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An interview with Arthur Dmitriev in sport-express.ru
Q: Is the cancellation of the Worlds and the lockout in figure skating going to have the biggest impact on Russia? The trio of Trusova/Scherbakova/Kostornaya pretty much lost their medals and who knows what will happen in a year.
AD: I wouldn't call them the main victims, all the skaters have lost. It's an extraordinary situation. And it's a big hit on figure skating which will require a while to recover from. But the level of our team is something to respect. I saw how seriously everyone were working towards Montreal. I think it's not a level you can lose in a year. We'll wait for the life to recover. I think it might take longer than a couple of months though.
Q: The main thing this season was the domination of Tutberidze's trio. Can you call it the biggest story of the ladies figure skating?
AD: A controversial question, after all there are other skaters as well and I hope this trio has a lot to look forward. It happens that there is a leading group in the world. Take Moskvina in pairs, Dubova in ice dance, Orser and Mishin in the singles. No one believed Mishin's boys are beatable. Pluschenko, Yagudin, Urmanov... They are all gone. But Mishin did not become any less great, right?
Q: Not obvious what will happen with the ISU congress, but what do you think about the offer to change the age limit? Is it a war against that group?
AD: When we talk about that reform we need to think what is our goal? Turn the juniors skating int a more developed sports then the seniors while not allowing those boys and girls to move forward? Sounds silly. So there will be plenty of the junior skaters who will end their career just there. I don't even want to touch what will it do to the pairs skating.
Q: Perhaps now is the time of the changes and later everyone will learn to land the quads?
AD: At any age - they will not. It's special for the ladies. Eteri found the method which gives the constant result with the girls. In her group they realized it requires a discipline. The kid is in the system. It's the same in gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics and circus where the kids are allowed to work. The lack of fear helps. The girls that age are more developed than the boys - they can't even nearly endure what the girls can. It's the physiology. And of course, the great team. Dudakov is a great kids coach. Eteri needed a second coach for a while - the technical one. All her success came after Dudakov had joined. Without Sergey that team would not exist in it's current state. But still, speeding up the preparation will not work with the boys.
Q: There are talks about slowing down the body development. Is it true?
AD: No one knows. I think the stress they are under slows it down. Before the Olympics I recall both Zagitova and Medvedeva running for 40 minutes before and after the morning and the evening practices. Eteri did not invent it - those methods existed before. Just that she became famous and that's the breaking point. The parents bring their kids where the success is. The best join her group and there aren't too many of them. So she gets to choose and set the conditions. If you haven't done what you were supposed to - go away, goodbye.
Q: Many consider it being mentally too tough.
AD: It was the same in hockey during Tarasov's and Tikhonov's times. They would lock the players in the training base, if they were not training well they would not be allowed to see their wives. Tarasov even had a weekly meetings with the wives and would say something like `Tell your dude to work harder'. That's the approach. He was not hitting them. He was creating the conditions. In the USA they were quite harsh as well before the 1980's victory.
Eteri follows everything. You can't skip working, you will be punished. Perhaps it's not a democratic approach. But it's not a democracy. Does it cross the border? Well, you'd need to be an insider for that. I worked wither her in the 2000s, but things were different back then.
Q: The fact they are so closed from the public - is it right?
AD: It's their right. Is it a good thing or a bad? A hard question. Guess it's part of their vulnerability. On the other hand too much attention is a bad thing. Last season I think it was hurt Dmitrii Aliev after his silver at the Europeans. Still, figure skating lacks publicity. We did have our share of popularity, but not that much.
And we have to understand that all that is being said in Eteri's case is part of our training methods, our sports culture. Tutberidze is by far not the toughest coach. There used to be that coach - Stanislav Zhuk. At least Eteri does not send pupils to the army. He could have. For not working well enough or even if someone refused to switch to him. He would invite a person and ask `How old are you? 18? Well, go on - serve in the army'. And the person would end up carrying weights in the middle of nowhere and end up being a handicapped. It's a stories I know personally. And yet he was a great coach.
Q: Now-a-days it would be criminal.
AD: What is criminal about it? He was not the one to handicap them. Just that he person would join the sports sq. and some commander would get to them. It happened, it was real. It was a tough time in sports as well. So the authority was a must.
Q: So how do they become successful in the West? Some other way?
AD: In Russia the coaching culture is certainly more tough than abroad. But I spent many years in the USA and know there are such specialists as well. But mainly - they have more rinks than we do. The kids are usually quite lazy, there are plenty of those who want to try and the federation hardly gets involved in the beginning steps of the skating. The parents are paying and they are the ones to decide who is a good coach and who is not. Hence they switch from one to the other. In my experience you need at least 3 months to figure what the coach wants from you and another 3 to be able to do it. So you switch 3-4 coaches and you wipe off 2 years. In the USA a lot of talented youth are wasted.
Another factor is not being able to make the kids do things. Here you can tell - I need her to train this and that time. There the parents will say they don't have so much money. Even those who do - see it as a hobby. And then the highschool/uni time comes and they pull the kid out of the skating. He just studies. Those who are now in the USA team find the sponsors, look for them.
