"Either recovered slightly, or overworked with a barbell": Medvedtsev - about Loginov's form and Mironova's mistake

- On the eve of the first start of the World Championship, you said that Alexander Loginov does not look as strong as a year ago.

Did the Mixed Relay confirm your feelings?

- We watched this race very carefully together with my wife Olga (two-time Olympic champion.

 - RT

), and it seemed to both of us that Sasha had grown a little thicker.

There was no sharpness in his movements.

One gets the impression that he did not manage to bring himself to this start.

At the World Cup stage in Antholz, Loginov looked better, but he always runs well there, like many of our other athletes.

But now, it seems to me, he has changed even outwardly.

Either he recovered slightly, or did too much strength work, overworked with a barbell.

And this always leads to a deterioration in speed qualities.

In such cases, the athlete tries to compensate for the lack of speed by shooting, but the shooting does not go, because he lacks functional training.

- Maybe the reason is that due to the pandemic, Loginov was actually isolated from his personal trainer and spent most of the season working alone?

- Maybe.

In biathlon, an athlete constantly needs an outside perspective.

And at the turn, and technically on the track while running.

You need to see how an athlete goes uphill, how he works out certain sections, how he acts at the turn, what mistakes he makes.

Any mistake can be learned very quickly if you don't correct it right away.

- How justified was Loginov's appearance in the relay as a starter?

- I would not like to assess the decisions of the coaches of the national team, since I do not know how the team prepared, what exactly the athletes did during the season and at the final stage, so I’ll just say how I would act based on what I see myself, forming the relay race.

In my understanding, the first stage should have been run not by Alexander Loginov, but by Matvey Eliseev.

There are no better starters in the Russian national team than Matvey.

After all, this is not just a stage at which any athlete can be put.

I remember, for example, how before the Olympic Games in Calgary everything was going to the point that Dmitry Vasiliev would not get into the team.

The head coach of the national team then was Alexander Privalov, and he invited Sergei Chepikov, Yuri Kashkarov to the meeting, and asked me who we see in the team for the remaining place that is.

And then we all agreed that we desperately need a 100% reliable first stage in the relay.

And this is definitely Vasiliev.

At those Games, Dmitry was even given the opportunity to run a sprint race on the eve of the relay so that he could breathe, feel the track, the situation.

- Speaking of reliability, do you mean shooting?

- First of all, her.

Reliable, accurate and fast shooting at the first stage in the relay determines a lot.

There are times when at this stage a person has collapsed, but the rest somehow scrambled out and pull the baton into medals, but this still happens quite rarely.

In order to seriously count on a high result, the first stage must be finished in the top three.

Or at least with a lag of no more than 15 seconds.

- Latypov at the second stage of the relay - the right decision?

- Edward immediately rushed into battle to close the gap, and in the mountains such tactics are extremely dangerous.

Therefore, the athlete was not enough for the finishing circle.

Perhaps such an option should have been envisaged, knowing how gambling Latypov is capable of being in the relay, and put the more experienced Loginov on the second stage.

But if the stage arrangement remained the same as it was in previous years, when women started the mixed relay, Latypov should definitely have been put to the finish line.

- And then it was Svetlana Mironova's turn ...

- Sveta went through the first lap very well, approached Julia Dzhima, shot the first line perfectly.

And on the second lap, in my opinion, she made a mistake - she stood up for the Ukrainian woman and came to the line for her.

But Jim runs very slowly this season.

And it turned out that Mironova just went not at her own pace.

Therefore, at the second frontier, she began to pound to such an extent - there was not enough pulse.

Sveta even said this herself after the race.

If she overtook Jim and continued to work on the track at her own pace, I think she would have succeeded.

At one time, when I was coaching Olga, I constantly repeated: “Never go after anyone.

Not in the pursuit, not in the relay. "

- What is it fraught with?

- For a biathlete, only his own pace is important, in which he can comfortably approach the line.

It's just that this pace must be observed regardless of what is happening around.

Slowing down before reaching the line in order to better rest is the same mistake.

At the Games in Vancouver, I even shouted to Olga from the stock exchange: "Overtake!"

It has a strong psychological effect even on rivals.

They involuntarily begin to think that the opponent is much stronger and more confident than they think.

It is no coincidence that Martin Fourcade always did the same.

Well, after two laps of the penalty, you can't run quickly - the thought that you let the team down and it's all over is pressing too hard.

- In such cases, it doesn't even make sense to talk about the final stage.

- Exactly.

Although the very fact that Ulyana Kaisheva did not manage to bypass the Canadian at the finish circle suggests that the athlete was not functionally ready.

Either at the very last stage of preparation, something was done wrong, or in the two weeks that passed after the previous starts, Ulyana simply went down from the peak of her form, which fell on the World Cup in Antholz.

