

Three down for the Russians and just one to go -- the ladies', the showcase event of the Olympics. Irina Slutskaya remains the favorite to convert her Salt Lake silver into Torino gold. She is the reigning world champion and four of the last five Olympic titles have gone to the woman who holds that crown. But the competition, which begins with the short program tonight and concludes with the free skate Thursday, looms as the most competitive and wide open of the four competitions. Here's a look at some noteworthy competitors in the field.

Irina Slutskaya: At 27, an almost grandmotherly age in this sport where nobody over 16 has won the ladies' Olympic gold since 1992, Slutskaya hopes to make Torino the icing on her figure-skating cake. If she succeeds, Slutskaya would be the oldest Olympic ladies champ since the event was first competed at London in 1908, which interestingly enough was a summer Olympics. Slutskaya has won seven European championships, putting her one up on two of the most exalted women in the history of the sport, Katarina Witt and Sonja Henie. She is extremely popular with her competitors and has a compelling personal story, having cared for her mother, who has kidney disease and requires dialysis three times a week. And Slutskaya has fought back from her own serious ailment, an inflammation of the sac around her heart, which several years ago threatened her career.

Slutskaya is a technically sound skater with very solid jumps and an exuberant on-ice personality. Though she used to show some nerves in her younger days, Slutskaya has become the steadiest performer in the world, having lost only once since 2004. The only thing she isn't is spectacular; her routines sometimes have a mechanical feel, seldom attaining the majesty that we associate with the sport's Olympic greats. Still, very good is usually enough to win these pressure-packed competitions. And unless another performer produces the skate of her life, as Lipinski did in Nagano in 1998 and Sarah Hughes did four years later in Salt Lake City, Slutskaya is likely to glide home with the gold.

Sasha Cohen: Here's the lady who can dazzle, the one for whom American fans have been waiting to have that skate of her life. No skater can spin and twist her body quite like Cohen, who has got the Gumby factor going for her. She is also blessed with a marvelous musicality and theatricality. Her jumps, though, tend to be the wobbliest -- and costliest -- part of her repertoire. And she has a history of silver medals the hard way, when she has been positioned to win and makes a late blunder -- "bizarre," Dick Button told NEWSWEEK -- on what appears to be a routine move.