"Coaches' wings were severely clipped": Danchenko on changes in the rules, replacement of Subbotina with Doroshko and men in groups

On Monday, the Russian Synchronized Swimming Championship starts in Kazan, which will be the final start of the season for Tatiana Danchenko's wards. In an exclusive interview with RT, the famous coach told why she decided to end the sports year so early, explained why she was in no hurry to show ready-made new programs and lifted the veil of secrecy, where four-time world champion Varvara Subbotina disappeared from her group.

- Let's first determine the status of the upcoming start. Is it the main one for you, or a qualifier for more significant tournaments?

- The main and, moreover, the last. According to the calendar, the season does not end there, but for the main athletes, I made just such a decision.

- Have you accepted it for a long time?

- As soon as we learned that the International Swimming Federation will hold the World Championships in Doha in February next year, which may be the last chance for us to qualify for the Olympic Games in Paris.

Previously, the Olympic selection was held in our country as a separate tournament in April, now FINA has decided to hold it as part of the championship. And this is February. So we decided that in this regard, we should end the year earlier than usual in order to have time to rest and go out for early training next season.

— Can you tell us more about this?

- Usually, as you probably remember, the main starts were held in July - August, so we started training no earlier than autumn. Now we intend to start the season in June.

- Will you put new programs on your duet?

- All programs have already been delivered.

- That is, at the Russian Championship in Kazan you will show them?

- Of course not. We will show it only next season. There is no point in doing it now.

- Do you want to shine your new ideas ahead of time?

- I just think that tactically it would be wrong.

– How satisfied are you with the state in which your athletes approach the national championship?

- For the national championship, they are in pretty decent shape. They would have looked decent at a larger start. But I'm still a little worried, because starting and training are two different things. Let's see how the girls will be able to get together. Still, we have a new composition of the duo.

- In what sense is the new one?

- Svetlana Kolesnichenko has a new partner - Maya Doroshko.

- And what about Varvara Subbotina? Still haven't recovered from your injury?

- Varya recently underwent surgery on her foot, so she is still resting. In principle, we were ready for the fact that surgical intervention would be needed, so we decided that there was simply no better time to put our health in order. Now it all depends on how quickly the rehabilitation goes.

– Doroshko, if I'm not mistaken, competed at the World Championships in Gwangju in 2019.

"That's right. It's just that there she stood in the group, performed in combination. A girl from our school, from our group, for many years she was coached by my daughter Elena Voronova, then I myself joined the work, that is, we purposefully brought her to the national team, where she got to Tatyana Pokrovskaya. Therefore, there were no great difficulties in introducing her into the duet. It's just that now it's difficult to somehow predict the result. After all, the rules have changed quite a lot. They became, I would say, completely different.

- More difficult?

- There is no explanation in one word. If earlier the evaluation criterion was the complexity, speed, saturation of the program and, of course, the image thanks to which the program gained integrity, now each bundle will be evaluated separately, with its own scale of complexity. And the image, as well as the original finds, are actually secondary.

- Is the image as important as it is commonly believed?

- It is clear that each athlete has two arms, two legs, everyone has approximately the same set of skills and possesses complex elements. Therefore, in fact, it was considered the upper class to come up with something new, to stand out, to surprise, to make themselves admire. Now, most likely, there will be a different trend: everyone will churn out the same ligaments, and the one who is able to do a little more than the rivals will win.

You just can't wind up anything original here: arbitrary programs have become a little shorter, there should be a certain number of bundles in them - seven, all supports are also regulated. On the one hand, everything seems to have become clearer, but it is still difficult to get rid of the feeling that creatively all the coaches have their wings clipped. Physical strength and endurance come to the fore.

- That is, you do not see the positive aspects in the new rules at all?

"Why?" The undoubted plus is that now technical errors will be punished much more severely, according to a certain scale, and not to determine the degree of error by eye. This will be done by individual judges.

How it all works remains to be seen, but this is also one of the reasons why I don't want to show new programs ahead of time. In this regard, our suspension from competitions gives us a certain advantage. On the one hand, there is nothing good in the fact that we are suspended from international competitions, on the other hand, there is an opportunity to carefully observe what and how our rivals will do.

"Are you following this?"

- Of course. I watched the World Cup stage with great interest - these competitions replaced the World Series. Actually, in this regard, I concluded for myself that the new rules can greatly affect the perception of programs.

- How much, in your opinion, can the appearance of men in the Olympic groups change synchronized swimming? And is it an advantage?

- In support, perhaps, there will be some advantage. But much more important here is another question: how a particular boy will stand in a particular group without having such experience. This is a very serious skill that is developed in synchronized swimmers from childhood. It is difficult in all aspects: to keep the alignment correctly, to work correctly in the swims. There are a lot of nuances in teamwork that have actually been worked out over the years.

All strong groups work very tightly and harmoniously, so any insufficiently calibrated movement, a slightly larger amplitude in the movement of an arm or leg becomes traumatic. There were cases of fractures of the arm, leg, and nose. In this regard, the group is the most jewelry type of program. Therefore, girls are very carefully taught to choose their arms and legs so as not to injure each other. Introducing a new person into a well-coordinated mechanism a year before the Games and not disrupting the overall work is an incredibly difficult task. And a huge responsibility for any coach.