Q: Anastasia Tarakanova was trying to do that.
AD: Well even in the USA that system does not always help. You know what is special about figure skating? It's like a ballet, you can't just learn it. I heard a lot of times in boxing, for example: there is that strong dude, let's teach him the right technique, in a year he'll win the regionals and in his 2nd year he'll go to the Worlds. In figure skating if you haven't started at the age of 6 you can't learn it in a year. You need a system. The training system in Russia right now is the best in the world.
Q: So we are done with the NA, let's say Europe is still in a knockout after Graz...
AD: Yes, Japan is left. There it's the opposite direction - the endless respect to the coach. The Japanese got burnt with that - the coaches were using it and killing the kids with the amount of work. The skaters did not survive. But the coach is the god and they bow to him. Eteri more or less recreated that feeling in her group - the kids are afraid of her. And respect her. You see the results.
Q: There must be a lot of problems in the Russian skating which no one talks about because it's all about the age limit and Tutberidze's victories. You travel a lot, what stands out?
AD: There are indeed some problems. Let's take one: recently there are a lot of new rinks opened. And there are no good specialists. It's what the local management talks about. We lose a lot of good skaters. The regional coaches are on the level of `give me your hand and let's do a round'. They get their 30K rubles salary and earn the rest in the private lessons. They give private lessons to their own or others' pupils. But they don't know how to teach and they are not willing to learn. They are fine as it is. You have no responsibility for your private lessons and it's not a systematic work. Half Moscow do them but it's really a waste of time. Why learn when you already have it all?
The next step is not releasing their kids. Because the parents are not stupid, they take the kids to the master classes. We have a half-American system that begins here. And all of the sudden the kids start jumping. A 2A, a 3T. And then they get back and they are re-taught, they are not allowed to do the things they were told to do in Moscow. I.e. we have a level of the top coaches and a void in the middle level. It's a big problem on a long term run.
Q: But there are so many talks about the popularity of the figure skating. Do you feel it?
AD: There are more single ladies, the level of the pairs skating is higher. But there is a height limit. If the girl is 1.65 her partner needs to be around 2m. There aren't many such guys. Besides a lot of girls are afraid switching to the pairs - the split twists and the throws are really scary. And the pairs skating becomes technically harder, there are a lot of details and not a lot can take it.
As for the ladies single skating all the doors are shut. Only the first 3 make it to the national team. The rest will stick around for a while and retire.
Q: How about the citizenship change? When speaking about Medvedeva or Tuktamysheva a lot have a very strong opinion about it.
AD: I think it will happen. Not necessarily to those two, but for some others. I don't mind say, Medvedeva switching citizenship. But is it worth it and should she insist remaining competitive? It will only mean she did not hold the pressure of the competition in Russia. She would still know that there are skaters, come to the international competitions and lose becoming 5th. That's not what she wants. So does she need that switch if it doesn't even give her a chance?
Q: This year she had a chance to make it to the team if it wasn't for that broken boot.
AD: The broken boot is a tough issue. I had a single guy in my group, his boot broke as well. The middle part was travelling around, the other parts held. He landed his triples.
Q: So Medvedeva could had competed and it was a trick?
AD: Let's say: let's believe Medvedeva, but I think it was not only about the boots. Medvedeva had done so much for our sport, let's forgive her the little mishaps.
Q: The current judging in Russia and aboard - is it a problem?
AD: No, it's all quite adequate. Perhaps in Russia we score higher than abroad. The ice dance is a story of it's own, the judging there is complicated. There is a reason our sport is called `figure skating and the ice dance'. There are a lot of ugly moments there. The rules are such that you can always not count something. Though in the singles the underotation rules become more tight. In pairs I had a team who lost after the competition was over and the protocols were published. It was in Zagreb. The judging is a hard issue, but it's not the main thing in figure skating. The most important is the quality of the skating. The ability to find the right balance between the difficulty, the musicality and the expression.
Q: Your son is one of the not so many in the world who are attempting the 4A. Hanyu is getting there now. What is so special about that jump and no one had still landed it?
AD: Arthur had the rotated attempts, but he fell from one of them. It's too late for him - he is too old. Besides, he joined TSKA, switched the coaches and lost a lot of time. Then he broke his foot with another coach, got into a car accident, had a concussion, switched the coaches again, underwent a knee surgery and then came to me. He did take things from each coach. But I'm not a magician. I understand that jump is a way to make history. Besides, working with your son is hard.
As for the 4A - it's about the rotation speed. The faster it is the easier it will be to land it, yet it has to be the ideal speed to take off. Like the pole jump - he does not speed up like Bolt in his 100m, but looks for the right moment to get off. The development of the jump up is a slow process. Another thing - you need to prerotate as much as possible without breaking hte rules. I.e. it's too many things at once.
Q: In Mishin's books there are usually a lot of that - about the geometry...
AD: You need the experience. The athletes don't need to know the geometry and trigonometry, they will think you are nuts if you try explaining them things in degrees. It does not mean the skaters are stupid. They just have different goals. The coach needs to find the right words to explain what the skater needs to do.
