2019-20 Team China

[Fluture]

I think this interview needs its own thread. I rarely check in here and otherwise could have easily missed it. But people need to see this. I am absolutely horrified, disgusted and scared on the behalf of the poor child. If this is true - and it seems like it is - I truly hope someone somehow intervenes and gets the little girl out of this toxic and dangerous environment...

 

[katymay]

An has a HUGE personality. From the videos I've seen, she is loud and dramatic. (The stretching her mother was doing shouldn't have been worthy of all that drama-and generally I cringe when I see coaches trying to force leg flexibility (****cough cough **** Eteri).-but what her mother was doing is something that was done to me in gymnastics every day by coaches etc. It actually helps counterstretch and keep the back healthier). One video she falls on a combo and hits the ice with her fist and ...there is an audible outburst. During a competition! LOL. This kid is...unique. And she sorta makes me laugh. She probably makes her parents a bit weary. I suspect that no one is able to force her to do something she doesn't want to do, she isn't the compliant type as far as I can see.
As far as not going to school....I'd compile a list of American skaters who have never gone to school, but there wouldn't be enough space. Some are diligent about online learning and home schooling, and some....are not.
I look forward to seeing her on the Junior circuit next year....I have a feeling she is going to be highly entertaining.

 

[Flying Feijoa]

Strange... the last three posts in the thread (one by me and two by another user) aren't visible anymore. Our discussion was a little off-topic (and slightly political) but not more than what you would get in e.g. the Russian skaters' threads. Could a mod explain what happened? I certainly didn't mean to offend.

 

[Flying Feijoa]

An has a HUGE personality. From the videos I've seen, she is loud and dramatic. (The stretching her mother was doing shouldn't have been worthy of all that drama-and generally I cringe when I see coaches trying to force leg flexibility (****cough cough **** Eteri).-but what her mother was doing is something that was done to me in gymnastics every day by coaches etc. It actually helps counterstretch and keep the back healthier). One video she falls on a combo and hits the ice with her fist and ...there is an audible outburst. During a competition! LOL. This kid is...unique. And she sorta makes me laugh. She probably makes her parents a bit weary. I suspect that no one is able to force her to do something she doesn't want to do, she isn't the compliant type as far as I can see.
As far as not going to school....I'd compile a list of American skaters who have never gone to school, but there wouldn't be enough space. Some are diligent about online learning and home schooling, and some....are not.
I look forward to seeing her on the Junior circuit next year....I have a feeling she is going to be highly entertaining.

I did think that some of the examples cited as abusive by commentators (who may not have in-depth knowledge of the sport) are not that unusual in training. Assisted stretching and homeschooling as you mentioned, high repetition etc. are fairly common for high-level skaters and other athletes around the world. It's not clear from the information available whether Xiangyi actually gets homeschooled (i.e. in anything other than skating/gymnastics/dance), but if she does, then there could be some possible misunderstanding by the online community, because homeschooling is quite rare in China. I think if there is an issue, it would be more the psychological effect of having a demanding/controlling parent, rather than physical damage, but it's hardly a unique problem. In the absence of concrete evidence, I'd rather not be judgemental.

Side note regarding stretching: being pulled passively into a stretch ('static stretching') is now understood to be less effective than e.g. dynamic stretching, but in terms of injury potential it really depends on how knowledgeable/responsible the coach is. As kids we did it to each other in ballet class without issues (under teacher supervision to avoid overstretching). However, later I did martial arts under a coach who would stretch our hamstrings and shoulders till we complained of pain, then hold the position for 30 seconds and push us further. He also employed ballistic stretching (bouncing) which is even worse for injury. One of my training mates tore his hamstring and took six months to recover.

Do you know if your gymnastics coaches did PNF stretching with you? It's often also applied by a partner/coach, but involves contracting your muscles against the stretch and then relaxing into it, and is one of the safest and most effective stretching methods around. It's hard to tell as a bystander whether someone is doing static or PNF stretching though.

 

[saturdaysun]

On the issue of homeschooling, the infamous "I hate my dad" moment was spoken in English, so I think we can deduce she's learning English and if she's learning a foreign language, she's probably being taught all the other subjects as well.

 

[Flying Feijoa]

So I finally took time to look through some of the additional links Lunalovesskating posted, and came to the conclusion that Nini's family/training situation has likely been heavily misinterpreted and taken out of context by the Weixin/Weibo figure skating fanbase Why, I have no idea...

