Domain Owl

We at Domainowl like to give our fellow webmasters the benefit of the doubt, but here is a situation fraught with question marks.

Silver medal winning men’s figure skater Evgeniy Plushenko famously responded to losing the gold medal in Vancouver last week by trash talking the loss and alleging a poor scoring system.

Plushenko evidently had pinned his hopes of getting a second gold medal on his quad jump. But many observers watching (and the judges too) noticed Plushenko not skating his best and technical errors that sliced the margin advantage to Evan Lysacek, the gold medal winner.

But sore loser Pushenko immediately made statements to the press regarding his wrongful “loss”. Even Alexander Putin reportedly told Plushenko that he had “really” deserved the gold. So yesterday when Plushenko’s website showed his “platinum” medal from Vancouver 2010, many sports and Olympics watchers cried foul. No platinum medal exists, and the implication is clear: the “platinum” medal outranks Lysacek’s gold.

Is this a real beef or just an attention getting (click tricking) website gimmick? The image above shows what the site looks like now, the “Vancouver 2010″ platinum medal prominent. Not many athletes could claim a fake Olympics medal on their website, making us wonder if this webmaster is just trying to grab clicks. But no advertising is shown.

Certainly the American bloggers are up in arms concerning the “platinum” medal, attracting a storm of browsers the Ukrainian skater probably never saw before. Is this a real imbroglio, or merely a device to get stats and then sell the space on Plushenko’s website? Time will tell.