- Joined
- Oct 20, 2006
Jenny, I'm not sure it's Brian himself so much as the people around him (as Kunstrijdster noted). Both Didier Gailhaguet - the president of the French federation - and Joubert's mother, Raymonde, are very much involved in his career and training. Brian still lives at home with his mother (I understand his parents are seperated) so she's quite influential. Not everyone wants to deal with all that. According to Wikipedia, Brian trained with Veronique Guyon for many years - from a really young age until around 2003 - and at some point she wanted to stop coaching. From then on, he's had much less stability with coaches and choreographers.
JCS did not have any experience coaching elite skaters AFAIK. After Worlds last year, there was some discussion about how neither he nor Brian appear to understand the math for CoP program construction. I believe this is correct: in an interview yesterday or the day before, Simond said that his tactics were fine, that up until 40 seconds from the end Joubert was the World Champion, and that he was the one who fell. The last part is correct. The rest is not: even before the fall, Brian was not maximizing his points and might not have done enough to win. The fall just sealed it. Simond did a lot of good work with Joubert but if he couldn't figure out how to have him do programs that maximize his potential points-wise, he was not doing his job as well as he could.
Thanks, Buttercup. To me, difficult to coach or uncoachable is that a skater was rebellious and disobeyed his coach most of the time. I haven't seen any thing that showed this on Brian yet.
The fact that Brian didn't have a stable relationship with his coaches in recent years might be because he hasn't found a right coach for himself. He followed his coach's advice and changed his program. I don't see any "difficult to coach" on that. The coach's suggestion right before the competition have definitely had a big impact on the mind set of a skater which definitely played a major role on Brian's unstable skating at this Worlds. Yes, Brian was the one who skated but how could he totally disregard his coach's advice without any doubt only a few minutes before the competition? It would take a great deal of rebellion to not follow his coach in this situation. Brian must have struggled in his mind on what he should do or should not do. At that point, I would say that following the coach's advice (which was a wrong advice this time) was a better choice.
Brian and his coach's separation was unavoidable this time. I just hope that Brian could soon settle down and focus on 2010 Olympics. I am so glad that he has considered to have Tarasova for his coach. Why not move to Moscow? Why only go there one week each month? Move to there and commit himself totally to it. I am sure that Tarasova has the right tool and will work for Brian.
PS: Brian is going to keep his SP? That is a welcome news too. I love to see him perfect that program.
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