“Only the place matters, not the records”: Moskvina on the work of judges, Boikova’s mistake, pressure from the Olympics and competition

- After your two duets performed absolutely brilliantly in the final of the European Championship, I caught myself thinking: what a pity that one of the couples is obviously doomed to lose.

Have you ever experienced similar emotions at competitions?

- I always leave the result at the mercy of the arbitrators.

It is their job to determine the final alignment.

It is completely pointless to try to figure out who will bet and what, especially since the panel of judges is different every time.

Therefore, our coaching work with Artur Minchuk comes down to giving the judges the opportunity to choose, but at the same time both of our duets turned out to be as high as possible.

For this, in fact, we involve a variety of specialists in the work.

— Alexandra Boikova and Dmitry Kozlovsky spent quite a lot of time in Novogorsk this season, working with Nikolai Morozov.

Was it your initiative or the desire of the students?

— Initially, the idea belonged to me.

We purposefully searched for a dance coach who would give the guys a short program and work on the expressiveness of step changes.

That is, above the second estimate.

This specialist turned out to be Morozov.

He staged the program, and in general, Sasha and Dima liked working in Novogorsk.

In St. Petersburg, they mostly ride with juniors, but there was a more mature and interesting team of athletes.

- Kozlovsky admitted at a press conference that constant and very high competition is always a medal about two sides.

It not only moves the athlete forward, but also emasculates him psychologically.

Do you have to take measures to reduce the degree of rivalry within the group?

- In training, the guys do not ride together - they only cross paths at competitions.

It was like that from the very beginning: it was more convenient for us to work with these two couples separately, in different groups.

Therefore, it is difficult for me to say which of the skaters to what extent is subject to thoughts of competition.

- And if you remember your skaters of the past years, who reacted most painfully to the rivalry?

- No one.

There was, for example, a period when Oksana Kazakova/Artur Dmitriev and Elena Berezhnaya/Anton Sikharulidze skated with me.

I knew that the girls did not like each other too much, but at the same time, both pairs always trained side by side, on the same ice, and not once did any of the athletes express dissatisfaction about this.

- It turns out that it is harder with girls in this regard?

- I can't say that.

All situations are different, and no one has yet invented a device that allows you to measure the voltage within a group.

- In your opinion, is work more productive on the same ice or on different ones?

- When athletes look at each other, they always start to compete, they try to do something better, to get ahead of their rivals in some way, this is noticeable.

But this is just a normal process.

In my opinion, this is how all business in the world works, no matter what its area.

The same Apple company pulled ahead in the computer technology market primarily because it wanted to get ahead of its competitors.

And I'm just sure that the intelligence officers of the leading companies have access to all the information in their professional field.

- Do you want to say that you also try to follow what is happening in the groups of competing coaches?

— Everything is easier with this for us: we very often intersect, and this allows us to compare our work with someone else’s, see the positive and negative sides, and adjust our own training.

I think it has always been very successful for me.

- While the old grading system was in use in figure skating, the tandems of your skaters were perceived as absolutely equal in class.

Now Mishina and Gallyamov are not only noticeably ahead of their rivals in terms of basic difficulty, but are also the current holders of all the highest titles, with the exception of the Olympic one.

Do you at least mentally separate your athletes by class?

- As for the basic difficulty, I want to note that Mishina and Gallyamov jumped their most difficult cascade even before they came to my group from the most experienced specialists - Lyudmila and Nikolai Velikov. That is, this is not the situation that I taught some athletes something, but not others. And besides, I really do not think that Boikova and Kozlovsky are less competitive. We all the coaching staff make a lot of efforts to ensure that the strengths of our athletes are equal.

If an opponent performs more complex elements, this does not mean at all that he cannot be beaten by quality or a second mark.

Another issue is that you can never predict what the result will be.

Each athlete in this regard is like a black box.

What will be in this box depends on many factors: mentality, motivation, well-being, mood ... Or are you trying to convince me that our athletes were not well prepared for the tournament?

Also on russian.rt.com “We are proud that we have overcome ourselves”: Boikova and Kozlovsky - about the free skate, an incident with a partner and life in Novogorsk

- In no case.

It's just that now there is a lot of talk about the fact that one of your couples is guaranteed to go to the Olympic team tournament, but the positions of the second duet are not so solid.

Therefore, I am trying to understand: did Boikova and Kozlovsky have any chances to perform better in Tallinn?

- Unfortunately,

the guys made a ridiculous mistake by breaking the triple salchow.

This is not the most difficult jump, besides, Dima and Sasha never made a mistake in it.

Never ever.

Perhaps the guys wanted too much to show the maximum result, and this desire affected their inner balance.

As for the Olympic team tournament, we do not yet know what our sports leaders will decide on this matter, so there is no point in discussing anything.

Personally, I would like to see in the team those skaters who are objectively capable of bringing the country the highest possible place.

- How did you manage to get Sasha Boikova out of the emotional hole she fell into by breaking the jump in the short program?

- I had to use all the methods of psychological persuasion.

- In theory, this is understandable.

But to put it into practice, and even in such a short time ...

“I can tell you a story.

