- Joined
- Jan 5, 2019
Beyond the possible
“Only those who are interested in first place go into sport”
by Inna Goncharenko.
Progress looks exactly like this: at first we think something is impossible, then we consider it a miracle, and then we perceive what is happening as ordinary. It is like a cellular connection. At first, the very idea that a phone can work without any wire seemed incredible, but now it’s even hard to imagine how we lived without a cell phone, which has both a camera and Internet access.
Something likewise happened with jumping. The fact that the entire assortment of jumps can be performed with four revolutions became clear already in the last Olympic cycle, that these jumps can now be jumped by children came as a surprise to everyone. How this became possible and what will happen next, “Moskovskiy Figurist” learned from the Honoured Coach of Russia, Inna Goncharenko.
- Inna, in your opinion, what do you think made this progress possible?
- I think, first of all due to overcoming a certain psychological barrier, as well as due to the accumulation of experience and the development of training methods.
- Was this barrier passed by children or trainers?
- Of course, the coaches. They made their conclusions and stopped being afraid of quadruple jumps. This psychological breakthrough was made possible thanks to the Tutberidze group, which through its work proved that it is possible and even necessary to teach quads early.
- Do you skip over single and double jumps? Immediately start with triples?
- Even at the beginning of the 2000’s, children learned double jumps for a year or two, before connecting them in cascades for another year, after which they only started to learn triple jumps, but only a select few reached that stage. Today, the approach itself has changed: single and double jumps are learned as a starter movement to triples and quads. This is a new trend in training, and advanced trainers are teaching single jumps with an eye on quads, not otherwise.
- Previously, it seemed that only physically strong skaters are capable of quadruple jumps. What caused children who by definition do not have such muscle mass to jump quads?
- The child in the pre-pubertal period is lighter, more resilient and psychologically more stable. If the child is not cowardly by nature, has the necessary basics and desire - already half the battle is won. It is also important that he has a competent trainer and ambitious parents. Without this, it will not work out.
- That is, the ambitions of parents is an encouraging factor?
- Yes, if the child is skating with a competent trainer. Sporting ambitions and professional work cannot harm a child. They say that mankind has made progress through laziness. Maybe, only not in sports. There is nothing to gain without ambition and this thirst for victory. Those who are interested only in first places, who want to prove they are the best, go into sports.
- “You cannot go far on ambitions alone.” You still need to work, that is, to exploit your body to the maximum. How long can this continue?
- When from childhood on, an athlete gets used to working hard and does not see anything supernatural in this. He is sure this is the norm, and thereby increases the capabilities of his body. I think that there are no special limits, especially in their youth, when ambitions are overflowing. Why is all education happening in childhood? Because at this age, new stuff is the easiest to digest. The more you lay in the child, the more will remain in him by the time he has passed puberty.
- Today, almost everyone cries out over excessive loads, broken legs and backs and generally over skaters being tormented from childhood on. Do coaches' ambitions threaten the lives and health of athletes?
- Nobody breaks anything more or worse than usual. Take any ‘coordination sport’ - gymnastics, diving, trampolining and others - everywhere training starts from early age on, because otherwise you do not have time to learn everything you need. By the way, the same is true for ballet and circus: very early and intensive training, but only the most talented ones make it into Baryshnikovs, Nurievs, Tsiskaridze's.
The press has lately written a lot about the harsh working methods of Eteri Tutberidze. I can say that we all work hard, it’s just that not everyone gets a result like hers. Eteri managed to find such a working order, where children come to the ice every day and fight. They fight for the elements, for her attention, fight with themselves and with each other. Therefore, her athletes are so steadfast and stable in competitions. In training twice a day, six days a week and 350 days a year, she has her own Olympic Games within her group. I do not think that it is easy, neither for herself nor her staff. After all, it is necessary to work every day, as Tatyana Anatolyevna says, to spring an artery.
There are always some specific people who made a breakthrough like were the first to go into space. But, before becoming a world-famous trainer, Eteri, at the beginning of her coaching career, worked with children for whom figure skating was a leisure activity, took those who were already expelled from sports schools as unsuitable. These were ordinary children, not the most talented, not the most daring, who needed to be persuaded to become bold and talented. She does it now.