Here's a section of that 2017 interview with Ms Zhang (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/YKGQLXycmht41FK73n1bEw) which I've translated with attention to tone/implication:

"2. As Nini increasingly becomes the focus of wider attention, do you [parents] feel pressure, and do you think that this attention and being in the limelight will adversely affect Nini's development/maturation?

I'm a skating fan myself so raising Nini I feel like a mother bird teaching her baby to fly. One could say my dreams have found a home in Nini, however naturally Nini herself really loves to skate. From the beginning, we deliberately focused on Nini's spins when she was younger, because at this age physical strength and skating technique are insufficient to support difficult jumps. Now that she's achieved Level 4 spins, henceforth we will allocate more time to jumps, footwork etc. However, due to our approach, when she competed in the youth division, many skating fans questioned why she had such good spins yet a low overall score. At first when we were faced with all sorts of comments, we had doubts about our approach and wondered when she would be able to break through the national ranks. However, constantly thinking about beating competitors is a foolish mentality, since it causes impatience and rashness. Thus, after some consideration we concluded with certainty that such a utilitarian mindset [being fixated on current results] would be a counterproductive approach [proverb roughly equivalent to 'more haste, less speed'] which would be very unfavourable to Nini's future development.
In organising Nini's training plans, we focus on the long term rather than being concerned with her results from competition to competition. Building a solid technical foundation while placing the main focus on artistry and performance, allows Nini to enjoy and genuinely love skating and lets figure skating truly become integral to her life. We are extremely grateful to the skating fans in our country for their support and love for Nini. Nonetheless, she is currently at a very tricky stage (overrotating doubles, underrotating triples) and needs more time to work on her technique, so everybody please be patient."

Clarification on Ms Zhang's remark re: schooling - she said her daughter doesn't do traditional exam-based education. That's perfectly understandable for a homeschooled primary school aged child (gee, even kids who go to normal primary school in NZ don't have exams), but perhaps scandalous to people with a more conservative outlook on education.

From what I saw of Ms Zhang in the 2015 clip and this interview, she sounds fairly rational, not at all authoritative in the way that the mothers of Tiffany Chen or Tonya Harding were, and doesn't overrule Nini's dad/coach's professional opinion. Honestly it seems they took a lot of flak from Chinese forums just for being somewhat unconventional... I hope Xiangyi brings her extroverted personality to international ice this season and lays the gossipers to rest.

 

[Lunalovesskating]

An has a HUGE personality. From the videos I've seen, she is loud and dramatic. (The stretching her mother was doing shouldn't have been worthy of all that drama-and generally I cringe when I see coaches trying to force leg flexibility (****cough cough **** Eteri).-but what her mother was doing is something that was done to me in gymnastics every day by coaches etc. It actually helps counterstretch and keep the back healthier). One video she falls on a combo and hits the ice with her fist and ...there is an audible outburst. During a competition! LOL. This kid is...unique. And she sorta makes me laugh. She probably makes her parents a bit weary. I suspect that no one is able to force her to do something she doesn't want to do, she isn't the compliant type as far as I can see.
As far as not going to school....I'd compile a list of American skaters who have never gone to school, but there wouldn't be enough space. Some are diligent about online learning and home schooling, and some....are not.
I look forward to seeing her on the Junior circuit next year....I have a feeling she is going to be highly entertaining.

The ignorance in this post is blatant.

 

[SNAKSuyun]

There are definitely a number of issues with Nini's current situation / education / training / upbringing - and I'll note that most Chinese skating fans agree. If we are to take the article at face value, these are a list of red flags (that remain red flags even if we compare them to training methods elsewhere):

1) Nini's mother seem to be extremely obsessed with skating and have projected her dreams onto her daughter. One should note that figure skating is an extremely niche sport in China - even more niche than it already is in the West. According to the article, Nini's mother self-studied skating for a year, spending entire days at the rink until she got all her singles. She even had an abortion due to skating. She only quit due to a nasty fall that nearly left her disfigured, and after that, tried to make Nini a champion skater from birth. She claims to have wanted a boy due to the infamous puberty/consistency problem with ladies singles skaters. She wanted to name her daughter "Yibing," with "bing" meaning "ice," hoping she'd love skating. She only changed it to "xiangyi" because people told her naming her daughter after "ice" is unlucky - but she substituted "xiang" instead which is a character used in the translated names of famous Japanese skaters Yuka Sato and Shizuka Arakawa. She started editing Nini's competition music while still being pregnant with her and started conditioning Nini for spinning when Nini was only two months old. Like come on...

