"There is no point in crying": Kolesnikov on strong emotions, gold medals, finishing touches and stupid purchases

His career is one continuous paradox.

In the spring of 2019, Kliment Kolesnikov underwent a rather difficult operation, after which, as it was believed, the swimmer had to miss the season.

Instead, he flew to Gwangju for the World Championships and won three medals there.

Kolesnikov won two more medals at the Games in Tokyo and, despite the fact that none of these awards became gold, Clement is still confident that fate has ordered him absolutely right.

- Shortly before the Games in Tokyo, you said that the Olympic tournament will not differ much from any other.

To what extent did your expectations coincide with reality?

- At the minimum number of percent out of a hundred.

First of all, I expected my own maximum calmness.

But as soon as you really realize what the Olympic Games really are, in principle, no peace of mind remains.

When Zhenya Rylov and I swam the 100-meter distance on our backs, and I took second place, there was a feeling that I had broken through some kind of inner barrier in my head.

- In what sense?

- Only at that moment the realization of myself as an athlete came to me.

Who I am, what I have achieved ... There were a lot of new emotions and I can say for sure that I had never experienced anything like this before.

The main thing is that a new motivation has appeared, including in training.

Before the Games, I reasoned rather primitively: they say, I will go out as usual, I will show myself ... We are not an evaluative sport, but there are numbers, looking at which it is not so difficult to form a general picture before the competition: what is ready for myself, what are others ready for.

In Tokyo, of course, I expected to get on the podium.

And he was really happy that he got there.

But…

- Was there something wrong?

- There was great devastation.

After all, you have been preparing for the Olympics for many years, and then you swim your 100-meter distance in a minute, you get what you went for, and, one might say, you stop understanding what to do next.

- Many fans and journalists, including, expected Olympic gold from you.

- As a result, I fought for him.

- But they stayed second.

Although, it turns out that you are lucky: having lost to Rylov, you thereby retained a much more powerful motivation.

After all, Olympic gold brings an athlete much more devastation - up to depression and a nervous breakdown.

- Yes it's true.

Interestingly, before the Olympics, I read quite a lot about the psychological problems that Michael Phelps faced after each of his Olympics.

And he could not understand in any way: what problems can a person have, who won everything that is possible, and who has everything?

But Michael really was at some point on the verge of suicide.

And after Tokyo, I very clearly understood what you said: that an Olympic gold medal is really capable of pushing a person to a nervous breakdown.

Because it is the highest achievement that an athlete can have, and at the same time, the end of life.

Because there is nowhere higher, only down.

And you really don't know what to do with it.

Therefore, already now I think about the Games in Paris with some apprehension.

Still counting on gold ...

- How do you manage not to get upset by losing?

- I am upset.

But this is not anger at the opponent.

Rather, the annoyance that he himself was not good enough.

Did something wrong during the course, not so well prepared.

All this happens precisely because I do not like to lose in principle.

It so happened that, starting from the junior age, I won for the most part.

And I got used to victories.

At the same time, defeats do not put pressure on me psychologically.

Lost - no big deal.

I love to train, I work a lot and I know that this work cannot but bring results, plus I am not at the end of my career and I can do a lot of other things.

Have you ever cried over defeat?

- Yes, when I was little.

I actually cried a lot, now it's even funny to remember all this.

- Why?

- Because there is no point in these tears.

Strong emotions are, rather, to the detriment of the athlete, because you can strongly drive and never get out of this state.

Therefore, I now take any of my results for granted.

- In addition to silver in backstroke, you won bronze in the 100-meter freestyle in Tokyo - a distance that has always been positioned in swimming as a completely separate world with its own fairly narrow circle of heroes and legends.

And then you appear and, as it were, in between times climb to the pedestal.

Is this a special distance for you, or is it one of them?

- Not to say that I somehow deliberately tried to swim a hundred meters before the Olympics, but just in the Olympic season it turned out that the greatest progress I made was in the freestyle sprint.

And without thinking twice, my coach and I decided to qualify for the Games at this distance too.

Well, after the European Championships in Budapest

Kolesnikov swam there 100 m freestyle for 47.37, setting a continental record

  desire to compete in the “hundred” for the Olympic podium only intensified.

In general, I can count on fingers when I was so strongly charged to fight for a medal.

- In other words, didn't that sprint bronze come as a surprise?

- For me, definitely not.

- I know that before the Tokyo Games, the head coach of the Russian national team was very much afraid that you would not have enough strength for all the declared distances.

Don't you think now that it was worth giving up some starts?

- Not.

Since childhood, I have been accustomed to swimming everything that is possible.

And he swam 800 meters freestyle, and 400 complex and 200, and even 200 breaststroke.

I was looking for myself.

- At what moment did you find it?

- Well, just when I came to the 100-meter backstroke and freestyle.

As for the number of distances in Tokyo, I was well prepared, confident in myself, and in this case, there is no need to doubt anything.

- Can you imagine yourself swimming a marathon distance?

- Never!

Never in my life will I swim for a time something longer than one and a half kilometers.

- Psychologically, back and freestyle are the same training work, or does switching from one style to another become emotional relief for you?

- When you constantly swim in one style, it gets boring, although the coaches try to diversify the process as much as possible.

In this regard, I am quite stress-resistant: the monotony of work does not cut me down.

That is, the head does not get tired from the load, only the body gets tired.

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- For some reason, freestyle, like backstroke, is associated with the work of a tightrope walker in a circus, where a very precise sense of balance is at the forefront.

- And you know, probably it is.

It is no coincidence that when athletes begin to professionally crawl, they are taught to mentally build a straight line in front of them, beyond which the hand should not go in the stroke.

If you start to rake a little more to the side, the body turns more, accordingly, the resistance increases and you get tired faster.

