Artur Gachinski: “In the pursuit of quadruple jumps, it’s not only girls who suffer, but also boys. I started jumping triple axels and quads too early.”
Translation of Artur Gachinski’s comments about the impact of complex jumps on athletes’ health.
original source: RT
2011 World bronze medalist and now a coach Artur Gachinski shares his thoughts on how the complexity of programs affects figure skaters’ health. Here’s translation of his comment.
“Q: Don’t you think that in this race for quads, athletes are depleting their resources too quickly?
Artur Gachinski: In a sense, we are just returning to the time when every coach worked with mature athletes, not children. When Irina Slutskaya, Viktoria Volchkova, Maria Butyrskaya were skating. They also executed a serious set of jumps. Slutskaya, for example, performed flip-loop, lutz-loop, and that was almost 20 years ago.
In the pursuit of quadruple jumps, it’s not only girls who suffer, but also boys. Yes, figure skating has advanced, everyone is trying to go further with this step, but each athlete has their own resource, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And a coach doesn’t have the ability, figuratively speaking, to take a remote control, press a button, and see how much of that resource is left.
Q: Did you end your career because you exhausted your resources?
Artur Gachinski: By resources, I meant health. Sometimes an athletes’ health unexpectedly runs out. First, I had an injury, then it became chronic, and the pain became constant. It escalated. Then you open your eyes and see what other guys in figure skating are doing.
Nathan Chen had already started doing two quads in the short program, three or four in the free skate. Approaching all this with a cool head, I had to admit that I couldn’t do that anymore. At that time, for me, executing one quadruple jump was already a victory. Well, then, after five years, I still had to go to the hospital. I had two spine surgeries after I finished skating.
Q: Looking back at your career as a coach, could these consequences have been avoided?
Artur Gachinski: Possibly, yes. I started jumping triple axels too early. Started jumping all quads too early. So, at 13, I was already jumping axels, at 15, I was doing quadruple toe loops and salchows, and at 16-17, I mastered loop, lutz, flip. It’s just that at that time, no one recorded the training sessions, and no one posted them on social media. But I kept the videos for myself.
The peculiarity of my body was that the channels in the spine were very narrow, and accordingly, the passage was not very good. I found out later, after the surgery, that the cause of the injuries was precisely in the peculiarities of the structure of the spine. And the back simply couldn’t withstand the loads.
Q: In such moments, is there any resentment towards the coach, that he — being so smart and experienced — did not foresee, did not protect?
Artur Gachinski: That’s impossible to foresee. Especially since I remember myself well. When the work is going well, no one will stop the athlete. ‘Let’s try loop? There is loop!’ ‘Let’s try lutz, flip…’ If you have the desire, the excitement, you want to do everything at once. And if everything works out, why press pause or stop?” — said Gachinski.
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