2) Tiger mom training - Nini's mother says "I can at any moment yell, then smile, then become violent, then kick her, then beat her, everything is under my control, it's extreme / limit-pushing personality training." She compares herself to tiger moms and says it's her "social responsibility" to beat Nini. Nini's father has noted that "[Nini's mom] thinks Nini should rest if she's injured, if she's not injured then she should keep training. If her ankle doesn't have any issues then [her mom] gets unhappy, thinking she didn't train enough."

3) Nini's mother seems to take criticism and anything less than perfection extremely poorly and take it out on her daughter. Apparently, in 2014, Nini's mother read an internet comment that Nini is only good at spins and has nothing outside of them. Even if this is harsh, I think we can agree that plenty of fans make these types of comments even about the most talented and successful skaters (fans saying Nathan is nothing without his quads, etc). Nini's mother became extremely upset and thought, "how can I accept this? [Nini's] landed a single axel by 5 1/2 years of age, and only won every competition she's entered, what grounds does the [critic] have to say that?" She then proceeded to make Nini train extra hard, causing Nini to train 12 hours on one day. Nini's mom said "[Nini] trained until she had a fever," "I was pretty crazy then, the more they [criticized her] the more I trained her to death, because that's who I am, I don't accept losses, I can't handle them." This is an extremely dangerous and toxic mentality to have as an adult, much less to project onto a child!!

4) Nini's mom is isolating her from her peers and family, not just homeschooling her. Nini's mom describes her husband (and all men) as "giant babies" and thinks an efficient marriage is built on distance (to the extent that they text each other instead of talking in person). She thinks true elites are always "lonely" and Nini's friends should be at least 20 years older than her since she should only hang out with people who are "older and more experienced." She considers Nini's similar-aged peers as "garbage" who will only waste Nini's time and won't bring her happiness. She considers Nini's mental age to be 30+. When Nini's father tries to make Nini's training less extreme, Nini's mother fights back and recruits Nini to her side. One day, Nini's father heard Nini's mom yelling at Nini in the room and came in hoping to interfere. However, he found Nini's mom knocking her head against the wall and Nini doing the same. Apparently this is a common threat Nini's mom does to try to get Nini to be more even-tempered in training and less prone to bouts of impatience (?????)

I haven't even listed everything here, just a few things that really rubbed me the wrong way. Feel free to get more translations of the article if you want. I'd just like to say that when even Chinese fans (who are very used to tiger moms and tiger mom training) have reacted to the article by saying they feel chills going down their backs, there's some serious **** going on.

 

[Flying Feijoa]

Where to begin...?

To evaluate whether something is true, reliable evidence (corroboration by multiple high-quality sources) is more important than the number of people saying it's true (those are claims, not evidence - and based mostly upon a single source i.e. this recent article). True evidence may also be misinterpreted/twisted through the lens of online commentators who have their own, often unconscious, biases.

At first I was outraged like you when I saw the original post, but now I've gone from being unsure to doubtful, for the following reasons:

1. Factual inconsistency - The account of Nini's mum's personal skating obsession has now gone from 'she had a miscarriage due to falling on the ice' to 'she had a fall that left her disfigured + she had an abortion'. If a narrative changes at every retelling without any new input of facts, that's a strong indication of hearsay and rumour.

2. Leaps of logic - Because Nini's mum is a skating fan and did it as a hobby, she is considered to be unhealthily obsessed. If the criteria for being unhealthily obsessed is learning to skate as an adult and getting single jumps in a year (achievable for most healthy people below ~50 years), then apparently I'm unhealthily obsessed too. Within the adult skating community, nobody is delusional about becoming World Champion - they just skate because it's beautiful/challenging/fun (take a look at the Lutz Corner and see). Projection of unfulfilled dreams would make more sense for a mother who was a serious skater as a child, e.g. Medvedeva's mum - however, this projection may not always have a negative effect (Medvedeva gets on well with her mum, who is quite supportive).

3. Lack of corroboration/conflicting accounts - In the 2017 article I quoted in my previous post, Nini's mum says explicitly that they avoided training jumps out of consideration for her physical development, focus on long-term development rather than competition-to-competition results and prioritise her enjoyment of the sport. The 2015 video feature shows Nini learning to read in English. This is in stark contrast to the most recent article which portrays Nini's mum as results-obsessed, impatient, promoting overtraining/injury over health and depriving her of basic education. The only way to reconcile these differing accounts is if either Nini's mum had some drastic personality change after 2017, or that she was lying in 2015 and 2017 but suddenly decided not to in 2020.

