- Do you need to strive to bring juniors to the adult level as early as possible?
Rafael Harutyunyan: Firstly, it is very competent: the sooner an athlete reaches the top level, the easier it will be for him to start performing tasks of the maximum order. All my coaching experience shows that almost all skaters who entered the adult level early achieved high results there. Therefore, Eteri Tutberidze's actions in relation to Kamila Valieva are clear to me.
Another question is whether the athlete himself is ready for such an exit. And Valieva, in my opinion, is ready: she has a quadruple jump, a triple axel in her arsenal. I do not think that she will immediately begin to show her maximum, but this is not necessary at the moment. Unless, of course, the skater, coach, or parents have the ambition to tear everyone apart right now. In fact, it's very good that Camila got the opportunity to reach the adult level a year before the Olympics, when there is time to understand how she will look there. Especially in terms of the second assessment. Let's be honest: it is impossible to improve the “junior” quality of skiing, to make it mature in a mature way in a few months - it takes years.
Valentin Nikolaev: Ideally, a debutant should be looked forward to. Or he needs to appear so that everyone gasps. How Oksana Baiul appeared at the end of 1992. She could lose in some intermediate tournaments, but her skating, plasticity and musicality caught everyone. Entering the adult level early was part of a long-term strategy. I remember how Galina Zmievskaya was asked why she didn’t put the skater in some qualifying competition, giving the right to go to the world championship among juniors, and the specialist answered: “We have other tasks. We are preparing for the Olympic Games. " In this regard, Galya has always been a great strategist.
Sometimes in junior skating an incredibly successful program catches on, as, by the way, during the last two seasons Valieva had with her Girl on the Ball. But in this case, one must understand: there is no guarantee that the next production will be as outstanding. And then you can lose. The main danger here lies in the desire to catch up and surpass everyone, and at once. To this day, I consider the strategy of Alexei Mishin to be erroneous, when in 1998 he began to speed up the preparation of Evgeny Plushenko so that he would replace Alexei Yagudin, who left the group. An unprecedented excitement was then inflated around this, calling Zhenya's success a breakthrough into the future, but in the end he lost the Olympics in Salt Lake City.
Inna Goncharenko: Every girl has a moment when she enters puberty, and this is, as they say, Pandora's box - you never know what and how will happen to her. Let's say, the growth of bones, for which muscles and ligaments do not keep up, and here it is, an injury. Especially now, when women's skating is oversaturated with the most complex elements. Therefore, everyone wants to get the result before the process begins: to go to the adult level, to declare themselves, to take a worthy place in one or another tournament, to receive some titles and awards. Adult sports are other money, they are sponsors. Show me someone who doesn't want it.
Another question is that while the skater is performing at the junior level, it is quite difficult to predict how she will be perceived as an adult. And everyone, one way or another, strives to be there as quickly as possible. Moreover, the rules allow. According to them, the world champion among juniors has the right to compete in two stages of the adult Grand Prix next season. And not to use it, in my opinion, is stupid. Whether it is necessary to artificially restrain juniors from reaching the adult level so that older girls have the opportunity to skate longer is a big question. From time to time in our sport we hear the idea to create age groups “under 18” or “18+” in women's skating. But is it necessary? I dont know.
Tatyana Tarasova: Talented children need to be given the opportunity to reach the adult level earlier, because sometimes they can do more than adults. Valieva in a year will already have the right to compete in the Olympic Games. In order to count on a high result there, it would be good to be overplayed in this clip now. Why doesn't Camila compete with the elders? Adult competition gives a completely different experience. This is a different level of skill to grow to.
- Do you need to set a task for an athlete to be better than opponents in all competitions in a row?
R. A .: Absolutely not. From a coach's point of view, this is simply illiterate. I, of course, do not exclude the possibility that a person can be prepared so well that he, by default, surpasses everyone else by two heads and he does not need to exert himself beyond measure to win. But this almost never occurs in our sport. This means that you need to set yourself the task of being the first where it really matters. With experience, high-class athletes themselves come to this understanding and learn to calculate their own strength. Therefore, the same Valieva needs now to think about how to correctly build the entire path that she intends to go to the Olympics.
VN: It is not very reasonable in principle to set the athlete the task of maximum order at all starts in a row - it loads the head too much, and for a person performing at a serious level, it is already too busy. The task for an athlete like Valieva should be different - in a smooth lead to the Olympic Games. In Russia, despite the very high competition among girls, you can always choose those tournaments for her that would allow you to skate without excessive stress. But next season, during the same Grand Prix, it will be clear who and how competitive.
To set a goal for Kamila at all costs to beat those who left the Tutberidze group, in my opinion, is not very reasonable. Now Anna Shcherbakova may well do this - she is in the most advantageous position. No matter what they say about Alexander Trusova and Alena Kostornaya, you need to understand a simple thing: in a couple of months, neither one nor the other will skate better, no matter what specialists work with these skaters.
I.G .: If the same Eteri Tutberidze has put together a team whose task is to work for the maximum result, of course, she will strive to ensure that her athletes always win. And every day the coach will prove that her charges remain the strongest, regardless of whether someone leaves the group or not. This is a strategy. If an athlete reaches the Grand Prix level, then she is obliged to show everything that she is capable of, because no one knows whether she will hold out in the next season. There are also other girls.
