http://www.vz.ru/news/2014/2/13/672480.html
"Then in training today (Thursday) on the training - back again. Replacement had to be done at night after the team competition. Kovtun And, incidentally, was not ready to come, "- he said.
6. On Feb. 14, Piseyev said this regarding Kovtun in an interview:
http://www.championat.com/olympic14/new ... iadoj.html
"Unfortunately, he got sick before the Olympics . But he - our future, all in front of Maxim . Soon the World Cup, which will be held in Japan. He would go there and hopefully will perform adequately " - quoted Piseyev ITAR-TASS.
7. Now in this interview of Evgeni’s, he mentioned the same thing regarding Kovtun’s inability to come to Sochi:
http://www.sovsport.ru/sochi/texts/text-item/685221
- You have also heard that Maxim Kovtun night was off the phone , no one could find ?
- There is no comments, comments his coach that Maxim Kovtun ill. Sports minister also said that they tried to seek, have done everything possible , Maxim was not…
I wanted to put Mutko and Piseyev’s interviews about, because some people might think that Plushenko came up with this story to “blame” Kovtun—in part because his interview was the only one that got widely reported. The interviews by others show that it was definitely not only Evgeni who was saying this. Another small detail: in this particular interview, the reporter was the one who supplied the detail that Kovun’s phone was off.
8. I recall that after this, Kovtun’s coach first said that Plushenko had the responsibility to skate both the team and the individual events (therefore implying that they themselves did not take the idea or the responsibilities of the first alternate seriously):
http://sport.mail.ru/sochi/news/16977313/
Maybe I won’t make direct quotes from this interview at this point…Later, in another interview, Buyanova that they were waiting for the call. (I don’t have that particular exact links with me right now. I can find it later.)
Of course, we cannot know for certain what exactly was Kovtun’s situation on the night of Feb. 9 and the morning of Feb. 10 (before 10 AM), or how much an effort the FFKKR really put into looking for him. But really, none of this had anything to do with Evgeni. Anything he knew at the point could only be what the FFKKR officials told him.
9. Later on Feb. 17, Evgeni gave an interview with CNN:
http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/v ... e.cnn.html
-I am not able to say right now what's happened, what happened. But if you ask the president of the Russian federation, he gonna explain everything.
-What has happened?
-He gonna explain it to you. He gonna explain why I tried to skate, why didn't skate the other skaters. But anyway—
….
-We won Olympic games team event. So after that, federation said, okay, do you want skate? How do you feel? I said, well, I feel not so good, I feel problem after long program. Team even, I miss two jumps. Triple Salchow I missed, and triple loop. Because I feel already the...(gestures to back) my muscles, sore. And I explained to my federation, better maybe if somebody else gonna skate. I asked them.
Of course, everything CNN does is politically motivated, and the reporter was trying hard to ask leading questions, but thinking back, I am glad that he had this interview. The main substantial point was that after the team event, he told FFKKR officials about his condition (which was not nearly as bad at that time in comparison with a few days later). He hid nothing from them.
10. Immediately after the CNN interview, the following statement appeared on the FFKKR official website:
http://fsrussia.ru/news/1106_evgenij-pl ... -ne-davil/
In the statement, Evgeni said that he was not pressured into competing, and that limitations in his English was a factor. However, there was no denial in the statement about the main factual point of the interview—that he talked to the FFKKR about his physical condition after the team event. Perhaps this statement, which appeared so quickly, was meant to be “crisis PR”, but if so, it was “crisis PR” for the FFKKR, not Plushenko.
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Again, my apologies, I know that all this was in the past and I'm not trying to dwell on these things; this is more for completeness than for anything else. I was meaning to post this soon after Sochi, but it took me way to long to put them together (and maybe better late than never?)...
- thank you very much for your efforts 
that's same for all athletes (Plushy also served 2003) - as well as others russian skaters in the same time (Katsalapov, Soloviev, for example), were in army when and Kovtun. About all of them was only 1 text - about Kovtun? 100 texts, in which in the panic writes about how Plushenko's "rival" was sent in the army, far away from the skating, why, where...? 
