Evan Lysacek says men's skating has X Games appeal

• Four-rotation jumps are among sport%27s most difficult skills
• Lysacek says most people don%27t think of skating as being dangerous
• He says he%27s healthy%2C preparing for run-up to Sochi Olympics

OMAHA – The X Games might want to consider adding what Evan Lysacek calls the most extreme and dangerous sport to its line-up. No, not some crazy big air competition or one that involves a snowmobile on a halfpipe.

All it takes is two skates, some ice, a sprinkling of sequins and perhaps a little "Carmen" or "Swan Lake." Yes, figure skating.

"People easily identify a snowboarder or an aerial skier as extreme, dangerous even to the point of death-defying tricks they're doing, but they don't necessarily identify a skater as that and what we're doing is much more dangerous if you're just basing it on rotation alone," Lysacek, the 2010 Olympic champion, said Sunday.

"The truth is the skills and tricks that the best guys in the world are doing are the most extreme tricks of any sport on any apparatus in the world. Am I wrong – 1,440 degrees of rotation is a quad. What other sport does that? Maybe a few divers did that in London off a three-story dive, but we're doing it on two feet."

Lysacek has a point, one further underscored by the number of the world's top male skaters who are landing quads at a dizzying rate. In Saturday's European championships, Spain's Javier Fernandez landed three quads in his free skate to win the title. The top four men in the competition nailed eight quads total.

In comparison, Americans only landed three quads cleanly during this past Grand Prix season. In 2010, Lysacek won Olympic gold without doing one quad.

Despite the emphasis on the four-rotation jump, he said, "It's still about clean skating. For every quad you do if you make a mistake on another element, you have negated that quad. The margin for error in men's skating is zero."

Lysacek, 27, hasn't competed since his gold-medal winning skate. His comeback bid was derailed by a groin injury early in the season, then surgery for a sports hernia in mid-November. He plans to work on having two quads in his long program. He withdrew from the U.S. championships, but is training full-time to resume his push for next year's Sochi Olympics. He said Sunday he's completely healthy and if nationals had been three weeks later, he would have competed.