T. T: If I were now in Tutberidze's place, I might also have a desire to beat everyone, despite the loss of two wards. In general, it seems to me that this is the right desire - to be stronger than others. Another question is that in this way it is impossible to formulate a goal for an athlete. He must perform as well as possible the task that faces him at the current stage. If he does this, he will have a chance to continue performing.
- Where do you see the greatest difficulty of the pre-Olympic season?
RA: This is either an injury or a premature reaching the peak of the form, when a person simply burns out before the start. In other words, it is important not to transfer the athlete either physically or by excessive responsibility.
VN: Very much the hype in the press can interfere. Even adults with good life experiences are seriously affected by it. When they pour into your ears from all sides that you are great, it can be very difficult not to succumb to this. And the person relaxes, begins to sincerely believe that he is holding God by the beard. This is dangerous because constant praise creates a distorted idea of one's own capabilities. And at the first serious failure, he may simply not withstand the blow, psychologically break down.
IG: The difficulty is, first of all, that you never know what will happen at the finish line. On the one hand, it is a big risk to release a girl who has never competed with an adult before in the Olympic season. On the other hand, there was the example of Alina Zagitova, whom Zhenya Medvedeva rolled out for the Olympic gold medal. I pulled it out on myself in the truest sense of the word. In the same way, Valieva is now following Shcherbakova, and someone else will certainly follow her. This is the coach's calculation. We all think about tactics and strategy in one way or another.
T. T .: The Olympic year is always difficult. It is not the same as previous seasons. This is a big responsibility, tougher competition, and psychologically it is absolutely impossible not to think that the Games happen once every four years. If we talk about the next season, it will not be easy for everyone, because there are many strong athletes in Russia. I am sure that neither Sasha Trusova nor Alena Kostornaya will give up their positions. In the same way, I see Zhenya Plushenko has a very strong desire to achieve results, and as a coach, this makes me very happy.
If we talk about training, the difficulty, perhaps, also lies in doing what you need to do, not what you like. It's hard, but it's impossible to win without it.
- If the age limit is revised upward after the Games in Beijing, will it be necessary to strive to ensure that girls at the age of nine perform all triple jumps?
RA: I don't think they will raise their age. This is unprofitable for Russia, and they listen to our country at the international level. But if we talk about early specialization, this is a good thing. Children are light, everything is easier for them. Another question is that you need to work with them very carefully: how correctly the child is taught to jump directly depends on whether he will break his legs and injure his hip joints when jumping. It is important to preserve the body's resource as much as possible so that the skater is able to skate when he grows up.
You can train in such a way that the athlete will overtake everyone, but will exhaust his resource very quickly. And you can achieve a performance at a high level for as long as he wants. But this is more difficult. It is necessary to find the right approach to strengthening the musculoskeletal system, to the number of quadruple jumps, especially toothed jumps, which put excessive stress on the foot. That is, to ensure that you can do everything that you have to, but with minimal energy and physical costs. This is the kind of work I do with my athletes.
VN: Specialization at nine years old, in my opinion, is the wrong thing. The child still has no brains at this age - any pediatrician, pediatric teacher or child psychologist will tell you. You can look at the experience of the general education Waldorf school, where in the first four years students lag far behind the level of a regular school. And they finish it with a colossal margin. There, for example, they do not study the exact sciences with small children, because a child, up to a certain age, thinks in images.
Figure skating is the same exact science if the training process is not training. If at an early age there is a continuous race for survival, children simply break down. And the worst thing is that they break down psychologically, and for a very long time. This is exactly what happens when a child wants to ride and he is told that he is not fit.
So I am not a supporter of early specialization in general. What for? To create a conveyor belt of stars? Will not work. A conveyor is when, at one end of the production, you load 10 tons of metal, a certain number of wires, lamps and other parts onto a belt, and at the other end you get 15 machines with the required characteristics. If, out of 10 tons of metal, 14 defective machines come out and only one meets the declared standard, this is not a conveyor, but an unprofitable production. It is clear that only a few become champions in sports, the rest are eliminated in one way or another. But they should leave with minimal losses.
IG: I think that early specialization is useful. If triple jumps are already a thing of the past and you need to learn more complex elements, it is more relevant to start learning earlier. It's like in a general education school: once the first graders came at eight, then at seven, and now six-year-olds go to school already knowing a foreign language, or even more than one. And children are sometimes tested in two languages. The criteria, the set of items are changing. So it is in figure skating. One cannot expect that quadruple jumps will be canceled and everything will return to the old times. This process can no longer be stopped.
T. T .: The abilities of those girls who are skating now are ahead of those of the previous generation. And so it will be. I go to training every day, I see small children jumping, and I understand that this process, when a child starts to try quadruple jumps at the age of 12, cannot be stopped. These skaters are different. They have been skating since they were four, doing choreography and general physical training every day. But nobody forces them to work like that, they strive for it themselves. Therefore, they grow. And coaches grow with them.