Will Russian coaches be forced to "drop" their foreign students? | Golden Skate

Will Russian coaches be forced to "drop" their foreign students?

Ptichka

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Will Russian coaches be forced to "drop" their foreign students?

http://ptichkafs.livejournal.com/51660.html

Moscow lowering the “ice curtain?”

Two days to World Championships

On Monday, World championships will start in Moscow with men’s qualifying round. This competition may be the last one (for a while at least) when our coaches will train foreign skaters.

Elena VAITSEKHOVSKAYA

Every time figure skating Worlds come up, fans and newspapers alike discuss how many foreign stars owe their success to Russian specialists. Indeed, it’s hard to avoid the subject given the sheer number of such examples.

At one time or another, Tatiana Tarasova coached or at least conducted master classes for: Sasha Cohen, Shizuka Arakawa, Michelle Kwan, Jonny Weir, Brian Joubert, Mao Asada, ice dancers Isabelle Delobel/ Olivier Schoenfelder, Barbara Fusar-Poli/ Maurizio Margaglio and others. Nikolai Morozov preprared Arakawa and Daisuke Takahashi, Miki Ando and Nobinario Oda, as well as Floran Amodio. It’s impressive, isn’t it?
At the risk of boring the reader, I’ll continue the star list. Alexei Mishin has helped Stephane Lambiel, Carolina Kostner, Sarah Maier and Kevin Van Der Perren. Alexander Zhulin made the French team Natalie Pechalat/ Fabien Bourzat into European champions. Even the Vancouver Olympic champion Evan Lysacek has spent some time at the training camps with Victor Kudryavtsev, and later with Tarasova.

The undisputed best ice dancing coach last year were also “our” specialists – Igor Shpilband and Marina Zueva, whose students won both gold and silver and the Vancouver Games and then repeated the feat at Turin Worlds.

Throughout this time, the brains of Russian athletic leadership were nursing a reasonable idea – doing everything possible to return coaches back home. They succeeded with two – Zhulin and Morozov. Now, following the Moscow championships, it’s possible we’ll see the next step – the newly repatriated Russian specialists could be forbidden from working with foreign athletes.

What makes me say this? I’ll explain.

Just a few days before the 2011 Worlds, Morozov said in an interview that he has decided to temporarily suspend any work with foreign skaters. It’s feasible that the coaches came to this decision undependably for his own weighty reasons. But I don’t believe it; not least because a few days prior, I learned from a trusted source that Alexander Zhulin is almost ordered to stop working with the French ice dancers.
The leadership’s logic is simple: Sochi Olympics is around the corner, so everyone is needed to work exclusively with Russian skaters.

In this light, it’s hard not to think of good intentions and where a road paved by them often leads. Indeed, the consequences of such a move could prove disastrous.

Any practicing coach knows that while the stronger contender can win a tough sparring match, the weaker one always wins in the end. The fate for the strongest is to prepare the competition so that one day that competition could pass him by without so much as turning the head. I suspect this is the reason why the US for many years was happy to offer the ice to the best Russian coaches and their best students – it gave their athletes a chance to watch and learn. This has included Tamara Moskvina with Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, Tatiana Tarasova with Ilya Kilik and Alexei Yagudin, Oleg Vasiliev with Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin, and Natalya Linichuk with her once large and international ice dancing group.

Elena Buyanova, who know coacahes the two time Russian champions, Grand Prix and junior World champion Adelina Sotnikova, once said that an important factor in her student’s impressive progress was the chance to share the ice with the Japanese skater Mao Asada. Indeed, for three years in a row, the reigning World champion came from Japan to work with Tarasova and trained at the CSKA rink alongside the little kids.
Look at any summer training camp for skaters, be it in Germany, Switzerland and the US, and you immediately see how international the group is. It is this kind of work that allows each one to reach their potential. Would it really hurt Alena Leonova to have a chance to not only compete against the former world champion Miki Ando, but also to observe how the Japanese skater approaches her work?

Were Russian skaters the undisputed leaders in all disciplines, such sparring would certainly be unnecessary. However, that is obviously not the case.

Talking about his work, Igor Shpilband once said that during his first few years in the US, he got an invaluable coaching experience by working with everybody, from little kids to senior citizens. Oleg Vasiliev said the same about his work with Fumie Suguri. That’s not surprising – the need to look for the key to the athlete with a completely different mentality forces the coach to constantly be on his toes and to perfect their skills. As a result, experience accumulates more quickly, shortening the road to success.

This is the road along which the coach will sooner or later be able to lead their perhaps Russian student.
 
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Joined
Jun 21, 2003
Thanks for the translation Ptichka. Very interesting.