- This sounds good. But, you see, in the West, the training methodology is fundamentally different from the Russian one - everyone recognizes this. Why can't we work like them?
- Back in the Soviet years, we were taught that we, as coaches, have no right to raise our voice at an athlete, we cannot drive him out of training for laziness or disobedience, rather we must guide him and inspire him to do this hard labour by pedagogical methods. Unfortunately, this does not work. In the West, where the coaching ethics of interaction with the athlete is very regulated, the coach will not raise his voice, will not rebuke for laziness, or talk about being late. There, the coach will never touch the athlete with his hands in order to correct the position of his back or legs, because you can end up without your license or even get a sentence. For this reason, training is going at a somewhat slower pace than ours. It is possible that with such an approach they would not have any results at all, in the West, athletes do not work in groups, but exclusively individual. Just do not think that I think it is OK to yell at children and shake them like a pear. It’s just that our conditions and methods of work, it so happened, differ from Western ones. There, coaches and parents are in a direct monetary relation of service and delivery. For parents, an athlete is an expensive investment, so abroad it is not the trainer who ‘demands’, but the athlete’s parents. Especially if they are a family of immigrants, particularly from the East. In China, in Japan, the mentality of the nation is different from ours and from the western: they are workaholics there and raise their children in a Spartan way. I once accidentally became convinced of this when I witnessed the morning training before an exhibition performance at some stage of the Grand Prix. Imagine athletes at seven in the morning, some lazily ride back and forth on the ice, or simply huddle at the boarding. Only one certain Nathan Chen jumped the quadruple jumps throughout the training session in front of his mom’s watchful eyes - on not yet resurfaced ice and without overhead lights.
- When the rules changed in 2004, in our circles we held this opinion that from now on we will lose to foreign athletes, since we are not good at sliding. Today, our skaters are among the champions of the Olympic Games and World Champions. Hence the question: have we learned how to properly teach sliding or have we somehow adapted to perform the most difficult jumps without it?
- Oddly enough, both of these happened. Before everything else, we learned to use the rules. The same Eteri Tutberidze every time very competently analyses the ISU rules and keeps up-to-date with them. When cascades were highly valued, she won in cascades, later in cascades during the second half of the program, then she began to win with arms raised in a jump, now she is preparing to win with quad jumps. We know that her athletes do not always slide divinely due to various circumstances. Many came to her group from other coaches - with an already existing slide. Now that she has created her own school, I think Eteri will carry out her planned work on sliding, because without this you’re going nowhere. This will give an even greater impetus to the development of multi-turn jumps - from more interesting entries, with good speed.
- Are there ways to effectively teach athletes how to slide? After all, trainers usually complain there is not enough ice time.
- In my opinion, 'sliding school' or school figures should never have been removed from the competition program, it would’ve been better to come up with some other format, more spectacular, but it should have been left in the program. Moreover, now with the development of television and all these digital technologies, competitions could become more exciting: spectators could see in detail the blade at work, the steepness of the arc, the drawing of the element, the speed of rotation - all this is why our sport is called figure skating. But now there is no such type of competition, and ice time is not allocated to these subtleties. Therefore, coaches start to come up with their own ways to somehow meet the requirements of the rules. I have my own methodology for teaching the basic elements of figure skating. I always carefully and uncompromisingly teach sliding to my athletes, I come up with each sliding run in such a way it develops maximum blade control. I explain the theory, draw the geometry of the basic elements on paper, work out the steps on the floor in the hall.
- “Why on the floor, not on the ice?”
- Because the development of this skill requires separate training time, which we don’t have. There is always a shortage of ice time. When the FFKM introduced sliding tests, this somehow compensated for the lack of schooling, gave athletes at least some understanding of the arcs, the correct inclination of the body, the distribution of the center of gravity, the force of a push, feeling for ‘the edge’; understanding how to accelerate oneself by pulling, completing triple turns, rockers, counters, brackets, without pushing. Due to this skill, the athlete can control the speed on the jump, the trajectory of the arc of approach, and the stability on the lead-out. This is a whole science in itself. Among other things, this is the development of coordination, an understanding of the physics of your body's movement on ice. But the children were not interested, they suffered from coaching tediousness, did not understand why they were forced to peer into the trails from their blade and so on. Until they understand that without this nothing will work out, some time will pass.