If you take swimming on your back, certain angles must also be maintained between the body and the hand, between the forearm and the hand.

Although each athlete's sense of balance is strictly individual.

- During the competition, do you also control all movements, or are they performed automatically?

- In my case - almost completely on the machine.

Not so long ago I caught myself thinking about almost nothing during the course.

I try to feel the water - that's all.

I float like with the flow, without getting hung up on any technical issues.

- After you underwent surgery in the spring of 2019, removing a blood clot from the subclavian vein, few people assumed that you would perform at the World Championships.

You not only went to Gwangju, but you won three medals there.

How is this possible?

- I think that the fact that I initially had a very good technical and functional base, which had been accumulating over the years, played a role.

And we prepared very seriously for the World Cup.

Well, then, when the diagnosis was made and I had to undergo surgery, I was lucky in a certain sense: everything went very easily and well.

They did bypass surgery, and I didn't even need general anesthesia: I lay on the operating table and watched all the surgical procedures on the screen.

It was fun.

- How long did it take to restore your condition?

- I started to swim after one and a half to two weeks.

Therefore, I arrived in Gwangju in my usual state.

The only thing that didn't work for me there was a start at a distance of 50 m, my leg jumped off.

At that world championship, the organizers made plastic platforms more slippery than usual.

I used to start from the highest possible position, and in that final, apparently, I wanted to tear everyone up so badly that I bent down a little more and my leg slid down.

I swam to swim, took third place, but it was a shame.

- Have you ever lost glasses in water?

- Not.

Here swimming trunks once flew off, when the little one was swimming in CSKA with a 100-meter complex.

That was scary.

Really wildly scared, but he managed to catch his swimming trunks and put them on again.

- You overcame the hundred-meter distance in Gwangju with the third time, losing 0.02 seconds to Evgeny Rylov.

And exactly the same amount lost to him in Tokyo in the fight for gold.

Two hundredths at the Olympic level - is that a lot or a little?

- It's nothing at all.

Very little.

To make the repulsion a little harder, and there would be no difference.

But after the fact, I never gnaw myself on this matter.

You always swim as hard as you can.

- During training, swimmers usually work out starts and turns, but does the finish touch require working out?

- We are always working on this. Firstly, at this level, you must have a certain number of strokes on each segment, and counting these strokes, we can confidently say that you will hit the finish line. And, secondly, you can touch the wall in different ways. You can just throw your hand in the same way as you swam, or you can give an additional impulse with the body in the finishing stroke to get acceleration. The one who knows how to do this usually wins in case of equal rivalry. I try to do roughly the same thing when I swim on my back: I unfold my body more than usual, and I carry my hand along a wider trajectory. I will not say that this gives any very big advantage, but 0.1 seconds by touching it is quite possible to win back. And one-tenth in our sport sometimes decides a lot.

- Against the background of a fairly large number of medals you won this season, how valuable are Abu Dhabi's awards?

- If we talk about our victory in the 4x100 m freestyle relay, it brought a lot of emotions.

Like any relay race, actually.

Personal victories do not give such emotions - there you abstract too much from everything around.

And there are no such strong experiences either.

- Commenting on the relay race, Vladislav Grinev said: they said, they expected that Kolesnikov would jump into the water and bring everyone half a hull.

- Well, yes, it was.

So recently it turned out that I was jumping into the water in relay races and took the first stroke on a par with the best, or even a little further.

Here I jumped and saw that an American was swimming to the left and slightly ahead of me, and an Italian to the right.

It didn’t knock me down, but it didn’t come off either.

After all, you can never guess in what form rivals will approach one or another competition.

This is the thrill of the relay.

- What is more valuable for you in terms of life and sports experience - victory or defeat?

- Defeats, definitely.

They make you think, make you look sensibly at a lot of things, I would say.

After all, you immediately begin to analyze: why is someone swimming faster than yourself?

By what means?

How can you improve your own result?

What's wrong with the technique?

Some defeats help them not to catch a star - I know such examples.

Although some catch with defeats.

- Commercial tournaments of the International Swimming League (ISL) - is it fun for you, or just a job?

- In short, it's a thrill.

There is no tension, the whole atmosphere evokes a feeling of warmth, coziness and absolute inner comfort.

Everyone knows each other well, and there is absolutely nothing to share.

It's like running a race in training: whoever is the last is a fool.

- But you can reason differently: every defeat is lost money, isn't it?

- In this respect, I have never had a feeling of envy towards those who win more often than me.

What he worked for, he earned, as they say.

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- Do you have any dream related to money?

- No, I never thought about it seriously.

Sometimes it jumps in my head that if you earn a lot, you can buy a super-mega-cool house, and it would be cool.

But then you think: why do you need it?

Naturally, I look into some kind of my own future, but it makes no sense to make plans while you are in sports.

You can think as much as you like about the future Olympics, and then - once, and get sick.

Therefore, in a sense, I live for today.

And money comes and goes.

The main thing is to be able to dispose of them correctly.

Do not waste on all sorts of trifles.

- Have you never had to make stupid purchases?

- Oh yeah.

I once bought myself an electric bike.

In general, I had a lot of stupid purchases, but I never regretted the money spent, because every time I got a high from the purchase.

Later I asked myself the question: "Well, damn it, why not?"

And he answered himself: "Well, you wanted to?"

It's just that the bike was really the stupidest thing ever.

I bought it in 2019 and only managed to sell it now.

It weighed 60 kg, had a motor and could accelerate to one hundred kilometers per hour.

It was so cool to think about how I would ride it ... But it turned out that there was no one to boast to anyone, because everyone who is able to appreciate this coolness of mine either lives in other cities or is busy with their own business.

As a result, I went once on this bike to training and back, and then winter began ...