My profile:
Koji Sasahara / AP
Slutskaya in Tokyo in December
While the duo look set to lead Russia to a historic sweep of the four titles, skating officials will hope that memories of the 2002 pairs judging scandal will finally be buried when the sport's revamped scoring method makes its Winter Games debut.
Russia captured all four golds at last month's European championships, and there is little to suggest the nation will not repeat the feat at the Palavela rink.
Slutskaya and Plushenko, both silver medalists at Salt Lake City four years ago, are primed to collect the only golds missing from their impressive collections.
World and European champions Tatyana Totmyanina and Maxim Marinin have set their sights on the pairs title, while Tatyana Navka and Roman Kostomarov are the favorites to claim the ice dance crown.
Slutskaya won an unprecedented seventh European women's title in Lyon and could again skate into the record books by becoming the first Russian to win her Olympic discipline.
Despite the country's dominance of figure skating, the women's Olympic crown has, surprisingly, always eluded them. Slutskaya's second-place finish behind Sarah Hughes in 2002 was the first time a Russian woman had ever claimed a silver.
If Slutskaya's health holds up, she is unlikely to be beaten in Turin since her closest rivals, Americans Sasha Cohen and Michelle Kwan, have so far been unable to match the Moscovite's complex routines.
"It's hard to say how I feel about the Olympics ... because you never know what's going to happen," said the 26-year-old, who has her next birthday on the eve of the Games on Thursday and has been plagued by illness the past two seasons. "All I know is that it's ice and it's very slippery."
After recovering from the groin injury that wrecked his chances of claiming a fourth men's world crown last March, Plushenko has been in stupendous form this season despite being laid low by flu in January.
The 23-year-old dragged himself out of his sickbed to produce the performance of the week with an explosive free skate to capture his fifth European crown in seven years, easily beating world champ Stephane Lambiel.
Having chosen to curtail his schedule to preserve his best form for Turin, he easily won the three events he entered in the run up to the Olympics.
"I've given up everything that may get in the way of my Olympic aim. I've even decided I won't drink a single drop of alcohol before the Games. Neither beer, nor champagne -- nothing," Plushenko said in an interview.
Plushenko's closest challenger is likely to be Swiss spin master Lambiel, although he will have to keep his nerves in check to avoid repeating some bizarre mistakes he has made in competitions this season.
The adjudication will also come under scrutiny in Turin as the International Skating Union has adopted a new accumulative-points system to avert any replay of the 2002 scandal.
Following French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne's admission she deliberately underscored Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier to favor Russian rivals Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, the arcane 6.0 scale was consigned to the scrapheap after the 2004 world championships.
A new, computer-based system secretly selects nine of the 12 judges whose scores will count, then discards the highest and lowest marks. The seven scores are then averaged.
