Russian biathletes have long taught us to enjoy small things.
From this point of view, Tuesday became, of course, a holiday: the individual race with two athletes who finished among the top 14, and two more in the top 30, became the first of the women's disciplines at the World Cup, for the final result of which there was no shame.
You can, of course, look at the fifth place of Svetlana Mironova in the individual race, as a lost bronze, for which it was quite possible to fight without a miss in the last or the penultimate shooting.
But it is more logical to just pay tribute to the athlete, who did not slip into depression after all the troubles and failures of the first half of the World Cup, but worthily completed the most difficult of the personal races.
The girl wrote down to her credit the best of all previous performances at the world championships, and at the same time added bonuses to her personal mentor and head coach of the women's team Mikhail Shashilov: she proved that the coach was not mistaken by declaring her in the lineup.
Of course, a light residue remained.
Explaining these or those shooting failures, in biathlon they like to use the word "lottery", but the individual race in this regard stands out nevertheless.
In the sense that sometimes it is wiser to spend extra seconds at the turn than to catch a minute or two of a fine.
After the race, Natalya Sorokina (nee Guseva), the bronze medalist of the 2007 World Championship, spoke about this after the race in an interview with RT: they say, Sveta hurried to shoot at the final turn, but in vain.
She would have reacted a little more carefully to her actions, you see, someone else was happy or upset now in fifth place, and the Russian athlete could finish with a medal.
The day before the women's individual race, I spoke on the phone with eight-time Olympic champion Ole Einar Bjoerndalen.
The legendary Norwegian has been constantly in the position of the China biathlon team isolated from the world for three months.
Talking about how sports life and work are organized now in the Celestial Empire, I noticed that there are not so many top-level biathletes in the country, therefore, every athlete capable of progressing and showing results is treated here very carefully.
“They try to help a person fully develop and realize their own potential.
We have 11 guys in the national team, but in general the team is quite large: five coaches from Europe, four masseurs, a doctor, two translators.
I can say with confidence that very few European countries can boast of such a professional organization of the training process.
In any case, in Norway during the years that I trained myself, there was neither such a professional management, nor such a comprehensive control over the athlete's condition, his workload, statistics, recovery ... ", said Bjoerndalen.
How can we not remember that in sports there are no trifles at the level at which medals are played.
Russia is perhaps the only country that could implement for its athletes no less professional training scheme than China.
But every year, as soon as it comes to the main starts, all sorts of organizational problems, training flaws and internal strife begin to creep out.
A year ago in Antholz, these were the odious statements of the President of the SBR Vladimir Drachev and his constant interference in the decisions of the coaching staff, plus the story of the accreditation of Alexander Kasperovich, which haunts the personal trainer of Alexander Loginov to this day.
Well, now we are trying to understand: why only during the World Cup it turns out that the team did not hold the final training camp where it was planned, and why the head and senior coaches learn about each other's plans and considerations only during the competition and then through the press.
“If I knew that I wasn’t running a sprint, then with such a large absence of starts, it would probably be worth going to the IBU Cup,” Tatyana Akimova said in an interview after the individual race, adding that such a long break in performances definitely played a role in not the most successful performance in Pokljuka.
And it also remains to guess: is it really impossible to build training in such a way that athletes understand in advance what exactly they are preparing for?
Especially when it comes to individual starts.
It would be okay for each of the places in the national team to be claimed by a dozen or two athletes, but in reality there are no more of them than in China.
Why, at the most important stage of the season, the national team is over and over again covered with discord, can to some extent be understood from an interview with the head coach of the women's team Shashilov, which he gave after the pursuit races on Saturday, emotionally saying that eight people in a team are eight regions. eight governors, eight personal trainers with whom many issues need to be constantly coordinated.
The apotheosis of such pressure in the framework of the world championships usually falls on relay races.
Even a more experienced person is not always able to put a barrier in his way.
Although the one who is responsible for the result is simply obliged to do it.
Relatively speaking - to expel outsiders from the locker room, including the head coach, no matter how paradoxical it may sound now.
After all, if we do not give the people working with the team the right to make their decisions, including mistakes, we will never be able to understand what a particular specialist is worth.
The head coach of the Russian national team, Valery Polkhovsky, in fact, can only be regretted.
He became a hostage of the situation as much as those who work directly with the team.
On the one hand, he does not bear any responsibility for the result: the experience of previous years suggests that senior coaches always turn out to be extreme.
On the other hand, it would be naive to expect that, having found himself in the position of chief, a specialist of this level will not try to impose his vast experience of a practical trainer, accumulated in the Soviet years, on his less experienced colleagues in one way or another.
I believe that the extremely unpopular, as it turned out, decision of Polkhovsky to place the team for the final training camp at the height of the stadium also grew out of his “previous” life.
In any case, in one of his not so long conversations with journalists, he explained what it was based on.
“The mountains provide first of all basic training.
It is impossible to joke with heavy loads at altitude, but the very stay in the mountains is already training.
In the good old Soviet times, we proceeded from the fact that an athlete shows his maximum result somewhere on the 13-14th day after the mountains ... ", - said Polkhovsky.
If in Pokljuka everything would have gone exactly according to this scheme, the team would have reached its peak by the very beginning of the World Championship.
But, alas, it didn't work.
The mountains turned out to be different.
Another thing is interesting here.
Attempts by Polkhovsky to interfere in the training process in the status of head coach at different times led to the fact that the specialist was simply removed from the team by will.
This was the case in the Olympic season before the Games in Sochi, when the German specialist Wolfgang Pichler joined the Russian team.
“I worked closely with him for only three months.
Then I was dismissed.
I don't know what happened, but Pichler at some point told me that he would send all the reports to another person.
Accordingly, I stopped delving into his work and did not interfere with it in any way, ”the coach said after a while.
At the same time, Polkhovsky made an attempt to switch to the men's team, which was led by Nikolai Lopukhov, but this, too, was unsuccessful.
“After all, it was I who invited Lopukhov to one of the Moscow biathlon schools, when he was forced to end his coaching career in cross-country skiing,” Polkhovsky recalled. “Then, on my recommendation, he began to work in the national team, responsible for functional training, and then became a senior coach.
And at this stage of my career, I suddenly began to interfere with him.
This became the formal reason for my dismissal: they called me and said that I should not appear in the men's team ... ".
During a long conversation, we realized that the reason for his troubles and failures of that time was a banal misunderstanding of his own role in the team.
He was sincerely convinced that the position of a head coach implies, first of all, the training process, direct work with athletes.
And the leadership of the SBR, headed by Mikhail Prokhorov, meant exclusively managerial functions.
Perhaps the current antagonism between the specialists of the coaching staff, which now and then breaks out, is a link in the same chain.
And this does not mean that someone is a good coach, and someone is not.
Rather, the new leadership of the RBU has not yet managed to build an ideal mechanism for coaching interaction within the team.
Perhaps there was simply not enough time for this.
And the potentially powerful locomotive of the Russian biathlon never managed to pick up speed.