I'd rather not wade further into the murky territory of 'he-said-she-said' (or keep bumping this subject/last season's thread to the top of the sub-forum), so will just leave this discussion with a plea: in the absence of stronger evidence, let's not jump to conclusions.

 

[SNAKSuyun]

I think it's at least fair to lay out all the article's problematic claims, as lunalovesskating only covered some of it, but not some other parts that I thought were just as, if not even more outrageous. You may decide the truth of it as you will, but since most people here do not speak Chinese, a translation would help people understand the current competing claims.

As a side note, since the accusations here are pretty serious, one would expect Nini's mother to come out with a serious rebuttal if it was made up of blatant lies. So far she's produced... Nini's student ID cards for school.

It will be next to impossible to gather multiple high-quality sources on something like this - we couldn't even prove Plushenko's parenting/training methods and he's a far more social figure than Nini's mother. If you believe all or most of this is just malicious hearsay or rumor, that's fine. But to immediately dismiss the claims here would also be problematic as well.

To respond to your points:

1) Where did you see that she "had a miscarriage due to falling on the ice"? The article is pretty explicit in saying she "got a miscarriage/abortion" for the purpose of practicing skating. Unless you have a different source?

2) I don't know how you can't see giving up your job, staying in a rink from 8am - 10pm every day, getting an abortion to practice skating, and making plans for your child's skating career before they were even born as unhealthy. Maybe some of these descriptions were not facts, but as they were written, this paints a very distorted mental picture. I'd also note that if you grew up with one parent who's projecting their dreams onto you, it's not impossible for you to get on well with them. I'm not saying Zhenya's case is like that, but it is definitely possible for it to happen both in a positive and in a negative way. Heck, prodigy pianist Lang Lang had a complicated relationship with his parents regarding how they forced him to learn the piano. Either way, for things like this, I feel like it's best to hear from the child themselves, and especially after said child has had some time away from their parents to reflect on their own.

3) Nini is 13 years old now and 10 years old in 2017. It is easily within the realm of expectations for even a results-driven mother or coach to not want her to spam practice jumps at 10. I think Nini's mom as portrayed by the article has serious issues, but she is not a terrible coach. She knows what she should be doing in rough time frames (e.g. she's trying to get Nini to land a 3A in competition now - many junior girls are trying the same thing at her age), it's just the details in the execution that are problematic. And it is indeed true that Nini's mom allows her to have other indulgences such as downloading the latest apps, playing with cats, making food etc - but to "award" your child in that way does not necessarily make "training" your child in certain ways during the other hours of the day okay.

 

[nussnacker]

There are definitely a number of issues with Nini's current situation / education / training / upbringing - and I'll note that most Chinese skating fans agree. If we are to take the article at face value, these are a list of red flags (that remain red flags even if we compare them to training methods elsewhere):

1) Nini's mother seem to be extremely obsessed with skating and have projected her dreams onto her daughter. One should note that figure skating is an extremely niche sport in China - even more niche than it already is in the West. According to the article, Nini's mother self-studied skating for a year, spending entire days at the rink until she got all her singles. She even had an abortion due to skating. She only quit due to a nasty fall that nearly left her disfigured, and after that, tried to make Nini a champion skater from birth. She claims to have wanted a boy due to the infamous puberty/consistency problem with ladies singles skaters. She wanted to name her daughter "Yibing," with "bing" meaning "ice," hoping she'd love skating. She only changed it to "xiangyi" because people told her naming her daughter after "ice" is unlucky - but she substituted "xiang" instead which is a character used in the translated names of famous Japanese skaters Yuka Sato and Shizuka Arakawa. She started editing Nini's competition music while still being pregnant with her and started conditioning Nini for spinning when Nini was only two months old. Like come on...

2) Tiger mom training - Nini's mother says "I can at any moment yell, then smile, then become violent, then kick her, then beat her, everything is under my control, it's extreme / limit-pushing personality training." She compares herself to tiger moms and says it's her "social responsibility" to beat Nini. Nini's father has noted that "[Nini's mom] thinks Nini should rest if she's injured, if she's not injured then she should keep training. If her ankle doesn't have any issues then [her mom] gets unhappy, thinking she didn't train enough."