The article does not mention money. Is there enough work in Russia for all the top coaches without taking on foreign clients?
 

Ptichka

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Jul 28, 2003
Here is what Artur Verner has to say on the subject:

"There's been talk about the ban [to work with foreign students] for a long time; that's a big reason why many coaches have not returned. Let's remember, however, that the best among them can still buy a ticket and go where they came from. Trust me, Nikolai Morozov has a base in Japan, Zuhlin and Elena Garanina have one is the US, etc. And what do you do with the Russian dancer with Australian citizenship John Guerreiro, who, together with his Russian partner, trains in the US with Russian coaches Genady Karponosov and Natalya Linichuk who have both American passports and places in the leadership of the Russian federations? Would they just send Pushkash back to Moscow under the threat of turning off gas?"
 
Joined
Jun 21, 2003
^ I think I agree with Verner. It is pretty hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube. If anything, I think the John Guerreiros of the world will win the day.

First name John. Last name Guerreiro. Citizen of Australia. Skates for Russia.
 

ImaginaryPogue

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Jun 3, 2009
Exactly. Zadie Smith wrote about that beautifully in White Teeth (first and last names on a collision course). It'll be interesting to see just how the coaches that went back to Russia deal with this presumption.
 

Violet Bliss

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Nov 19, 2010
Nationalistic policies and decrees are usually simplistic and reflexive, often reactive decisions not well thought through and almost always have unintended consequences.
 
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Aug 16, 2009
Thanks for translating, Ptitchka! I hope the Russian authorities see the benefits of keeping their country's coaches internationally available. It's too late to go back to the Spartakiade model of Russian athletic supremacy. As the article and other forum posters have pointed out, the win goes both ways; Russian coaches and skaters benefit from collaboration with people from all over the place. The instinct to hoard their considerable talents is understandable, after the results of Vancouver, but I hope they resist the temptation. Sports, music, and science are always better when they are without borders.

I'm reminded of an opera singer I discovered on YouTube, Sergei Lemeshev. (I once asked you about him, Ptitchka, because I ask everyone who knows Russian about him--someone might have more information for me.) He was adored like a rock star from the thirties on. Seriously: he had to build a wall around his home because his fans were so devoted that they would have swarmed him. When I heard his voice, I was transfixed: he had a gorgeous, sweet lyric tenor, and a wonderful way of connecting emotionally with the music. Yet not a single opera buff of my acquaintance had ever heard of him. During his career, he was not allowed even to sing in Soviet-bloc countries. He sang only in the U.S.S.R. Can you imagine how much his career would have been enriched had he been able to perform with some of the great Western conductors and singers? Can you imagine how greatly Western audiences would have revered Russian performers had they heard him? What a waste. Let's not go back to that, even a little bit.
 

Jammers

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This sounds like something Putin would want. Considering he once said the worst thing that ever happened was the collapse of the Soviet Union. I'm sure millions of Russians who don't have his former employer the KGB watching them would disagree.
 

Lucky Star

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Feb 27, 2009
This sounds like something Putin would want. Considering he once said the worst thing that ever happened was the collapse of the Soviet Union. I'm sure millions of Russians who don't have his former employer the KGB watching them would disagree.
The worst thing is not the collapse itself (it would have happened anyway), but how it happened. So in this case yes, I agree with him.

Thanks for the translation Ptichka. Very interesting.

The article does not mention money. Is there enough work in Russia for all the top coaches without taking on foreign clients?
With Sochi 2014 programm money is not the problem. And there are not so many foreign skaters in Russia anyway, so the money they pay is just a drop in the sea. To make, say, Morozov leave his foreign students and focus on Russians means motivate him with money, otherwise he can go back to the US anytime, and I'm sure Russian FS Federation understands that
 

Gudrun

Rinkside
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Apr 25, 2011
Hi there, some time ago I read the headline that Russian coaches shouldn't train foreign skaters anymore and I thought it only a caption to make people read the article, I didn't think there was any truth to it. To be honest, it is quite shocking to me that this should really be true. How could anyone tell a coach who to take on and who not? It's his free choice, isn't it? He might not spend as much time with all skaters as before (due to Sotchi) and prioritise but he shouldn't "drop" anybody - that's a wrong signal, I personnally think. Where does this lead to? Isn't it good that people from different nations come together? And sports as well as music is THE place for cultural exchanges and friendships without boundaries ... we shouldn't start building walls again ...
 

Ptichka

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Jul 28, 2003
I think the "ban" would apply to coaches who depend on the Federation for their livelihood - who get paid not directly by the athletes but by the federation and whose ice depends on the federation as well.
The case of Linichuk & Karponosov is interesting because they work in the US but also are in the leadership positions of the Russian skating federation.
 

bsfan

On the Ice
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Feb 10, 2011
I have another question: Are those foreign federations fully trusting the Russian coaches? Like in Mao's case, and B&A in dance.

