“Those who are true to style get to the top”: Gorshkov on the skill of dancers, peculiarities of refereeing and Morozov’s rationality

- Your skaters Albena Denkova and Maxim Stavisky actually did the impossible in 2006 by winning the world championship.

Despite the fact that over the past 16 years you have gained experience, knowledge, and you can, as Tamara Moskvina once said, shorten the path to the goal, no equally outstanding duets appeared in your group.

Is it due to the lack of talented “material” or something else?

- Offhand and do not answer.

But there were also Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin.

- Who left you for Natalia Linichuk right after they won the European Championship in 2008.

Why?

“That's not what I need to ask.

The decision then was made not by me and not even by the athletes.

Rather, they were persuaded to do so.

- I don’t want to offend you, but I remember very well how ambiguous the decision to put Domnina and Shabalin to the European championship was perceived, although only two weeks have passed since Maxim’s knee surgery.

- That season, between my pair and Isabelle Delobel - Olivier Schoenfelder (European champions 2007.

) there was a very difficult and principled tactical struggle.

Therefore, Oksana and Maxim had to "take" Europe at all costs.

I remember we were sitting in the office of Valentin Piseev, where he himself, the national team doctor Viktor Anikanov, someone else from the leadership, me and my athletes were present.

And just there they jointly decided: you need to ride.

Then, when the problems with Max's leg predictably worsened, all the blame, as usual, was dumped on the coach.

Like, it was I who made the guys go on the ice so early.

- I can understand the position of the leadership: in that season we had no chance to get on the podium in either men's or women's skating, and we had to get medals at any cost.

But did you really not understand the consequences?

“Understood, of course.

But here you can’t answer which was more correct.

In the end, the guys won the title, became champions.

- Can you get used to the fact that athletes go to another specialist?

- Of course not.

It is clear that over time everything begins to be perceived less emotionally, but in any case it is a drama.

Like a family in a divorce.

Whatever the relationship, it hurts for everyone.

The most disgusting and unpleasant thing is when you realize that some momentary misunderstanding becomes the reason for the breakup.

All my life and coaching experience shows that transitions occur mainly for the same reason: when an athlete fails to achieve the desired result, he begins to look for the guilty on the side.

Trying to find an excuse in any way.

- Well, it's so unpleasant to think that he himself gave up the slack.

— Quite right.

I remember in some documentary Boris Eifman was asked how he treats his artists.

And he replied that he treats them precisely as artists.

That is, as to people who see only themselves in the mirror.

Athletes are the same case.

They seem to live inside themselves and do not even try to look from the outside.

And it turns out that the coach is a person who constantly says some unpleasant things.

Since he clearly understands what he should give to an athlete in a particular situation, with no less specific opponents, rules and judges ... Of course, it's great when a mentor and a skater work in unison in this regard, but in practice this rarely happens.

– Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean have been considered the standard of ice dancing for several decades, but my personal attitude to the genius of Dean the choreographer at one time was greatly shaken by the fact that both the championship “Bolero” and the Aztec dance that Christopher choreographed for Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay, and many demonstration numbers were the result of an almost direct transfer to the ice of the choreographic productions of the ballet Ghost.

Where do you get your ideas from?

- Borrowing to some extent, of course, is permissible, but in addition to this, you need to constantly go to theaters, study modern choreographic trends.

An unexpected idea can come to mind even when watching other people's programs, not necessarily high-level ones.

At one time, the idea of ​​​​one of the free dances of Domnina and Shabalin, choreographer Sergei Petukhov and I, was inspired by Pukirev's painting "Unequal Marriage".

We even dressed Oksana then as a bride.

Petukhov generally liked to tell the athletes what exactly they were skating.

Create a visual image.

I still use this technique when I work with little ones.

When a skater has a libretto clearly in his head, the viewer immediately understands that there is a thought in the program, there is an idea, there is something that you want to follow the development of.

If there is no content in the program, then no form will help.

- The winners of the Grand Prix final Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier - is it a long time, from your point of view?

And can you unequivocally call them the leaders of this season?