3) Nini's mother seems to take criticism and anything less than perfection extremely poorly and take it out on her daughter. Apparently, in 2014, Nini's mother read an internet comment that Nini is only good at spins and has nothing outside of them. Even if this is harsh, I think we can agree that plenty of fans make these types of comments even about the most talented and successful skaters (fans saying Nathan is nothing without his quads, etc). Nini's mother became extremely upset and thought, "how can I accept this? [Nini's] landed a single axel by 5 1/2 years of age, and only won every competition she's entered, what grounds does the [critic] have to say that?" She then proceeded to make Nini train extra hard, causing Nini to train 12 hours on one day. Nini's mom said "[Nini] trained until she had a fever," "I was pretty crazy then, the more they [criticized her] the more I trained her to death, because that's who I am, I don't accept losses, I can't handle them." This is an extremely dangerous and toxic mentality to have as an adult, much less to project onto a child!!

4) Nini's mom is isolating her from her peers and family, not just homeschooling her. Nini's mom describes her husband (and all men) as "giant babies" and thinks an efficient marriage is built on distance (to the extent that they text each other instead of talking in person). She thinks true elites are always "lonely" and Nini's friends should be at least 20 years older than her since she should only hang out with people who are "older and more experienced." She considers Nini's similar-aged peers as "garbage" who will only waste Nini's time and won't bring her happiness. She considers Nini's mental age to be 30+. When Nini's father tries to make Nini's training less extreme, Nini's mother fights back and recruits Nini to her side. One day, Nini's father heard Nini's mom yelling at Nini in the room and came in hoping to interfere. However, he found Nini's mom knocking her head against the wall and Nini doing the same. Apparently this is a common threat Nini's mom does to try to get Nini to be more even-tempered in training and less prone to bouts of impatience (?????)

I haven't even listed everything here, just a few things that really rubbed me the wrong way. Feel free to get more translations of the article if you want. I'd just like to say that when even Chinese fans (who are very used to tiger moms and tiger mom training) have reacted to the article by saying they feel chills going down their backs, there's some serious **** going on.

Jesus Christ, I just read this.
Holy moly, this is insane...

 

[nussnacker]

I think this interview needs its own thread. I rarely check in here and otherwise could have easily missed it. But people need to see this. I am absolutely horrified, disgusted and scared on the behalf of the poor child. If this is true - and it seems like it is - I truly hope someone somehow intervenes and gets the little girl out of this toxic and dangerous environment...

I agree.
someone should create a thread with a full article, I’m am absolutely shocked to read all of the snips that were posted online.
The ones posted by SNAKSuyun are just pure horror. Poor kid.

 

[Flying Feijoa]

I think it's at least fair to lay out all the article's problematic claims, as lunalovesskating only covered some of it, but not some other parts that I thought were just as, if not even more outrageous. You may decide the truth of it as you will, but since most people here do not speak Chinese, a translation would help people understand the current competing claims.
...
If you believe all or most of this is just malicious hearsay or rumor, that's fine. But to immediately dismiss the claims here would also be problematic as well.

To clarify (since by 'you' I guess you mean me specifically, not people in general), I'm not dismissing the allegations as false. I think in terms of reliability they're similar to claims about Hamada abusing skaters - they could well be true, but at the moment there isn't any solid evidence currently to prove it. Granted, the current evidence doesn't disprove it either.

I think it's good that you and Lunalovesskating have raised the matter of Xiangyi's training/family situation to English-speaking audiences here on Golden Skate, since they wouldn't otherwise have known about it. (And neither would I, since the only Chinese skaters I usually pay attention to are pairs). So, I'm not trying to shut down the discussion or anything - I just wanted to ensure people here are aware of some possible caveats to the article.

For the sake of open access, I may post a manual translation of the article (Google Translate often mangles Asian languages). It would take a while though, because my Chinese is rusty...

 

[nussnacker]

To clarify (since by 'you' I guess you mean me specifically, not people in general), I'm not dismissing the allegations as false. I think in terms of reliability they're similar to claims about Hamada abusing skaters - they could well be true, but at the moment there isn't any solid evidence currently to prove it. Granted, the current evidence doesn't disprove it either.

I think it's good that you and Lunalovesskating have raised the matter of Xiangyi's training/family situation to English-speaking audiences here on Golden Skate, since they wouldn't otherwise have known about it. (And neither would I, since the only Chinese skaters I usually pay attention to are pairs). So, I'm not trying to shut down the discussion or anything - I just wanted to ensure people here are aware of some possible caveats to the article.

