“I don’t consider this an achievement”: Kondratyuk on Ronaldo’s 500 million subscribers, contemporary art and skydiving

Immediately after the completion of the final stage of the Russian Grand Prix in Samara, Mark Kondratyuk landed in the hospital with a back injury.

Because of this, I missed the jumping tournament and was very upset, but resolutely declared: “If I have at least one chance to have time to restore the programs for the Russian Championship, I will fight for this opportunity.”

There are two exactly opposite points of view.

That the health of a top athlete is his own business, and, accordingly, the topic of injuries is not up for discussion.

The second comes down to the reverse thought: those who root for him have the right to know what is happening to him.

What do you think about this?

— Probably, I'm still closer to the second option.

It's better not to hide anything.

To, perhaps, reassure someone, reassure.

- Then start reassuring people: how do you feel now?

— Definitely better than it was in Samara.

Positive trends from treatment are clearly present.

I can bend over, both legs rise, and in the same Samara one did not rise at all.

Because of this, even the way back home was difficult.

Artur Danielyan helped me carry my suitcase and things.

You've had back problems before.

What is the reason?

- First of all, in heavy loads, in a large number of jumps.

Perhaps, some separate positions in rotations add unpleasant sensations, but, first of all, these are, of course, jumps.

Now I already walk without pain, I started skating, I try to do everything that the doctors advise, and I intend to follow all the recommendations as carefully as possible.

Take a more responsible approach to it.

Because health is one thing, and I would like to keep it.

At least in order to be able to ride longer.

- In all your interviews, you somehow say that you never set yourself the task of achieving any specific high titles.

Nevertheless, you are already the champion of the country, Europe and the Olympic Games in the team tournament, that is, you have collected almost all possible trophies in figure skating.

What keeps motivating?

- Maybe it will sound trite, but I ride primarily out of love for my sport.

I get great pleasure from this despite the fact that it is hard, difficult, painful, and so on.

I really like the process - to perform and give pleasure to the audience.

That's probably how it is.

- I involuntarily recall Tamara Moskvina's recent comment that such a skill is the primary task of a high-class athlete.

— Yes, I heard.

She believes that you need to be able to push everything personal into the background.

- Are you pushing back?

- I'm pushing back, but not everything.

Sometimes I hear from some guys that, in addition to training, they don’t go anywhere, that only sports are a priority.

But I'm not that kind of person.

I always went out somewhere - with friends in a cafe, to some museum, to an exhibition.

That is, in my life there has always been something other than sports.

It's important for me.

Now I was in the hospital and felt that it was hard for me to be there.

Even though almost the whole day was scheduled for procedures.

There was a feeling of a closed space from which you can not go anywhere.

- Were you alone in the room?

No, with a neighbor.

Also an athlete, a pentathlete.

My mother, Sasha (Trusova - RT ), Svetlana Vladimirovna (Sokolovskaya - RT ) visited me.

Thanks to this, it was not so sad and lonely.

Maybe it's just my personality.

I need to constantly do something, go somewhere, watch, read.

If this is not possible, I will probably just go crazy.

- Remind me, please, how old are you?

- 19.

Let me explain what the question is.

You have repeatedly called Alexei Yagudin your favorite skater, who officially retired in the fall of 2003 - the very year you were born.

Why him, and not those skaters who have appeared in a whole scattering over the past twenty years - Stefan Lambiel, Johnny Weir, Daisuke Takahashi, Patrick Chan, the same Evgeni Plushenko, finally?

- I named, after all, two people: Yagudin and Yuzuru Hanyu.

I generally consider the latter a figure skating genius.

I reviewed his performances many times, realizing that this is the standard to which one should strive.

I admire what a skater and person he is.

Therefore, I dreamed of someday being on the same ice with Yuzuru.

It worked out in Beijing.

— And Yagudin?

- For me, he is also a great skater, perfect.

I must have watched his program "The Man in the Iron Mask" a hundred times.

I heard a lot of times from various people that the main production of Yagudin is "Winter", but I like "The Man in the Iron Mask" more.

I think the last one is great.

- If we talk about specific ingredients, what does your understanding of the ideal skater consist of?

Can you make a recipe?

Flexibility, jumping ability, skating skills, the ability to turn the hips ... What else do we throw into the pan?

- Sense of music.

The ability and ability to convey this music with the help of movements, facial expressions.

So that you look at the ice and feel that you are sitting in the first row of the stalls at some performance.

When the speaker keeps you on your toes, from the first second to the very end.

Probably, here is such a block.

Plus complex elements, their clean execution.

And confidence.

Not that you will now go on the ice and win, but that you will skate in such a way that it will not leave anyone indifferent.

Both Khanyu and Yagudin had situations when something did not work out, but they never lost some kind of inner composure, or something.