Before one of the important starts, Natasha Mishkutyonok and Artur Dmitriev ride in training and fall from support, and they fall quite unpleasantly.

They performed perfectly at the competitions, and one of the foreign journalists asked how I managed to make Natasha forget about the fall.

I'm not going to paint everything in detail.

Therefore, she blurted out the first thing that came to mind: they say, nothing complicated, I just hypnotized the athlete.

The next day I read the headline: "Moskvina hypnotizes her skaters."

But seriously, there are quite a lot of ways to psychologically influence athletes.

- Yes, but the situations that arise during the competition are far from always predictable and, as it seems to me, the coach does not always have time to analyze them.

- For those who do not do this kind of work all the time, it can really be difficult to navigate.

I have been working with athletes for 50 years.

I learned a lot of things on my own, a lot of things came with experience.

But whether this or that technique will work or not, I can’t know for sure until now.

It’s not always possible to achieve what you want right away, I’ll tell you straight.

Go to gallery page

- Since records have been set in figure skating, journalists have been paying quite a lot of attention to them.

Does it matter to you that all three top results in pair skating currently belong to Mishina and Gallyamov?

“It doesn't matter to me at all.

In the course of the season, the athlete must improve the quality of the elements, the quality of the programs is the meaning and essence of our work.

Accordingly, if there are no gross errors, the results also grow.

It's just that the level of this growth depends not only on the performance, but also on how the refereeing team works.

That is, everything is quite subjective.

Therefore, the only thing that matters is what place your athlete eventually took.

Do you always agree with this distribution?

- I just play according to the rules that in our sport are determined by the International Skating Union (ISU), which includes Russia. Therefore, our job is to adhere to these rules. Judges live by the same principles, by the way. Moreover, none of the arbitrators individually decides anything. So I never have any questions. Moreover, I am always aware that the judicial assessment in our sport reflects not only the technical level of performance, as such, but can be influenced by a variety of factors: the difference in cultural perception, musical preferences, subjective opinions, relationships between people, etc. Further. You can’t turn on a stopwatch, you can’t measure skill with a centimeter. Ratings posted? Everything! This is already history.

The only thing I can do, if I am not satisfied with the place that my athletes have taken, is to take the protocol, study it, analyze it and see what can be done so that for the same step sequences or rotations my athletes receive not the third level of complexity, but fourth.

By the way, I don’t understand my colleagues who, after each competition, complain that they are doing everything right, but they are condemned.

Every time I want to ask: have you ever tried to understand why, in your opinion, you are “sued” from time to time?

- Do your couples have a rest after the European Championship?

- After the competition, it is always provided.

For example, after the Russian Championship, the guys rested for the first time for five whole days, although we usually have two, maximum three days.

But this time I decided to make some indulgence.

Before that, everyone had a very tense and nervous period of preparation, and you won’t demand that people go skating on January 1?

- Some coaches, I know, demand.

— I have been convinced many times that our athletes return to form very quickly after rest.

So I completely trust them in this respect.

- Is the final stretch of preparation before the Olympic Games a narrow corridor from which athletes are no longer allowed to take one or another step aside?

- Rather, on the contrary. The Olympic Games themselves are a complex and responsible business. If you artificially create additional pressure, you can actually achieve the opposite effect. The form of an athlete in this regard, as Alexei Mishin likes to say, is like a slingshot: in order to hit the target exactly, you need to pull the rubber with a certain force, but you must not allow the rubber to burst. I adhere to exactly the same views: it’s better for my athletes to underwork a little than get injured. You have to be especially careful when people do not yet have the experience of the Olympics.

- In this case, are they more nervous than usual, or, conversely, less?

“The question here is more about what you need to be prepared for.

For example, at the Russian Championships, Mishina and Gallyamov went on the ice after Boikova and Kozlovsky.

Those skated perfectly, and, naturally, this caused a corresponding reaction from the stands - a thunder of applause.

Despite the fact that Nastya and Sasha competed in St. Petersburg as world champions, it was a completely new experience for them.

Indeed, in Stockholm there were almost no spectators in the stands - only volunteers.

I then told the guys: start getting used to it.

Because at the Olympics you will most likely find yourself in the strongest group, where many, if not all, will skate well.

- Is the ability to distract an athlete from unnecessary thoughts before an important start also an experience?

— Now in this respect it has become much easier: everyone has a lot of gadgets, computer games.

But at the Olympics in Salt Lake City, I remember, just for this purpose, I went to the mountains to sled with Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze - our American fans gave us such an opportunity.

So here I am

the most experienced coach, did not take into account then one thing - how strong the sun can be in the mountains.

And Lena returned from that walk with a face burn.

What do you think is the most important thing at the Games?

- Give as little importance as possible to what is happening around.

After all, there will be many factors that can cause irritation: tests, travel bans, a bunch of all sorts of rules and restrictions.

You need to perceive any situation simply as a given, and treat it calmly, without unnecessary emotions.

And it is highly desirable to be distracted from the topic of the upcoming speech as much as possible.

If we start every day to remind the athletes that they have the most important start of the four years ahead of them, they will finish skating with us in Krasnoyarsk before reaching Beijing.