Russian Irina Slutskaya goes down in history as first 7-times European champion

Women competition of European figure skating championship finished in French Lion. Leading places took Russian figure-skaters - Irina Slutskaya and Elena Sokolova. Slutskaya became the first 7-times European champion in figure-skating history. Bronze was awarded to Italian figure-skater Caroline Kostner. Another Russian Victoria Volchkova demonstrated 9-th result.

Judges evaluated performance of Slutskaya extremely high - 126.81 points. While skating Irina made one small mistake, which didn`t influence the final result. Russian figure-skater has beaten achievements of Norwegian Sonya Henie and German Catherine Witt. Henie became European champion in 1931-1936 and Witt won continental championship in 1983-1988. Slutskaya became European champion in 1996 for first time (and first Russian female figure-skater awarded this high title) and then repeated her achievement in 1997, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2006. Season-2004 she missed because of illness.

Elena Sokolova skated the program without mistakes but lost 15.43 points to Slutskaya by results of short and original programs.

This is the second gold medal for Russian team in Lion. Tatyana Totmyanina and Maxim Marinin won competition of sport pairs, while Russian pair Maria Petrova and Aleksey Tikhonov got bronze medals.

As a reminder, during last year`s European championship in Turin Russian figure-skaters won gold medals in all 4 kinds of figure-skating programs.

sections: Sport