- Leaders - not a fact, but I always liked them very much.

They're cool.

Always unusual, always going their own way.

Life shows that people who are true to their style are selected to the top in ice dancing.

- If we assume that all the skaters of the top ten in dancing are equally good at stepping technique and equally capable of gaining high levels of complexity, then we will come to the conclusion that success at the “top” level is determined not by technique, but by choreography.

That is, performances.

- Of course.

If we look at the top ten under normal judging, everyone is really the same in terms of skill.

By and large, everyone rides to the fourth level, and the one who performs all the elements with a plus turns out to be higher.

If we remember Gabriela Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron, they once relied on the purity of skating.

The desire to do something new and interesting in dance is not enough.

You need to make it as easy and cool as possible.

- Every year I ask myself the same question: why can’t I realize in dance what Ilya Averbukh and Alexander Zhulin do an excellent job with in the Ice Age?

You can relate to the project in different ways, but the productions are really catchy.

- It is clear that everyone who takes part in the production of this project has already got their hands on it.

And they are perfectly aware of: how else can artists take judges?

You can't take technology.

• Yekaterina Ryazanova and Ilya Tkachenko with Alexei Gorshkov at a training session ahead of the World Figure Skating Championships in Nice

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• © Alexander Wilf

- Agree.

But let's look differently.

Quite a few duets broke up last year in Russian dances.

And, in fact, now we have the same "Ice Age", only at a higher level.

Where people ride together for a week without a year and coaches, it would seem, should be extremely concerned that their couples be remembered, stand out from the crowd.

Instead, we see a lot of absolutely passable programs.

Your dancers Irina Khavronina and Dario Chirizano are a pleasant exception against this background.

- I also had unsuccessful programs, although I take each production extremely seriously - just so that it becomes not a passing one, but interesting to the maximum.

But here another question arises: what is of greater value?

Yes, at the Olympics or the World Championships, the value of the staging, energy, charisma of athletes who are in the top is incredibly high.

But it doesn't work for us.

And the idiotic fourth level works, which you get or don’t get depending on how the judges agree among themselves.

And who cares that you skate the most interesting program?

There is also a second point.

People do not always want to spend a lot of hours on choreography.

Working with the same Giuseppe Arena is like diving into the ocean.

The deeper you dive, the more you learn.

To create a masterpiece, it is desirable to cooperate not with one specialist, but with several.

And in order to get the fourth level for a track or rotation, such efforts are not even close. 

- I know that in every dance judging team there are always people who, outside of the competition, privately advise certain duets.

Is this practice right or wrong?

- Of course it's wicked.

But it's not only that.

Previously, all skaters, including juniors, went to one or another competition at the beginning of the season, and the marks obtained there were, as it were, a guideline for judges at all subsequent starts.

Now everyone is in a closed space.

After Alla Shekhovtsova retired, any control disappeared.

None of the six tournaments of the Russian Grand Prix was adjudicated in dancing so that this did not raise questions.

- Last year's mass rearrangements in Russian dances - a consequence of the sudden pre-Olympic "progress" of Diana Davis and Gleb Smolkin?

- Well, the athletes themselves have nothing to do with it, their job is to go out and ride.

At the same time, we then had a conversation with the leadership of the federation.

We asked not to include in the technical team a person who had just returned from Detroit, and everyone understood that he was an affiliated person.

We were assured that everything would be fine, but in reality nothing has changed.

The point here is not that hands down.

Such things do not work in favor of sports as such.

What's the point?

Now, for example, it is not in our power to change the situation in the country.

Accordingly, no one understands when athletes will have the opportunity to return to international competitions.

But inside ourselves, we should at least try to become better?

To do this, we need to give people the opportunity for healthy, unbiased competition, so that at each training session they set themselves the task of winning against themselves - yesterday.

You asked me before the interview if I watched the ISU Grand Prix.

Naturally looked.

Dance is constantly evolving.

And it is not known how we will look when we return after this "commercial break".

- Do the current ISU rules develop athletes, or limit them?

“I would change a few things about them.