Unless the coach only teaches non-russian skaters, he/she won't get full credit if the skater wins and will get all the blames if the skater doesn't.
 

Dodhiyel

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Dec 13, 2003
Russia is currently doing well in the money department, as are fuel-rich countries, in general, and Putin has said that figure skating is popular there. I believe that he would very much like to see Russian skaters doing well in the international competitions, so, one way or another, I think that the money for paying Russian coaches will be there. Russian coaches have given a lot to the skating world, and I think we should be grateful for that. I remember Tamara Moskvina saying that she wanted to give something back for the USA allowing the use of our ice for the training of Russian skaters, back when ice time was hard to come by in Russia for figure skating, and she certainly did. It makes sense to me that now Russian coaches would want to help their native countrymen to show their best skating when they host the next Olympics in 2014. It's only natural. :)
 

ImaginaryPogue

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Jun 3, 2009
Russia is currently doing well in the money department, as are fuel-rich countries, in general, and Putin has said that figure skating is popular there. I believe that he would very much like to see Russian skaters doing well in the international competitions, so, one way or another, I think that the money for paying Russian coaches will be there. Russian coaches have given a lot to the skating world, and I think we should be grateful for that. I remember Tamara Moskvina saying that she wanted to give something back for the USA allowing the use of our ice for the training of Russian skaters, back when ice time was hard to come by in Russia for figure skating, and she certainly did. It makes sense to me that now Russian coaches would want to help their native countrymen to show their best skating when they host the next Olympics in 2014. It's only natural. :)

Of course, the question is not whether they want to help showcase their country. The question is that if the high profile coaches currently have non-Russian students, will they be expected to drop them? Could you imagine if Skate Canada forced Orser to drop Yu Na Kim before Vancouver? Next, wouldn't you argue that skating with the best in the World means that often skating with non-compatriots?
 
Joined
Jul 11, 2003
The Russia coaches, imo, are not all that special nor are they inferior to non Russian coaches.

I believe the fans are confusing Russian skaters and coaches during the Soviet era with those of the Republic era.

I believe the Soviet System brought about their great skaters moreso than their coaches. Can you imagine a Government with an official Sports Department?
 

prettykeys

Medalist
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Oct 19, 2009
I have a lot of respect for Russia, whose contributions to figure skating are huge. I hope such a rule/demand is not instituted, for it would be such a step backwards.

First of all, I would not want a precedent established so that other countries in the future would think of doing the same thing. Second, it was mentioned by Adelina Sotnikova's coach that having Mao Asada come to Russia to train with Tarasova on a few occasions was eye-opening for Adelina and some of the other Russian students. So I would imagine that the benefit is often mutual. Third, I am afraid that figure skating would lose out on the potential to maximize the best partnerships towards creating the best figure skaters and performances, regardless of nationality.

I really hope they don't go with this idea.
 

Ptichka

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Jul 28, 2003
The Russia coaches, imo, are not all that special nor are they inferior to non Russian coaches.
Joe, I think the two coaches we're specifically talking about here are Morozov and Zhulin. Would it be possible for all of their non-Russian students to find other coaches? Certainly. Would it be detrimental to the sport of figure skating? Undebiably so.
 
Joined
Jun 21, 2003
It makes sense to me that now Russian coaches would want to help their native countrymen to show their best skating when they host the next Olympics in 2014. It's only natural. :)

It it the Russian coaches who are initiating this policy?
 

Dodhiyel

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Dec 13, 2003
It it the Russian coaches who are initiating this policy?

I think we have to look at what Ptichka wrote: "But I don’t believe it; not least because a few days prior, I learned from a trusted source that Alexander Zhulin is almost ordered to stop working with the French ice dancers. ".

The key words here are "almost ordered". It does not matter what you or I think, Mathman; what matters is what "the leadership", as Ptichka delicately put it, thinks. Different nations have different ways; we need to remember that. We are not talking about the USA or Canada; we are talking about Russia, and how Russians do things.

When I posted that "It makes sense to me that now Russian coaches would want to help their native countrymen to show their best skating when they host the next Olympics in 2014. It's only natural.", perhaps I should have said "would be willing to help" instead of "would want to help", because I did not mean to give the impression that the impetus to exclude working with non-Russians is necessarily coming from the coaches themselves. I meant that if the coaches were asked to work exclusively with those who skate in Russia's name, until after Sochi, I could easily understand why they might say yes, because of what I have seen of Russian culture. Moreover, the Olympics is very much about each nation expressing their own national spirit and pride in their particular culture.
 
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