- In other words, was it a mistake to put Kaisheva on the baton too?

- I didn't say that.

Apparently, the coaches did not have much choice.

And who instead of her?

Larisa Kuklin?

She's not very good at kicking.

I would rather consider Zhenya Pavlova's candidacy.

She is courageous, light, fast both with her feet and in shooting, although, of course, the first thing to look at is the state of the athlete at the time of the start.

And I would most likely replace not Ulyana, but Sveta.

It does not always withstand the stress of the relay.

When I worked in the reserve national team with women, where Mironova ran, I didn’t put her in the team at the European Championships, although according to the results she deserved it.

Now it turns out that for the second world championship in a row Mironova goes to the penalty loop in the relay.

- You once said that you see one of Kaisheva's main problems in the fact that she was overloaded too much when she was a junior.

- And now I can repeat it.

In my opinion, the juniors have been trained a little bit wrongly over the past years.

They were killed by the amount of work, three-week training, which goes one after another with breaks for three to four days.

Everyone who was considered the most talented - Kirill Streltsov, Igor Malinovsky, Karim Khalili - are people who have ate decently to reach the adult level.

In the same way, at one time it happened with Anton Babikov - a bright representative of a generation that was plowed up in juniors and quickly worn out.

Some will say that this is good: if a large amount of cyclic load is added, the athlete begins to grow very quickly in functional terms.

But the trouble is that the body wears out just as quickly.

You need to rest for two or three years in order to recover afterwards.

- I would also add that the generation of today's athletes (with the rarest exceptions) is generally not in perfect health.

- And there is.

As a result, we see that only a few can withstand such a load, the rest begin to "crawl" - they simply have no strength left.

As, in fact, this season Streltsov, Malinovsky, and Khalili were crawling.

- But what about the endless talk that biathletes need to work harder?

- We need to work not more, but more correctly.

Do not get hung up on adding load, and this is what sounds now in all annual reports: “We added, we added, we added ...” At the same time, there is practically no work on speed, on speed endurance.

- Can you gain speed through starts?

- But what if from April to November you don't train speed qualities at all?

It is impossible to recruit them in the remaining four months if preliminary high-speed work has not been done.

The result can only be short-term - there is not enough base for a longer period.

After all, it is no coincidence that in the old days a test cross was mandatory in May, there were always summer test roller ski races.

Now this is not the case, coaches avoid it.

Anyway, you watch the same European Championship, listen to what the mentors say, and you understand that at these competitions it was not at all about performing as best as possible.

Everything was solved by some regional internal problems.

That is why we are losing.

And the same Norwegians are running at once and constantly.

So they are doing something differently?

- Sometimes it seems to me that the generation of Soviet coaches who still knew how to achieve results have almost left the sport in our country.

- And there is.

And in those days everything was much tougher than now.

The only question was about victory.

And the people who worked with the national team understood that victories are made up of little things.

The trouble is that it is very difficult to convey just the little things.

Few people know how.

It seems to me quite indicative that now in many teams of the world there are former world champions and Olympic champions.

That is, people who have not just received a professional coaching education, but can pass on their own experience.

Who have repeatedly passed all the loads through themselves and know the limit beyond which they do not need to step up.

In our country, recommendations for training are given by the analytical center, that is, people who have never run themselves, but looked at sports exclusively from the outside.

Specialized speakers.

My opinion is that such people should not be allowed to the training process and athletes at all, although they usually speak very nicely.

- You will not argue that sport as a science has gone ahead a lot in comparison with the times when you ran.

- You see, what's the matter, the same Privalov or Vladimir Ierusalimsky, with whom I trained myself, relied primarily not on numbers, but on their own eyes and intuition, because even then they knew: biochemistry is not an indicator of whether a person is ready for start or not.

How many times have already happened: all the numbers are in order, but the athlete does not run at all.

Therefore, in my work, I also like to be guided by what I see with my eyes.

- How do you feel about claims like the one that Elena Pidgrushnaya expressed after the finish, complaining that Hannah Oeberg did not allow her to overtake herself on the finish circle?

- Oeberg went first, didn't she?

Therefore, she took the position that she considers the best - this is the law.

There are wider and rather long sections of the track, if you have enough strength - overtake there.

There can be no complaints about the Swede here at all: tactically, she did everything correctly - she cut off the turns, realizing that she had to stay ahead.

It is clear that at the final descent she went along the most knurled section, forcing Pidgrushnaya to go to the right to the fresh snow, where the skis began to roll much worse.

But there’s nothing you can do: if you don’t have enough strength to overtake an opponent in “fresh”, then this is your fate, it happens ...