In general, I don't think this issue works very well.

Why not?

- Well, look: in dance support, the partner has three difficult positions - on one leg, boat and seed.

I once asked why not come up with something else, do not do five or six positions.

In response, I heard: in this case, it will be difficult for technical specialists to keep track of everything.

If we talk about the current rules, this year, for example, the dancers were given a chore track actually across the rink and with a mandatory stop.

And immediately the dynamics disappeared, which is of tremendous importance in dances.

Rhythm dance is not too fast anyway, because you have to fulfill a lot of not very simple requirements, and this season it just “got up”.

It's not very noticeable on video recordings, but it's very noticeable live.

- When in December you joined forces with Nikolai Morozov, Irina Zhuk and Alexander Svinin, it was clear that this was done primarily for the sake of Alexandra Stepanova and Ivan Bukin.

What is the point of teamwork now that Sasha has taken a break and the couple has temporarily ceased to exist?

- Zhuk and Svinin and I continue to work in a rather interesting format.

For some time we disperse to our skating rinks, then we meet in Novogorsk.

This season we have already held four such gatherings.

We work together, go to tournaments together, discuss some problems together.

This is very beneficial for skaters - they are getting better, there is no usual monotony, there is always some kind of novelty.

Each of the coaches has their own vision of the process, and that's great.

It is a pity, of course, that Morozov is stuck in the USA.

He is the only one of us who has a lot of experience with single skaters, and this is a completely different look, a different approach to the process.

- And in more detail?

- At one time, Igor Ksenofontov began to use this chip in his work, with whom the parents of Ilya Malinin once trained.

He was the first to consider movement not from the point of view of beautiful positions, but the work of the body, as springs and the rationality of all movements.

In the work of Morozov, this is very clearly seen.

Kolya is generally a very talented person, in some ways - so simply brilliant.

Moreover, rationality is at the forefront in each of its programs.

He once joked: they say, he didn’t dance for three years and was constantly surprised by the coaches who stand at the yellow dance protocols and believe that all the most interesting things happen there.

Although in reality this is not at all the case.

When we started working together, Morozov somehow looked at my couple Arina Ushakov - Maxim Nekrasov and said about one of the elements: “Let's throw him out?”

I began to convince him that there was no need to throw anything away and that this was a kind of trick, but Kolya convinced me.

He said that if I do as he advises, the guys will immediately go much faster, much easier, without nervousness, and in the end they will gain much more pluses.

- Before pairing with David Narizhny, Annabelle Morozov skated with you and Andrei Bagin.

Why, after changing partners, did the skaters go under the command of Irina Zhuk and Alexander Svinin?

- Everything is simple here.

A pair of Morozov - Bagin was assigned to Perm, and Narizhny - to the Olympic reserve school, whose coaches are Svinin and Zhuk.

So we decided to transfer Annabelle to RBM-4 so that both partners represent the same organization.

It would be much more difficult to transfer both athletes to Odintsovo.

- The reason why Annabel and David broke up was the unwillingness of the partner to fly to Morozov before the Russian Championship in the USA.

Many, I know, wondered: what's the point of going to America for two weeks?

- This is a double-edged sword.

If Kolya came to Moscow for these two weeks, it would be an ideal option that would allow him to really work effectively on programs.

But flying to America from Russia is a completely different story.

Five days are lost only on flights.

So I'm not ready to answer what would be better.

- Now they say quite a lot that Davis - Smolkin will most likely skate for the USA, and Annabelle can go to look for a partner in France and, accordingly, play for this country.

Do you assume that some of your athletes may also want to leave?

- Of course.

Especially now the transitions are greatly simplified.

If you have a passport, you can get permission to change sports citizenship in two months.

It is clear that it is not customary to talk about this, but as a coach, I simply have to keep all possible options in my head.

It’s just that now, it seems to me, we need to think about keeping the skaters as active as possible and charged for work, and not about something else.

• Coach Alexei Gorshkov, doctor Viktor Anikanov and coach Nikolai Morozov.

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• © Alexander Wilf