Aleksandra Boikova: “In Tutberidze’s group there was a case when we did our program three times in a row. We got out of synch in some spin position, and Tutberidze says: ‘You messed up, well, go skate the program again.'”
Aleksandra Boikova about training in Tutberidze’s group.
original source: MATCH-POINT youtube channel
Pair skater Aleksandra Boikova in an interview for MATCH-POINT youtube channel talks about difference in training in Moskvina and Tutberidze’s groups.
Aleksandra Boikova and her partner Dmitri Kozlovskii switched to Tutberidze’s group from Tamara Moskvina after the 2022/23 season.
“In Moscow the attitude towards you is such that, if you don’t want to, nothing will come of it, which means you have to work on your own. If you don’t work yourself, at some point they’ll say to you, ‘What are you doing here?’ In Moscow, nobody will force you, but in St. Petersburg, they’re like, ‘Go ahead, do it one more time’, ‘Don’t finish it on a bad note’, ‘Let’s try one more time.’
Dima and I have always taken a very responsible approach to our work, this was appreciated in St. Petersburg, and nothing more was expected of us – we’re good fellows, we work hard. But here we work, and we see that the guys around us are working even more than we are, and this really motivates us. You see that the competition there is fierce.
We started skating on the same ice with the guys from pair skating, then Eteri Georgievna moved us to singles skating in the season, and at that point we realized that we were not working enough. That is, people skate the program five times, and you skate it once and you think, ‘Well, I’m a good skater.’
We had an approach that if we skate a program cleanly, we do easy elements and leave. Because we’re good fellows, we’ve skated cleanly. But it’s different here. You perform difficult technical elements cleanly, but then you mess up some spin or death spiral – in St. Petersburg, we would just redo it a couple of times, and then we said: ‘Thank you, goodbye’. When you’re an adult athlete, it’s a normal approach, because you’re not learning elements anymore, you’re improving their quality.
But it’s not like that here. In Moscow, there was a case when we performed our program three times in a row. That is, we perform technical part cleanly and start messing up on some stupid elements, the simplest ones. This year we had a spin at the end of the program. We got out of synch in some position, and Eteri Georgievna says: ‘You messed up, well, go skate the program again.
Since we are quite mature, and all the other guys in Eteri Georgievna’s group are younger than us, of course, they listen to us, because we are already quite accomplished athletes. Even if we’re not accomplished athletes, we are individuals – we have our own opinions, we understand our physical condition well. So, when they give you a load, they don’t do it thoughtlessly – people see if something hurts or if you’re in bad shape, bad mood.
When, for example, you’re in bad mood, our coaches – more Max Trankov than Eteri Georgievna – tries to talk to us, set us for work, say: ‘Leave all the problems behind, you came to work, do your job’. Of course, sometimes they shout at us – how else, it’s sports, no one will pat you on the head.
I must give credit that they feel the athletes very well. They understand when they need to be stricter. This is very cool, because sometimes we lacked this.
Eteri Georgievna is a very strict and demanding woman. I believe that these are the most professional qualities from a coach. No one in the history of figure skating has had nine Russian champions in a row. Many consider her an ‘iron lady’ – in work that’s true. But as a person, I don’t know her that close, and that’s probably right, because a coach must keep a distance between themselves and an athlete.”
Related topics: Alexandra Boikova Dmitri Kozlovski, Eteri Tutberidze
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