They also won gold medals at Skate America, NHK Trophy, Nations Cup, and Winter Universiade.

Nonetheless, a strange ordinal situation led to them finishing only 3rd in the free dance and dropping to 3rd overall behind the Duchensays and Klimova and Ponomarenko.

Kestnbaum also reported that they skated their program with "intense emotion" and created "an overall aura of Romanticism and uncanniness", using little runs and turns on their toepicks, knee slides, and "sensuous flowing and intertwining movements" that were enhanced by their billowing costumes.

These are passionate, eroticized statues, and the skaters' gazes are focused centripetally into the relationship, at each other's bodies and into each other's eyes".

The next season, they were third at the 1994 European Championships in Copenhagen, behind Jayne Torvill / Christopher Dean and Oksana Grishuk / Evgeni Platov.

Their new free program to a collection of Nina Rota tunes also received negative reviews from fans and judges alike as it was a sharp departure from their previous work, and many critics felt it did not suit their sensual and elegant style.

Upset about the controversial Olympic loss, Usova & Zhulin withdrew from the 1994 World Figure Skating Championships, which they had intended to be their final competitive event.

[citation needed] Usova and Zhulin were known for excelling technically and artistically and according to writer Ellyn Kestnbaum, "leaned toward drama and passion".

[38][39] In 2021, he connected the COVID-19 pandemic to the Black Lives Matter movement and transgender athletes, saying "the world is going to hell".

[40] In 2023, Zhulin attacked American skaters Adam Rippon and Ashley Wagner:[41] We don't care what they think of us.

So I don't give a fuck about their opinion.According to Oleksandra Nazarova / Maksym Nikitin, Zhulin did not contact his former students after they survived weeks of Russia's bombardment of their hometown, Kharkiv, and documented what they had experienced in February and March 2022.

[42] In late March 2022, Zhulin gave an interview to the Russian media in which he dismissed Nazarova and Nikitin as "brainwashed".

[43] Following sanctions announced by Ukraine in April 2023, Zhulin said: "It's like Katsalapov being banned from entering Uganda.