Many trainers, in turn, are also unaware that instead of fainting a jump, the same time could be spent on sliding. All jumps are performed from the arc, because the jump is its logical conclusion, its derivative. This is physics, dynamics of motion. Youthful enthusiasm and willpower alone will not be enough - you still have to delve into the actual sliding.
- When will coaches begin to realise this is necessary?
- When the jumps don’t work out anymore. Then, while jumping, the coaches start to talk about sliding, so if there is a jump, then why bother somehow? See how many athletes have appeared who perform jumps without a classic swing? Technicality became emphasised at the expense of movement. My acquaintance trainer calls these jumps pinwheels: the height, as they say, is no more than the thickness of a newspaper, but you can’t find any fault with the speed.
- Jumps by children look like this?
- No, it's not about age or height. There are quite tall athletes who jump quads like pinwheels. While quadruples are still rare, the judges will evaluate them only like fully rotated or not, but as soon as more than half of the athletes take possession of quads, the beauty of the jump will again be appreciated: height, span, length of the arc on the lead-out.
- It is known that when school figures still existed as a competitive program, the following phenomenon was observed: athletes who won the school figures failed in their free skating, and vice versa. Today you can observe something similar: Jason Brown has brilliant command over his blade work, but he doesn’t shine in terms of jumping. It looks like a paradox. Or isn’t it as straight like that?
- Jason Brown is really great and amazingly expressive. He loves figure skating so much that he just lives in it, but in his case, it seems to me, he was a little late with learning the quads. Would he have learned his quads a little earlier, when there are fewer adult doubts and fears, he would jump them. It is necessary to learn multi-turn jumps in your early youth, for as an adult it is more difficult from every aspect.
- Why does an athlete, having learned, say, a quad Toeloop, automatically after this not start jumping the other quads? What difference does it make which entry you take into the quad? Just changes the arc of approach and that's it.
- I will give an example: you learned to write with your right hand, you know how to hold a pen, you learned all the letters. Can you also write quickly and beautifully with your left hand?
This is more or less the same. Today skaters from childhood begin in the dry hall to learn multi-turn jumps. They develop ‘twisting sharpness’, the effect of pulling your arms to your chest into this tight position, the feel of the number of revolutions, the landing on one leg. But when an athlete enters the ice, different triggers are added to this skill, which we call the arc of approach. These triggers affect the athlete’s flight path during the jump. An athlete can be able to tightly group himself, be sharp and explosive, but then he needs to learn to enter and leave each jump. And if we want the athlete to skate for a long time and without injuries, then we will almost always have to fine-tune the jumps before his body changes with age.
- What is the difference between are all the jumps?
- The arc of approach, the location of the body in the arc, acceleration at the time of take-off, the use of toepick or edges of the blade are different for each jump. The Axel, which is executed from a forwards movement, gives the athlete very different sensations than jumping from a backwards movement. Many athletes have a problem with their Axel, because when you enter the jump, you have to twist your face into the right direction while screwing yourself into a tight position, and when you break away from the ice, the athlete can break out from his arc. For many, the instinct of self-preservation is triggered, and they unwillingly open into a “butterfly” or pop. Many do not like the Axel, they talk about it as a difficult and uncomfortable jump. Jumps that are entered from a 3-turn, like the Salchov, are liked better because it is easier to catch the feeling of take-off. The Toeloop is one of the first jumps to be taught, because due to the push off with the toepick ‘sharpness’ appears on its own, it is easy to feel and remember, unlike the Axel, where this sharpness must be understood and specially taught. The Rittberger is a one-leg jump. Moreover, if you do not control the swing, at the moment of take-off the athlete can throw himself out of his arc so he cannot guess where he’ll land. The Lutz is generally the most difficult leap because it favours the brave. The outer arc of approach should be high-speed, and this takes courage and strength, in order to launch yourself into this jump. Lutz’s must be done waving. Flip, although also a toepick jump, is somewhat similar to Salchow in the wraparound pattern. Different arcs of entry, also the body enters the jump in different ways. All figure skating consists of arcs: serpentines, 3-turns, loops, rockers, counters - these are arcs in different combinations. These jumps are just like more complicated arcs.