And the top of all this is the Olympic skates.

Yagudin, respectively, in Salt Lake City, Yuzuru - in Pyeongchang.

- You said about the ability to please the viewer, but for me, for example, Hanyu always had the exact opposite impression.

That he doesn't ride for the public, but rather condescends to them, allowing himself to be watched.

Is there no such feeling?

— I understand what you are talking about, and, probably, I agree.

But I'm not sure it's the exact opposite.

Yes, Hanyu can be said to make people look at themselves.

But he does it anyway, he goes out on the ice.

He is the root cause of this madness.

That's why it's so popular, I think.

• Fedor Chalov, Alexandra Trusova and Mark Kondratyuk.

• © Alexander Wilf

- Are you interested in football?

- Not.

I understand it very poorly from the point of view of the rules, although, of course, I know who Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are.

I have been to two football matches and I must say that I liked it.

- I remember one of the meetings of CSKA, before which you, together with Sasha Trusova, dealt a symbolic blow to the ball.

And what was the second?

- The very first time I got to the stadium during the World Cup, which was held in Russia.

It was a 1/8 final match between Russia and Spain, which we won on penalties.

I don’t know how many tens of thousands of people were then in the stands, but at some point I felt that the stadium is a completely alive, single organism that breathes, makes some crazy sounds, screams, groans ... It was very interesting, such see.

- Before the current World Cup, information appeared that the number of Cristiano Ronaldo subscribers exceeded 500 million. In your opinion, is this an achievement?

— I'm not very inclined to consider this an achievement.

Cristiano is a great footballer and I think that is more important to him than the number of followers on the social network.

But 500 million is certainly very cool.

If we remember that the number of people on Earth has now exceeded eight billion, it turns out, roughly speaking, that every 16th person in the world is subscribed to the Portuguese.

It is clear that there are some second accounts, bots, and so on, but the figure itself is a marker of insane popularity and fame.

For example, I have about 160 thousand subscribers, Ronaldo has 500 million. Such a small difference.

— For you, social networks are a means for entertainment, or for making money?

- For fun.

And for contact with people who are sick, support.

- Doesn't such publicity of one's own life depress?

— A little.

- What can you not afford in connection with this?

- I will not name any special moments.

I have never done anything that would look strange in public places.

Didn't get drunk, didn't mess around.

It seems to me that this is incorrect behavior in principle.

Well, you need to understand, of course: when an ordinary person begins to behave inappropriately, it will not occur to anyone to somehow react to this.

And if a person is famous, they will probably shoot him and put the video on the Internet.

— If you were faced with the task of increasing the number of subscribers as quickly as possible, what would you do?

- Most likely, these would be some kind of collaborations with famous people: the more famous, the better.

Some scandals.

“Which, as we just found out, you are not capable of.

- Well, I wanted to smoothly bring the conversation to the fact that, in principle, I don’t really care about the number of subscribers.

When at the Olympics I noticed that I was missing a few hundred to 100 thousand, I confess, I went to the Internet all day - I tracked how the numbers were changing.

It was interesting to wait for a beautiful number to appear.

But this was not some kind of purpose.

If I had five thousand subscribers, or just one, I definitely would not stop skating because of this.

— My youngest daughter graduated from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Austria and the Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona.

Until now, he draws a lot, but at the same time he does not at all seek to find a job in his specialty.

Answers all the questions that the artist must be hungry.

- Famous phrase.

- Men tend to attach more importance to career growth, but for some reason it seems to me that you just do not connect your post-sports future with the activity of an artist.

Or do you connect?

— I prefer not to think so far.

But making art part of your future profession would be nice.

I do not consider myself very talented in this area, but it so happened that I watch, read, study a lot.

I have an older brother who collects contemporary art - the second Russian avant-garde.

We discuss a lot of things with him.

Some of the ways in this area - how it can be developed, and how to make money on it, are clear to me.

- Not so long ago, I talked with Marina Zueva, and she spoke about the impression that an art exhibition in Paris made on her.

There were presented 220 works by Pablo Picasso and the same number of identical paintings by other artists from whom Picasso borrowed ideas.

Does this fact surprise you?

- In art, this is normal, especially in contemporary art.

If we turn to the same postmodernism, we will see that it is impossible to come up with anything new.

All new art is just a kind of processing of the past, adjusted to some modern realities.

It may be a little bit strange that this is specifically Picasso.

Because he was born earlier, and his main creative periods were still before the era of postmodernism.

But globally - no, it's not surprising.

In art, everything in one way or another follows from some earlier trends.

- Transferring this topic to your sport.

Are there any programs in the recent history of men's single skating that you would like to rework, show in a different way?

I really like Schindler's List.

