- I won her respect for a very long time ... - We are sitting with Angelica in one of the Moscow cafes (the interview was recorded in March . - RT ) and talking about the synchronized swimming, which she left eight years ago, and the phenomenon of Tatyana Pokrovskaya, who heads the Russian team now 22. - Probably Tatyana Nikolaevna left the most vivid impression in my life as a person. She is very strong, very interesting. If you ignore the sport, I really admire her.

- And if you do not disengage? Hated it?

- No. This has never happened before. We all really wanted to win the Olympics, so after the Games in Beijing, when almost all the strongest left the team, and got into the national team. Me, Alla Shishkina, Dasha Korobova, Sasha Patskevich. We have never been leaders at the junior level, but our goal and desire stood above everything else. There were no problems with discipline, with obedience. We were ready to endure anything. I think Pokrovskaya therefore believed that we would be able to meet her requirements. I generally think that she is a genius. Tatyana Nikolaevna is the very person with whom I would love to talk with my whole life, really. To me, as a woman, she is very impressed.

- Sometimes it seemed to me that all of you, who are in the group for the first year, are not so much separate individuals for Pokrovskaya as some impersonal working units: the girl who stands there, the girl who stands here.

- I understand what you mean. But I really think that the attention and respect of the coach should be earned. Personally, I won Tatyana Nikolaevna's respect for many years.

- What did this manifest?

- The fact that the coach begins to listen to you. You can come up and start some kind of discussion.

- And before that, everything is built on the principle of “Shut your mouth, go work”?

- Well, roughly speaking, yes. Synchronized swimming at the level of the national team is a huge stress and a crazy load, because there are a dozen girls claiming this very place behind each team. Every day I want to give up everything, and this is also normal, because we really have very difficult trainings, some of the most difficult in the world. Who else trains 10-12 hours a day?

- Yes, but at the same time you can be a tenfold champion of the world, and nobody knows you by sight.

- It does not matter when you go to your dream. I wanted to become an Olympic champion, and I didn't care what I had to go through for this.

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Posted by Angelika Timanina (@angelikatimanina) Jun 20, 2019 at 12:12 pm PDT

- Why did you leave in 2015, depriving yourself of a 100% chance of another Olympic gold medal?

- Due to a very serious injury - even before the Games in London she erased the cartilage in both hands. In the Olympic group, Dasha Korobova and I worked on the platform - we threw the girl out in support. I have apparently very thin hands, and about a year or two before the Olympics I injured my wrist. And you had to stay in the first team at all costs. It was not easy, because before those Games Asya Davydova, Nastya Ermakova, Elvira Khasyanova returned to the team and for us young three or four places remained.

I remember that we were at a training camp in Tuapse, and I could not even brush my teeth - any movement with a brush caused wild pain. It was there that Tatyana Nikolaevna told me then: we have the World Cup on the nose, then the Olympics. Therefore, you either endure, or go to the reserve ...

“And you naturally decided to endure ...”

- Yes. For two years, without bandages, she did not enter the water at all, pushing the support all rewound. And after we won the Olympics, Tatyana Nikolaevna gave me the opportunity to skip the season so that I could recover.

- Did you fail to recover?

- I was offered to go to a German clinic and change joints - put on artificial cartilage. But the doctors immediately warned that I, most likely, would not be able to develop arms in the same volume. After all, we have a specific load on the hands in water, a very high sensitivity is required. Therefore, I refused the operation - I treated the hands with needles, Chinese medicine, went to Germany, they did all kinds of procedures there. But, of course, it was not possible to completely restore the hands. And I left. I woke up one day and realized that I no longer want to continue.

- Six months before the Games?

- In addition to injury, then our relations in the team became very complicated. I think one of the reasons was that Tatyana Nikolaevna saw in me a very strong personality. I saw that I honestly work, honestly demand from myself, honestly demand from others, so I began to give me some kind of carte blanche. She could give me some of her powers when she was not in training, for example. And, of course, no one liked it. Neither older nor younger. I’ve never been a soloist, I never performed in a duet, just one athlete from a dozen of them. Upstart.

