Four years ago in Salt Lake City, Yevgeny Plushenko and fellow Russian Alexei Yagudin battled for the men’s figure skating title. The two best skaters in the world had grown up together in St. Petersburg. They had even shared the same coach – until their rivalry made it hard for them to share even the same ice.

Yagudin prevailed in that showdown, leaving the younger Plushenko to pick up the silver medal. But Yevgeny Plushenko is not the type to be satisfied with second place. Tonight in Turin, he returns to the Olympic stage with a single, clear goal: claim the gold that got away.

In the four years since Salt Lake, Plushenko has dominated men’s skating. He’s won all three of the World Championships he has entered since 2002. Under skating’s new, complex scoring system, the Code of Points, Plushenko routinely beats the rest of the field by staggering margins.

So dominant is Plushenko, both athletically and mentally, that he has single-handedly drained the tension from this Olympic final. Everyone – including the man in second place after the short program, American Johnny Weir – fully expects him to win.

Plushenko himself considers it a done deal, and it shows in his skating. He performs his jumps with the bored nonchalance of the kid who is 50 pages ahead of the class in the math textbook. He appears to be utterly devoid of self-doubt. Only Plushenko, with his slightly clueless but unfailingly popular sensibility, would hire a pop violinist to record a rendition of “The Godfather” specially for his Olympic performance in Italy.

Of course, as Plushenko knows, he can do whatever he wants. Now 23, he won his first world medal when he was only 15. Others have come and gone, but Plushenko has been a gold medal threat for almost a decade. Everyone is ready to crown him, from his competitors to the panel of (now anonymous) judges.

There was talk earlier this season that Stephane Lambiel, the Swiss skater who won the 2005 World Championships after Plushenko withdrew with an injury, could pose a challenge in Turin. All such talk ceased when Plushenko won the Europeans by more than 16 points. In Tuesday’s short program, Lambiel did only a double instead of a triple Axel and wound up third – 10 points behind Plushenko, who nailed every one of his difficult jumps.

A bit surprisingly, the contender who emerged from the short program was the top American, Johnny Weir. Weir is known as a tremendous talent, but he’s also a volatile competitor who’s had some truly memorable meltdowns at big events. Weir looked remarkably cool in his Olympic debut, landing all his jumps – and what’s more, he’s got a terrific, smooth style. Every element flows into the next. This isn’t just artistry, it’s technique. Weir knows how to glide and how to move from one difficult move to another without losing speed or flow. For that reason alone, he’s the man most likely to win if Plushenko gets lost on the way to the rink.

Weir makes an unlikely American male sports star, with his flamboyant costumes and his wild press conferences (comparing his costumes variously to “a Care Bear on acid” and “an icicle on coke”). Earlier this week Weir, who called himself “princessy,” told reporters he didn’t think his room at the Olympic village was very well decorated.

But for all Weir’s in-your-face disregard for convention (he played the dying swan, a classic ballerina’s role, in the short program), he has something quintessentially all-American: the rebellious energy of youth. Like his peers on the half pipe, Weir is bucking the establishment, and he’s damn good at what he does.

Good enough to overthrow the Godfather? Don’t bet on it. But good enough to be in the race for silver – which will be fierce. Besides Lambiel, there’s France’s Brian Joubert, who, like Plushenko and Lambiel, is capable of landing a quadruple jump. Canada’s Jeffrey Buttle has been incredibly successful under the new scoring system; he too could get a medal.

Watch for difficult but perfect programs – unlike the prior 6.0 scale, the new scoring system tends to reward clean triples more than sloppy quads. Best of all is the clean quad – which is what Plushenko typically delivers, and which is why, four years after Salt Lake City, no one can touch him.