“We'll have to redo the sections on all skis”: Kaminsky on fluorine-containing lubricants, Volkov’s working methods and values

- While the election passions continue to rage in the Russian biathlon, I want to ask you a purely professional question: now they are very actively talking about the fact that in connection with the new rules, excluding lubricants containing fluorine, skiers can have very big problems. How true is this statement?

- Any change in the established rules entails some kind of restructuring. And in this situation, not just the rules are changing, but the moving material is changing. I read somewhere that, according to some estimates, speeds will fall to 15%.

- Do you agree with this statement?

- It greatly depends on the temperature in the street. In warm weather, fluoride lubricants work much better than formulations made from saturated hydrocarbons. The colder the less noticeable the difference. In some conditions, it is generally nothing, though in such conditions they no longer run. That is, in warm weather there can be problems with the rejection of fluorine, but there are silicone and molybdenum additives that can partially solve these problems. So I would not speak about 15%, but about five. Maybe even less.

- In other words, the audience may not notice the difference at all?

- Definitely. What is five percent? This is five percent on the descent. And when the athlete walks along the plain or in the ascent, he also pushes energetically. But you need to understand that the transition to other lubricants will entail certain changes in technology: repulsive angles, other parameters will probably change a little. Most likely, the push will become longer. Structures, these notorious stein sections, can definitely change, because even a minimal difference in speed will entail a change in the depth of the furrows, their configuration. I do not exclude the possibility that it will be necessary to redo the sections on all skis, except for very frosty options. Honestly, I didn’t particularly analyze all this - I voiced the first thoughts that come to mind.

- Have you already managed to understand how things are with the stein shifts in the Russian biathlon?

- So far I am absorbed in more priority issues. But we know that at the World Championships many athletes said that they experienced some problems in warm weather. Honestly, I was surprised: in my Kazakhstani team, many also ran on the Fishers, and, as you know, they give them not the best skis. But such difficulties were not observed. What happened to the Russian team, I do not understand.

- The version that the athletes might have been trivial not ready for the main start, are you not considering? It’s always easier to switch the arrows to the service, as Alexander Bolshunov did last season, who lost the Ski Tour because he himself chose the wrong pair of skis for the classic race.

- I did not speak on this topic either with Bolshunov, nor with his coach Yuri Borodavko, nor with the lubricants, so I am not ready to discuss what exactly happened there. But purely for that weather, the choice of skis was a fortune-telling on coffee grounds. The likelihood that it will snow was initially misjudged. Who appreciated it - the athlete himself, the coach or the oilers, does not matter: this is a mistake that can happen to everyone.

As for skating skis, which are run in the biathlon, it should not be so that the skis go clearly worse, so the requirements for the quality of preparation of equipment are increasing. By the way, there are such statistics that I once took from biathlon, and I kept repeating to skiers all the time: if you have not twenty skis, then you will most likely not be in the top ten. Only elite athletes can get into the top ten on poor lubrication.

- It is customary to explain all the ski successes of recent years by the fact that the president of the FLGR Elena Vyalbe found a very successful format of work when several coaching teams within the team constantly and very fiercely compete with each other. If this model is really functional and gives a guaranteed result, then is there no point in introducing this in biathlon?

- In fact, competition has never harmed anyone. How exactly it is organized - it depends on the specific situation. In my sprint group, when I worked in Russian skiing, there was sometimes such intense internal rivalry between the athletes that people who were friends in ordinary life could not talk to each other for some time. I think the reason for our ski success lies primarily in the methodological plane, and then in the psychological one.

As for biathlon, the idea, of course, is interesting in order to increase competition in this way, but this question is probably not for me. Inside the men's team, we already have Karim Khalili, who partially trains with Yegor Sorin, there is Alexander Loginov, who works according to individual plans, there is Matvey Eliseev, who also wants to try something different - please, here’s the opportunity for you to compete, manifest yourself .

- Nevertheless, a model was always practiced in biathlon, when athletes, getting into the national team, train under the guidance of the head coach and according to his plans. And I must admit that I’m far from the idea that a dozen people are able to train equally and demonstrate equally high results.

- Well, the same French are training as a team and give results. It seems to me that is not the point. And the fact that in our country athletes sometimes stupidly carry out the tasks of the coach, not thinking too much about how this thoughtless implementation rests on the features of their body. And if the result does not work, the trainer is, of course, to blame. I will not say that this is exactly how things are in biathlon, but for some reason it seems to me that I'm not far from the truth.

- I would have formulated a little differently: most Russian athletes are sacredly convinced that it is the coach who is obliged to make them result.

- I agree, most often it happens. But on the other hand, a lot depends on the climate in the team. It is important that the athlete, on the one hand, clearly perform the task, but most importantly, that he understands where he is going with the coach. That is, he was not a wordless creature that first stupidly performs all the loads, not understanding what he is doing and why, and then shrugs his hands and complains about the lack of an individual approach. This is probably the responsibility of the coach: to organize an atmosphere in which athletes would like to bring something of their own to the work.

- Your current position in the team involves more organizational work, or coaching?

- First of all, coaching. Determination of the methodological direction. On the other hand, since we don’t have a head coach, we also have to take on the organizational part of the work. And regarding the methods, it seems quite logical to me that skiers appear in the biathlon. Today, the functional, that is, skiing, still determines the result: with fairly good shooting, our athletes today primarily lose in running speed. Perhaps that is why I turned out to be the head coach of the Russian national team, and not the narrow specialist who is responsible for the functional training.