But at the same time I was much more often than anyone invited to some events, some bright interesting projects. On the other hand, I was specifically engaged in my own promotion, working to ensure that I was somehow allocated from the total mass. For some reason, no one understood this, so the problems started. Being in a team where envy was constantly felt, some continuous underwater games were conducted, was so unpleasant that I finally realized that it was time to finish with synchronized swimming.

- Someone you greatly made happy with your departure.

- Yes, Gel Topilin. There was a unique case: in the team before those Games, Gel was only two years old and right after the Games-2016 she ended her career. This was the shortest time a person was in a team, as far as I know.

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Posted by Angelika Timanina (@angelikatimanina) Aug 20, 2018 at 11:53 PDT

- Two-time Olympic champion Denis Pankratov once admitted that the first after the victory was the idea that the gold medal was not worth the effort that he put into it. He expected that something absolutely grand would happen when he touched the side and became the Olympic champion, but nothing special happened.

- I can say about this that the morning after the Olympic victory in London was the best in my life, and at the same time the worst. On the one hand, you are insanely happy, on the other hand, a tremendous devastation rolls over because you have reached the goal towards which you have gone all your conscious life ... It’s such a ... difficult feeling that it’s not easy to put up with at first. But I can definitely say: it was worth all the effort. The realization that you have mastered this long-term process of hard overcoming yourself is a very cool feeling.

- Your sport is unique in the sense that it doesn’t even occur to anyone that a Russian group can lose. What is it like to go to the start of the Olympics, realizing that you are already five minutes a champion?

“But nobody understands this.” We live, rather, with a constant reminder from the coach that everything is very bad, and all rivals are better than us. It is on this that the result is made, because you really start to believe in it, to see a bunch of mistakes. No other way, unfortunately. Because otherwise you will not jump above your head. And we jump above our heads, every time, every new season.

I can say more: there were a lot of moments when Tatyana Nikolaevna, for example, said what exactly we should do, and we all understood that to realize this is as unrealistic as walking on water or flying. But in the end, we started to do it. Also, by the way, it was with our coolest Olympic support, where Alla Shishkina twisted Sasha Patskevich on one arm. Sasha, we lost every training session, on all runs. But we went to the start, I don’t remember exactly where - either at the pre-Olympic World Cup in Shanghai, or at the Olympics itself - and we did this support.

- How did you manage to control the issue of weight? Sometimes one gets the feeling that synchronists do not have puberty at all.

- It is very difficult to fight puberty. In the junior team, when girls are 17-18 years old, the athletes are weighed every day, controlled every 100 grams. Of course, there are rolls under the pillow, and sweets. But very quickly you begin to realize that you are in that sport where you must first have a certain texture. Everyone who is in the group should be the same, thin, light. When the weight is added, you begin to stand lower relative to the water level, you become slow, slow. We had athletes who flew very seriously for extra weight. They did not eat anything, but imagine what it is like with such loads, there is nothing.

- It happened that they turned off in the water?

“This has happened to me more than once.” In particular, at the Universiade in Kazan in 2013, when we turned off the music. The day before I got sick, the temperature rose and I had to perform on tablets. Replacing me as a team was already impossible, because I was a platform - pushing support. And then we turn off the music, almost at the very end of the program. And this means that you need to go out a second time and the whole combination again. I immediately realized that I was definitely not enough for the second run. Well, of course - ammonia, saving mode ...

- I remember that final very well.

- A bit, I still did not calculate, and at the end of the program, when I was under water upside down, I began to realize that I was losing consciousness. It was impossible to show this: if an athlete “leaves” during a performance, this is immediately minus two points. I was very scared, and some tough internal reserves turned on.

Immediately after the performance, they took me to the ambulance, and the next morning there was another finale. I don’t know how to handle this. This again, to the question of whether our internal reserves are so great: even without consciousness you are doing everything that you must. We are like robots in this regard. Wake up at night, make any program, even without including your head - automatically.

- From one of the synchronists, I heard that the triumph at the Olympics and the financial privileges for the victory largely pay back ...

