By the end of 2016, she was done with the sport altogether. The following month, she finished second at the world championships but was quickly discarded as her body began to develop. She made her name as a coach in 2014 when a 15-year-old girl in a red dress named Yulia Lipnitskaya cast a spell in Sochi and was crucial to Russia winning gold in the team event. She is a divisive figure, though not much is known about her – unusual for a skating community that can border on the incestuous. And how do they deal with that when they’re so young?”Īll three Russian teenagers boast the same coach: Eteri Tutberidze, who has built a stable of female talent. It points to the fact the training has been too much. Has there been a lot of over-training? I hear from doctors about 12-year-olds in America, Finland and Sweden – and I’m sure in Russia it starts even earlier – coming to clinics with stress fractures and things which shouldn’t happen at that age. “Obviously, the athlete has responsibility but we never really question if there’s something wrong with the coaching. But why does the body of a teenager break? Or if your body or psychological state fails it’s because you are weak. “You grow up to believe if you get injured it’s because you’re weak. “The worst aspect to this is that most of the time, in skating and gymnastics and maybe other sports, you grow up in a culture that’s very authoritarian,” Korpi says. First, rather than a skating competition for women, are we now dealing with a jumping competition for girls? Second, and much more importantly, what’s the cost of success – physically, emotionally and psychologically – for this collection of raw, developing children? Trusova and Shcherbakova have both mastered skating’s holy grail: the quad, an exhaustive element – and up until recently an unheard-of feat for ladies, which is four full rotations in the air. What makes them so good? Well, owing to their remarkable jumps, they maximize the technical points on offer. They repeated the trick at the European championships the following month their opponents left dumbstruck by their dominance. In the Grand Prix final last December, Kostornaia claimed gold while Shcherbakova and Trusova rounded out the medals. They only made their senior debuts last year but blitzed through the sport, ensuring a multitude of headlines. The trio have revolutionized figure skating. Unintentionally, it may have shifted the landscape of women’s figure skating in the process.īarring a minor miracle, three Russian teenagers would have battled it out for the podium places: 16-year-old Alena Kostornaia and a pair of 15-year-olds, Anna Shcherbakova and Alexandra Trusova. Last week should have seen the world championships take place in Montreal, but the Covid-19 pandemic put paid to that.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2022
Categories |