- The late Valery Lobanovsky, famous for his exorbitant loads, once said: “I can understand when a player misses the goal, but cannot be such that he is not able to run across the field all 90 minutes of the match.”

- It is right. But here, of course, we must take into account the biathlon specifics. In other words, to train not a specific skier, but a shooting skier, and shooting accurately.

- Didn’t you think that for biathletes you are the same Varangian that Wolfgang Pichler was at one time? Everyone recognized his coaching merit when he worked with Magdalena Forsberg, but as soon as he started working in the Russian biathlon, a huge opposition immediately started. You have not encountered a similar one yet?

- Well, now we are all at a distant distance from each other. But seriously, the first thing I did was start interacting with personal trainers. This has always been one of my main principles when I worked in cross-country skiing.

- To seek additional support from personal mentors?

- Not. First of all, for the reason that no one knows the athlete better than a personal trainer, especially if the trainer has been working with a person since childhood. Close contact makes it possible to obtain information that sometimes you will not get from anyone, no scientific data will provide knowledge of some of the nuances. This is especially true of psychophysiological characteristics, reactions that no device can catch, but which a personal trainer sometimes knows about and can tell about.

Moreover, now we all find ourselves in a situation where the role of a personal trainer has increased many times: if they had not provided training before, but simply sent the athlete to training camps, now they are actively involved in training and are the vehicles of the ideas that we have outlined. Whether they oppose it or not depends on many factors. Including how lucidly I can explain my ideas, and how much people will believe in them.

- I know that the current president of the RBU Vladimir Drachev persuaded you to come to biathlon for three months, under which the chair is now swaying very much. Are you ready for the fact that if he is not re-elected, you will have the stigma of a man put into power by the former leadership?

- Coaching is such that you need to constantly be prepared for everything. On the other hand, Alexei Nuzhdov persuaded me to go to biathlon two years ago - he wanted me to work with the guys in his club. There were other proposals that I could not accept, because I was bound by certain obligations with the Kazakhstan team.

- At the very beginning of your work as a head coach, you said that you have several plans for summer training. What is the situation now and how great is the prospect that full training work will finally begin?

- Training work has already begun with us, that is, the athletes are working according to the plans that we have developed with the coaching team. We control this work, conduct video conferences where athletes report, throw off information to Artyom Istomin, there is a common group where all information is constantly updated, we monitor this. I can say that working on the Internet is much harder than working with an athlete in direct contact.

- And when is it planned to bring the team together?

- We would like to do this at the very beginning of July in Rybinsk, but it all depends on the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare, which, as they say, should make real demands. We had another problem - with an in-depth medical examination of athletes. We are obligated that they all undergo UMO (in-depth medical examination. - RT ), and the person must lose from eight to ten days: come to Moscow, pass the coronavirus test the next day, then sit in quarantine for seven days, then go through UMO , and only then, on the tenth day, to go home. It turns out that for a week and a half people will be virtually immobilized. That is, all the work that has already been done will go down the drain.

- And what about?

- We have already made a proposal for UMO to be rescheduled until the situation stabilizes. There is also the problem of weapons: athletes must receive rifles in the regions, but in some regions they do not give out weapons due to quarantine. Therefore, we are trying to launch a solution to all these issues as soon as possible.

- Is there no risk that the World Cup stages will be canceled due to the pandemic in biathlon?

- The International Biathlon Union has already announced that from the end of November all the starts envisaged by the calendar remain valid. Some Russian competitions, too, I hope, will be held.

- Will the selection criteria for the national team change?

- I’m not ready to talk about this topic, I just don’t own the situation.

- When Nikolai Lopukhov worked in the biathlon team, he was very proud of his team, which included Maxim Tsvetkov, Anton Babikov, Dmitry Malyshko ...  Now, none of these people are actually in the team. Does it not seem strange to you that the generation that was called the gold disappeared so quickly?

- Sure. Experienced athletes can bring many benefits to the team. Even in the youth and junior teams with which I worked, I always tried to make the athletes learn from each other some experience. Another question is that at the forefront in the selection criteria for the national team should not be former sports achievements and not age. And the result and the desire to improve.

- So you don’t think that young people are dear to us everywhere?

- Of course not. Artificial rejuvenation was repeatedly used in a variety of sports, and rarely yielded results.

- While you were skiing, who were you rooting for in biathlon?

- Now I can say, because this athlete is no longer performing. This is Alexey Volkov.

- Why such a choice?

- Because Volkov is a biathlete who could control the peloton thanks to accurate and fast shooting. Anton Shipulin's trainer Andrei Kryuchkov once told how Martin Fourcade approached him at one of the World Cup stages and asked why Volkov was not put on the baton. They began to explain to him that Volkov was not too well prepared, then this and that, and Fourcade listened to all this and said: “In vain. When Volkov runs, no matter what state he is in, the peloton is very worried and twitches. ”

The meaning of Martin’s comment was that if you didn’t immediately run away from Volkov, he would leave the firing line very quickly. Therefore, many of those who do not shoot very well try to run to the firing line as quickly as possible and, of course, drive themselves, so they are morally killed by Alexey’s ability to shoot quickly. In my understanding, Volkov is a real biathlete in the sense that, not possessing excellent functional data, he managed to compete with the leaders. I am very pleased, by the way, that now Volkova was involved in working with the national team. I think it will bring many benefits.

- If you were offered to return to skiing, would you consider such a prospect?

- Not anymore.