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GOTEBORG, Sweden — In Sweden, he's known as Yeffrey Buttle.
In Canada and everywhere else, he's known as a world figure skating champion, now and for the rest of time.
On Saturday, Jeffrey Buttle, 25, of Sudbury, Ont., kept alive the Canadian tradition of male world champion figure skaters, following Donald Jackson, Donald McPherson, Brian Orser, Kurt Browning and Elvis Stojko.
Buttle is the first Canadian man to win gold at this event since Stojko won in 1997 in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Canada's Jeffrey Buttle performs his free program at the Scandinavium arena in Gothenburg on Saturday. (AFP/Getty Images)
Buttle wasn't considered to be in the medal hunt by anybody. France's silver-medal winner Brian Joubert certainly didn't count him in.
"I wouldn't have picked Jeffrey when I came here,'' Joubert said. "But competition is competition, and that will give me a lesson for the future.''
"They didn't see him coming,'' said Michael Slipchuk, director of high performance for Skate Canada.
Buttle had been sixth the past two years at the world championship and two months ago, he hadn't even won his own national championship.
Even Buttle wasn't in that gold medal mindset, although he was better trained and prepared this year.
"I went out there with the intentions of skating my best and not worrying about what I don't have or what I do have and just going out and enjoying myself,'' Buttle said. "I'm just focusing on putting myself in good contention when we get to 2010.''
Well, he's doing it in warp speed.
"This obviously exceeds my expectations,'' he said.
After he skated, Buttle asked his coach Lee Barkell if he thought he had enough to win a medal.
"Yeah, I think it will be enough,'' Barkell said.
"Oh good, a medal,'' Buttle said.
"No, I think it might be enough for a gold medal,'' Barkell said.
Buttle said he only half believed him, because "it seemed too surreal.
"When the marks came up I was just in shock,'' he said.
On Saturday, Buttle not only won, but he crushed his opposition with a final total of 245.17 points. Last year's world champion Joubert finished second with 231.22, about 14 points back of him.
Johnny Weir of the United States won his first world medal — a bronze — with 221.84.
Buttle stepped on the top of the podium, his emotions high, his smile wide.
"I experienced all the emotions up there,'' he said after he listened to the Canadian anthem. "I was definitely singing, and you can consider yourself lucky that you weren't close. But at the end of the anthem, it sort of got the best of me. I've heard it before, but not in this context. I was very proud and thinking of my family, that's for sure.''
Buttle's mark blasted his previous best mark of 234.02 that he got in finishing second to Daisuke Takahashi at the Four Continents Championships in February.
Canadian champion Patrick Chan, at age 17 and at his first world championship, finished ninth, allowing Canada to send three men to the world championship next year in Los Angeles.
Also remarkable: Buttle was so untouchable in the free skate that he won by about 10 points — with 163.07 to Joubert's 153.47.
And for a guy who is known to win medals on the strength of his presentation marks, Buttle reigned supreme on the technical marks at this event. His technical marks in the free skate on Saturday were 84.29, making Buttle drop his face into his hands in disbelief, while Joubert, the man known to land three quads in a program, emerged with only 79.36.
Buttle didn't attempt a quad all week, but when he won, the quad issue raised its head, in ugly fashion.
Joubert told reporters Saturday that he was disappointed that quads don't get more points.
"I am still disappointed because Jeffrey did the perfect competition,'' Joubert said. "He did not do mistakes, but he didn't try quad jumps, and I was disappointed about it. The new judging system is like that.
"It's better to do simple and clean than to try something difficult.''
But Buttle's top technical marks in both the short and the long programs are testimony to the fact that the Canadian worked hard on everything, he said.
"Everything that is involved in figure skating, not just the jumps,'' Buttle said.
"I was fortunate enough to get a clean program today and I was training very hard to do that, but it wasn't just the jumps,'' Buttle continued. "We worked whole sessions on the spins, and stroking and all the in-betweens, because that is figure skating. Figure skating is everything … that happens in those four minutes and 30 seconds. It's not just about the jumps. I definitely feel that I earned the title.''
With a few deft strokes, Buttle won that battle of the ideas, too. He said he felt no reason to apologize because he didn't attempt a quad.
"I started skating because I watched Kurt Browning and Brian Orser and it was about the program,'' Buttle said. "The most memorable moments in skating — you remember the program. You don't remember the elemtns they did.
"That's what I'm most passionate about when I skate … I went out there and I left everything on the ice. I had my heart on my sleeve and I'm proud of that.''
Joubert was next to last to skate, and when he saw that others had not skated so well, he decided to drop one of his quads and replace it with a triple-triple combination. That left him with two quad attempts — the same as former world champion Stephane Lambiel of Switzerland and world silver medalist Daisuke Takahashi of Japan.
But Joubert turned one of them into a triple Salchow. And for his other elements, he got levels of two and three for difficulty (the highest level is four). Joubert also got docked for taking off on the wrong edge on two flip jumps.
Still when he finished, he seemed elated, punching his fists in the air and then kissing the ice. But Buttle was next to come.
Buttle, on the other hand, chalked up difficulty levels of four for all four of his spins.
Takahashi landed one quad, fell on another (which he under-rotated) and stumbled out of a triple Axel, meant to be a combination. The heavy favorite coming in, he finished sixth in the free skate and fourth overall.
Lambiel stumbled out of a triple Axel — his nemesis — put a hand down in the midst of his quad combination, landed a triple loop on two feet, and didn't complete the rotation on the second quad attempt.
It's very costly not to complete the rotations on a quad. A quad is worth nine points. If you fall on a quad, but complete the rotations, it's worth eight points. If you land a quad, and don't fall, but fail to get all the rotations in, the mark drops to 1.57 points.
Lambiel finished only seventh in the long program and fifth overall.
Tomas Verner of the Czech Republic, fourth after the short program, had a complete meltdown in the long, finishing only 20th in the long program and 15th overall. His quad-triple combination didn't help him.
Slipchuk said nobody becomes a world and Olympic medalist without having some technical ability. "A lot of people tried the quad and a lot of people got downgraded on the quad,'' he said. "A quad is helpful if everything else is good. But it's not helpful if everything else falls apart around it, and that's what we saw today.''
So Buttle soared above them all and finally found his moment in the sun. ":It couldn't happen to a better person,'' Slipchuk said.
"For the last week, he's been feeling like that every day and we knew he had a chance. And he was a convincing win.
"You have skaters go through this sport and there's ones that are always there for you and good for the sport and Jeff is one of them. It's such a deserving title.''
This is a reward for Buttle's year of hard work, overcoming last season when he had a back injury that caused him to miss half of the season.
"It sure shows that Jeff is in the game,'' Slipchuk said. "When you're world champion, you're definitely in the game.''
