After his parents died, Max threw himself into work, coaching their skaters at the Skating Club of Boston in Norwood, Mass. He was working from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., Vladimir said, when he talked to Vladimir in March about helping him coach.
Vladimir, who coaches at the Simsbury rink, immediately said he would help and drove to Norwood.
“I’d go there Mondays through Fridays,” Vladimir said. “Saturday and Sunday, I was here (in Simsbury). Since then, it’s always like that.”
Then Max asked Vladimir to coach him in July to prepare for the national championships and attempt to qualify for the U.S. Olympic team. Elena and Vladimir are a team; they rented an apartment in the area where they spent the week, and they would return to Connecticut on the weekends. Daniel, who is now the director of figure skating at the Simsbury rink, took over Vladimir’s lessons in Simsbury.
“I’m a coach and a choreographer and everything else,” Elena said. “It’s not only about the technique – you need to know your athlete, how the day went before, how to get his head fixed if something’s bothering him…
“What to say, how to say it,” Vladimir said. “How to react with what is going on.”
“It’s love, it’s patience,” Elena said. “We want him to succeed. We want him to be happy. In this situation, knowing what he – what all of us – went through … we just had to become someone between family and coaches.”
“There’s no guidance, how to do this,” Vladimir said.
“Everybody was asking, how did you do this in four months?” Elena said. “We call it the secret recipe.”
She laughed.
“It’s been a long journey for us. It’s not only from the end of July. It’s from the Day One when we came here to the United States.”
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This 6-minute feature "The Naumov Family: A Skating Life" was filmed at the original SC of Boston and posted on March 30, 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxjJY_6-wzc
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