For the sake of open access, I may post a manual translation of the article (Google Translate often mangles Asian languages). It would take a while though, because my Chinese is rusty...

That would be great. If you could kindly add some cultural context as well, on what’s normal and not when it comes to certain phrases, that would be even better. (Something like “trained her to death” sounds insane in English, but maybe it’s a common phrase in Chinese or something and isn’t that scary when said in Chinese?)

Of course, at this point all of those things are allegations, but they are pretty strong and scary, hence a lot of people reacted this way.
Since there’s even a slight possibility of those being true, it’s a pretty serious deal nevertheless.

 

[HoneyBear]

There was actually a similar interview published in June: https://weibo.com/7440791834/J4WpJy...&mod=weibotime&type=comment#_rnd1594880646806

It sparked some debate among Chinese figure skating fans, but it was an online interview published by a figure-skating-content-only account with a much smaller viewership than a more general magazine; It didn't receive too much attention outside of figure skating fans.

The article itself was also less polished than the later interview. The writer didn't seem to have done much editing. The words and phrasing were quite colloquial- it reads like a transcription. It did point to a lot of similar things as the much-discussed interview though:

1. Nini's mother wanted Nini to become a figure skater even before she was born. She had Nini started on some kind of physical training for babies when Nini was two months old. Nini's mother described the training as "official". My personal guess would be she wanted to say it is scientific. Nini began skating when she was one month short of three. Ever since the first day on ice, she would train for 5 hours every day. Nowadays Nini trains ten hours a day. Every week she got two half-days off (not two and half) but she still needs to run and do jazz dance on the off days.
2. Nini's mom really is quite focused on the Russian (especially team Tutberidze) and Japanese girls. "[translation]If Russian girls can endure -20°C (-4°F), so can we".
3. Nini's mother has always been very anxious about not winning medals. She considered it a "more professional approach" to figure skating.
4. Whenever the topic figure skating training is asked, Nini's mom seems to be the principal one making decisions. She didn't say that, but she did not mention specifically who Nini's coaches are, or any other coach of Nini's. (Nini's father is a former figure skater and now a coach and has other students, but from what was written, he doesn't seem to have too much to say in Nini's training).

These are merely what were written in the earlier article that I think are similar to what were presented in the later interview. Other topics discussed included the cost of raising a figure skater, her thoughts on figure skating and rhythmic gymnastics, and her interpretation of the new rules. Obviously this article is a bit tamer, and did not mention too much of her professional career, nor did it mention the marriage and family drama. But both article point to Nini's mother being results-driven to an extreme degree and is controlling much of Nini's training and social life.

There was an interesting quote in the end of the article:
"[translation] Maybe my thoughts were not conventional, treating Nini like an 'experiment'. Sorry sister Ni. I wish you could realize my dream, the dream of a figure skating fan, a dream for the Chinese ladies singles". The article -and by extension Nini's mom because this is supposedly a direct quote - did use the exact word "experiment" with a quotation mark.

 

[Flying Feijoa]

Thanks HoneyBear for drawing attention to that June article, which I wasn't aware of. Having two interviews (and the fact that the June one is directly quoted versus being rephrased) strengthens reliability of the allegations a lot. As you can see from this thread, I'd been on the fence for a while about the more recent article since I hadn't seen any corroborating source.

I find her mother's thought processes illogical. A minor example: how would being able to bear -20ºC have anything to do with Russian girls' skating success? Rinks in general are about 10-15ºC, people bundle up when travelling between buildings in winter, and there is something called summer in Russia too. :eyeroll:

 

[HoneyBear]

I find her mother's thought processes illogical. A minor example: how would being able to bear -20ºC have anything to do with Russian girls' skating success? Rinks in general are about 10-15ºC, people bundle up when travelling between buildings in winter, and there is something called summer in Russia too. :eyeroll:

This is the exact reason I think the earlier interview wasn't as heavily edited: The logic in that interview is hard to follow sometimes. It is presented as a Q&A. In the same paragraph she talked about Russian and Japanese girls, the topics shifted from the class Nini was taking as a 3-year-old to going back to the age of Genghis Khan where even kids were very strong. Nevertheless I think she brought up enduring -20ºC in the context of building stamina. Personally, I also think maybe -20ºC didn't mean -20ºC exactly; It might be referring to a very cold environment.