- Well, what do you, do four million rubles pay for something? For example, we were almost all nonresident. They lived in a dormitory, in the school of the Olympic reserve. Or at the training camp. It was simply impossible to buy an apartment in Moscow for 4 million rubles then - we were not supposed to have any benefits in this regard. Therefore, at some point, I just realized that I did not want to waste my nerves and health for the sake of the medal, which, in fact, I already have. No matter how much money you make in sports, it will still someday run out. What happened next?

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Posted by Angelika Timanina (@angelikatimanina) Sep 26, 2019 at 1:42 PDT

- Not all athletes tend to think about what will happen to them after the sport.

- I always thought about it. Initially, I understood that in life there should be something other than synchronized swimming. Therefore, I wondered in advance what I would do when I finished speaking. When I left the sport, I started some much more active public life, social, social. I graduated from commentator courses in Ostankino, hired a PR man, set out to be recognized in Russia. For me to become a media personality, I could make money on this. It worked. Now my main income is advertising shootings and Instagram.

- Do they often offer you to star without clothes?

- Sure. But my goal from the very beginning was different. I wanted to become such Masha Sharapova from synchronized swimming. Cover the luxury sector, luxury brands such as Dior, Armani. But luxury brands will never work with a girl who is shot naked for the cover of Playboy magazine.

- Why surfing anyway?

“I always wanted to live by the ocean.” When we worked hard in training, I always said that as soon as I was finished, I would leave for the islands and lay on the sand. I directly drew a picture. To some extent, this, apparently, is the moment of professional deformation: we are constantly locked in the dark box of the pool, without the sun, also under water. Surfing has opened for me a whole new world: freedom, the ocean, the sun, you're on the wave, alone with nature ... And no one is standing above you with a stick. I just realized that this is exactly what I need. But since the body had not yet had time to break the habit of training, results, achievements and everything that was somehow connected with this, I was ready to get back into work. And literally a year later she won the Russian championship.

- What was your first experience with the board?

- Very funny. I didn’t succeed, but I quickly realized that any synchronized swimmer or swimmer who starts surfing is doomed to success. We are physically very strong and very good at rowing. In surfing, usually all beginners shout: "Row, row, row, row!" The trainer shouted to me: “Don’t row!” Because as soon as I started rowing, as in training, I so quickly advanced forward that the wave simply could not catch up with me.

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Posted by Angelika Timanina (@angelikatimanina) Sep 5, 2019 at 6:49 am PDT

- Do you set the goal to win the Olympics in this sport?

- On the one hand, surfing is just a hobby for me, I do not perceive it as a professional sport, I do not set any global goals. On the other hand, I really wanted to become the strongest in Russia this year, to select the base and go to the World Cup, where the last selection for the Olympics was to take place. For the sake of this, I trained purposefully for a year. I hired myself a foreign trainer and focused on the result.

At her first World Cup last year, she turned out to be almost by accident - she went there as a spare. As a result, I really selected the national team under the first number, despite the fact that I competed with those who ride for 10, or even 20 years. And if it weren’t for the coronavirus, it’s not known how everything would turn out. Of course, I would like to get to the Games - I always dreamed of visiting Japan.

- Surfing is an expensive pleasure?

- Very. You have to travel all year. There are people who help me, support me, but I organize all trips with my own money.

- Do you feel fear when you are on the wave?

- Sure. If you look at my legs, they are all cut. The best wave rises where shallow, where are the reefs. But you very clearly understand how huge this wave is. If you take the wrong step and fall off the board, you will be beaten to this reef with all the power of water and will be dragged along the washboard. If you hit your head, this is really a deadly number.

- And you are an avid adrenaline rinker ...

- I am really called one of the most fearless Russian surfers. I think this is also from somewhere in my former life, from synchronized swimming. After what we passed there, nothing is scary.

- Is synchronized swimming at least in some form in your life now present?

- No longer. It was cool, I am grateful for everything to the coaches, the team, and I have no regrets about anything. But I don’t want to remember that period of my life anymore.

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Posted by Angelika Timanina (@angelikatimanina) Mar 29, 2018 at 9:49 am PDT