- Why, in their first year of training do children learn single jumps if they are unable to perform arcs?”
- Today, the jump has become a kind of fetish. In the news feed there are periodically reports of quadruple jumps by various skaters. It even happened someone, without delving into the details, published the news that an athlete of a famous school jumped a five turn jump in training, even though this attempt was made in a harness. This excitement is linked to the huge attention to figure skating from the press, advertisers, fans.
The market for coaching services has become very hyped lately. Among the freelance trainers there is a struggle for the “client”, for his money. It is not always possible to make money and competently teach figure skating together, considering that the number of good trainers has never been large. Parents usually believe the coaches’ self-promotion, because they often do not understand the nuances. It is difficult for them to choose a mentor for their child, because there are so many offers. The correctness of their choice will only present itself over time, and, as a rule, athletes do not have this time. Therefore, skaters always run to coaches. Particularly attractive are those trainers whose athletes at that very moment are successful. They see at competitions that Ivanov is jumping triples, but Petrov already quads, which means they run to where Petrov is training. So it was and will be.
- How fatally will the meeting with an incompetent coach affect the fate of an athlete?
- Nowadays this is not so fatal: for your money you can find specialists who will accept to re-train or teach anyone. It just takes time, money and effort, however, the world championships are won by those who were taught correctly right away. Why do high-level coaches take children into their group only after having watched them? They take the most well trained, those who have been taught the correct basics and were not discouraged in their desire to train further.
Unfortunately, no physical education university’s diploma guarantees the trainer will correctly train the athletes, since each trainer has his own perception of figure skating, his own training experience, his desire to improve, and so on. Therefore everything in our business depends on the initial coach who lays the foundation for the future of each athlete. If someone thinks that in a particular case some elements can be learned anew, he is right: in theory it is possible, but in practice there are no guarantees.
It happens that coaches take improperly trained but capable children under the urgency of fanatical stubbornness of both the athlete and his parents. These trainers, as a rule, are capable professionals who are able to correct ingrained mistakes, 'clean the feathers' of this athlete, who then moves over to a strong club with a more eminent coach for his champion career. For middle-level coaches, this is a professional dead end, because they also want to, and can realise their coaching ambitions. There has always been such a problem in figure skating, but now it is especially acute. Therefore, it is not a problem for an athlete to find a trainer who will teach him or re-train him; here, rather, the problem with the trainers is how to further develop themselves. Those who have earned a name for themselves will face the question of how to reach a high level, and this cannot be done without creating a team. Which is the most difficult task.
- Nowadays, a coach can no longer succeed alone? Or at all?
- Today, in every coaching group at the highest levels of our sport works a team of specialists. Obviously, one person physically cannot do this all by himself. Imagine at a school one teacher will teach everything - algebra, Russian language, history, and chemistry together with physics? Therefore, above a certain level, there should be many specialists available to the athletes. For the athletes themselves this is also a psychological relief, because some of the specialists are softer, some are more demanding, this athlete needs a whip, some other needs a carrot. However, the staffing of our state sports schools doesn't yet provide such working conditions. Each school solves this problem independently. If the state wants high sports results, then a group of specialists should work with a group of athletes, and not like our way is now: one specialist for a whole group.
- I understand that specialists are needed for top-level athletes, but today, at early year training levels, coaches invite “ gliders ”,“ rotators ”, and so on. The question arises: what should the entry-level coach himself do?
“Just graduated trainers should first of all lay a solid foundation of competence, because the pursuit of more complicated stuff from a poorly learned base is plain irresponsible. He must teach the child to correctly use the blade, its edges and rocker. (To be frank, the quadruple jumps of this athlete were done by his initial coach.) He must just teach the child how to do single jumps so that in the future they are suitable for quadruples.
- How soon will the rest of the world wake up and try to catch up with us?
- Everybody has been awake for quite some time now, and the race for the leadership is always on, especially since the technical methods are understood, and psychologically all the barriers have been jumped. Another question is how athletes themselves are prepared for this, especially in the West. There is this hype in our country over jumping, because everyone understands that it's cool and not at all scary. Therefore, the more competent coaches and enthusiastic parents we have, the more talented Russian children will master the quadruple jumps and win.
Mayby only to make them even less literal. 