- "Schindler's List" as a piece of music, or in someone's specific performance?

— Both as a work and as Yulia Lipnitskaya performed it in 2014.

It was a great program, it sunk into my soul very much.

I'd love to run Schindler's List, but I won't.

- Why?

- Because internally I will constantly compare myself with the best performances of Yulia, and understand that I will not be able to do this program as well as she did then.

• Mark Kondratyuk

• RIA News

• © Vladimir Astapkovich

- At the November show of Evgeni Plushenko, you skated to live music performed by Philip Kirkorov.

Is this the first such experience?

- No, the second one.

In the spring, I skated in the Luzhniki to the live performance of Peter Nalich.

My performance was terrible.

It was the last of the season, right after the show I went straight from the rink to Novogorsk, where we were quarantined, before meeting with the President.

It turned out such a very fat and very bad point.

It was very embarrassing.

How long are you away from those fat bad spots?

- If it happened in the show, then quickly.

In competitions, failures are more exaggerated.

- I wasn’t going to return to the Olympic theme, but since the conversation turned to failures: what got stuck in my head more - two outstanding skates in the team tournament of the Games in Beijing, or two failed ones - in a personal one?

“Probably still a good performance.

But if I had a chance to survive the Olympics again, and I would have known in advance that I would be able to skate well only one of the tournaments, I would have made a choice in favor of a team player.

It's one thing not to show oneself in the best way in a personal, and quite another to let the whole team down.

- Mikhail Kolyada once admitted that after an unsuccessful performance in the Pyeongchang Olympic team tournament, he had the feeling that he was standing against the wall, seeing his own projection in front of him, and this projection was shooting him from a machine gun point-blank.

- When I realized that everything was going to the fact that I would compete in the team team, I was thinking that I should do everything in my power so as not to experience the emotions that, in my understanding, Misha experienced at the previous Games.

Knowing my character, I would gnaw myself for a very, very long time.

Maybe for a lifetime.

- Do you have at least a slight regret that you could not go to St. Petersburg for the recent jumping championship?

- Of course.

And not light, but big.

I really wanted to play there.

It would be a new experience, not quite the usual playoff format.

At the First Channel Cup in Saransk, the regulations were different.

There we just went out, did two elements.

- If you performed in St. Petersburg, what jumps would you dare to perform?

- I didn’t really read the rules, because I was in the hospital and I understood that I wouldn’t go to these competitions, but if I had to show two different solos, I would probably choose quadruple lutz and salchow.

Lutz for points, salchow for stability.

If I had to jump cascades, I would try, as in Saransk, to jump four or four.

Salchow-oiler-salchow.

This is a very winning cascade.

“Is it much harder than four or three?”

- Not that word.

Just a stark difference.

No matter how you do the first quad, as long as you don't fall off it, there's almost always the possibility of pulling out a second triple jump.

It may be crooked, with an error, but you can fight.

You can’t fight for a quadruple with a bad first jump - there’s simply no chance here.

Other than that, it's scary.

Several times I fell straight down like this from the second jump.

The fact that in Saransk it was possible to make that cascade on the first attempt is a great success.

- When at the Olympics in Pyeongchang, at one of the training sessions, Alina Zagitova performed a cascade of triple lutz and four loops, I talked with multiple world champion Kurt Browning.

He then yelled with delight that he saw this with his own eyes.

What is cool, please explain.

- Rittberger cascades have increased complexity.

Well, when there are more than one of these jumps.

I myself have never tried this.

I saw a similar cascade only performed by Petya Gumennik and, I remember, I thought then that it would be easier for me to perform two quads through an oiler than to jump two loops in a row.

— The most extreme event in your life?

- Good question.

Probably a tandem skydive.

It was in Dubai.

There, next to Palma, this artificial island, you take off on an airplane, and you are thrown out from a height of several kilometers.

I basically knew what to expect.

But when a door opens at a high altitude and people start falling out… It looks very frightening.

“Even with an experienced instructor behind you?”

- Well, yes.

I jumped fourth or fifth, the instructor explained to me in advance that he would start rocking us, and on the third movement I should jump out and do nothing else.

But when we got up, went to the door, stood on the edge, and it began to sway, a million thoughts flashed through my head.

That this is inevitable, that I can no longer stop the process.

That is, I probably can, but it will somehow look completely stupid.

While I was thinking, we fell out of the plane.

For the first ten seconds, I didn’t understand what was happening at all - I was in some kind of absolutely abstract state.

Then he came to his senses, even waved to the video operator flying nearby.

When the parachute opened, everything was already generally fine.

Just a crazy view - the coast, the city, the sea.

But overall, it was really scary.

Only bungee jumping is scarier in my opinion.

This is what I will never do in my life.