http://www.sport-express.ru/figure-skating/reviews/sistema-tutberidze-eto-rabskiy-trud-prizer-olimpiad-o-rasstavanii-medvedevoy-i-ee-trenera-1407816/
"Is Tutberidze's system slave labour?" 1992 and 1994 Olympic medalist and sports psychologist Elizaveta Kozhevnikova - about Medvedeva, Tutberidze and kids in olympic sport.
- What do you dislike about Tutberidze's methods?
- Even before the Olympics, I came across some old interview, where she talks about athletes as a material from which to mold. The majority of my clients are athletes, of whom "molded". It is very difficult for them to solve their professional problems, because the head and body are "split" because they were suppressed as a child.
- One need obscures all others. The same thing happens with the athlete who "must" comply with the standard, but he does not succeed. Fear obscures everything. The paradox is that it is impossible to achieve an ideal. So, the athlete, motivated in this way, stumbles into the eternal history of inadequacy. On the example of Zhenya Medvedeva, the second place in the Olympic Games is perceived as a failure and a catastrophe. And further purely at the physiological level, an imbalance is fixed: too many stress hormones that begin to destroy serotonin pathways - the athlete can not experience pleasure from himself and from his achievements. As a result, we get a person who is constantly in a state of irritation and discontent.
- And what should I do?
- There are several ways of compensation: eating disorders, alcohol, shopping. Remember the story with Julia Lipnitskaya. Instead of a painstaking process, where a child slowly learns to combine his values and hard work in sports, he is quickly hammered into the "do it" standard. There is an ideal, and everything below the ideal is thrash and shame. But in the end we get a person with a hole in self-identity.
- Can Medvedev get his best results in Canada with Brian Orser?
- Zhenya is an excellent sportswoman - clever, strong-willed, disciplined. But now it is very important for her to recover emotionally. I can only assume that she is experiencing Eteri Georgievna's figure if for her it was the second person closest to her after her mother. Its adaptation will take time. Foreign protocols say that it takes two months, but this is provided that the athlete has developed in the system of respect for the age periodization. My experience suggests that with our athletes this can take 6-12 months of psychophysiological practice.
Interesting point of view from a sports psychologist.