Q: Is Arthur ok now?
AD: Hard to tell. You were asking about the problems, so here is another one: he didn't make it to the national team, i.e. he lost all the support of the federation. The medicine, the massage, the costumes and the boots are his financial responsibility now. If you are a serious athlete earning money at the same time is almost impossible. The balance between the work and the practices is hard.
If we talk about the figure skating being popular - the times there were well payed shows in the USA are well over, now it's all about the American football. And the ability of our stars to become rich are well behind. In the 90s we were all earning in Champions on Ice. And Russia was dead poor back then. It was on the level of: you come to the rink and there is no ice. You ask the zamboni guy and he says `I have no petrol'. I would drive to the nearby petrol station, Urmanov would, we would spend our money and queue for it. In these conditions we took all the gold at 1992 Olympics. You have to really want it. Russia has all the right conditions for it now.
Q: Is the cancellation of the Worlds and the lockout in figure skating going to have the biggest impact on Russia? The trio of Trusova/Scherbakova/Kostornaya pretty much lost their medals and who knows what will happen in a year.
AD: I wouldn't call them the main victims, all the skaters have lost. It's an extraordinary situation. And it's a big hit on figure skating which will require a while to recover from. But the level of our team is something to respect. I saw how seriously everyone were working towards Montreal. I think it's not a level you can lose in a year. We'll wait for the life to recover. I think it might take longer than a couple of months though.
Q: The main thing this season was the domination of Tutberidze's trio. Can you call it the biggest story of the ladies figure skating?
AD: A controversial question, after all there are other skaters as well and I hope this trio has a lot to look forward. It happens that there is a leading group in the world. Take Moskvina in pairs, Dubova in ice dance, Orser and Mishin in the singles. No one believed Mishin's boys are beatable. Pluschenko, Yagudin, Urmanov... They are all gone. But Mishin did not become any less great, right?
Q: Not obvious what will happen with the ISU congress, but what do you think about the offer to change the age limit? Is it a war against that group?
AD: When we talk about that reform we need to think what is our goal? Turn the juniors skating int a more developed sports then the seniors while not allowing those boys and girls to move forward? Sounds silly. So there will be plenty of the junior skaters who will end their career just there. I don't even want to touch what will it do to the pairs skating.
Q: Perhaps now is the time of the changes and later everyone will learn to land the quads?
AD: At any age - they will not. It's special for the ladies. Eteri found the method which gives the constant result with the girls. In her group they realized it requires a discipline. The kid is in the system. It's the same in gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics and circus where the kids are allowed to work. The lack of fear helps. The girls that age are more developed than the boys - they can't even nearly endure what the girls can. It's the physiology. And of course, the great team. Dudakov is a great kids coach. Eteri needed a second coach for a while - the technical one. All her success came after Dudakov had joined. Without Sergey that team would not exist in it's current state. But still, speeding up the preparation will not work with the boys.
Q: There are talks about slowing down the body development. Is it true?
AD: No one knows. I think the stress they are under slows it down. Before the Olympics I recall both Zagitova and Medvedeva running for 40 minutes before and after the morning and the evening practices. Eteri did not invent it - those methods existed before. Just that she became famous and that's the breaking point. The parents bring their kids where the success is. The best join her group and there aren't too many of them. So she gets to choose and set the conditions. If you haven't done what you were supposed to - go away, goodbye.
Q: Many consider it being mentally too tough.
AD: It was the same in hockey during Tarasov's and Tikhonov's times. They would lock the players in the training base, if they were not training well they would not be allowed to see their wives. Tarasov even had a weekly meetings with the wives and would say something like `Tell your dude to work harder'. That's the approach. He was not hitting them. He was creating the conditions. In the USA they were quite harsh as well before the 1980's victory.
Eteri follows everything. You can't skip working, you will be punished. Perhaps it's not a democratic approach. But it's not a democracy. Does it cross the border? Well, you'd need to be an insider for that. I worked wither her in the 2000s, but things were different back then.
Q: The fact they are so closed from the public - is it right?
AD: It's their right. Is it a good thing or a bad? A hard question. Guess it's part of their vulnerability. On the other hand too much attention is a bad thing. Last season I think it was hurt Dmitrii Aliev after his silver at the Europeans. Still, figure skating lacks publicity. We did have our share of popularity, but not that much.
And we have to understand that all that is being said in Eteri's case is part of our training methods, our sports culture. Tutberidze is by far not the toughest coach. There used to be that coach - Stanislav Zhuk. At least Eteri does not send pupils to the army. He could have. For not working well enough or even if someone refused to switch to him. He would invite a person and ask `How old are you? 18? Well, go on - serve in the army'. And the person would end up carrying weights in the middle of nowhere and end up being a handicapped. It's a stories I know personally. And yet he was a great coach.
Q: Now-a-days it would be criminal.
AD: What is criminal about it? He was not the one to handicap them. Just that he person would join the sports sq. and some commander would get to them. It happened, it was real. It was a tough time in sports as well. So the authority was a must.
Q: So how do they become successful in the West? Some other way?
AD: In Russia the coaching culture is certainly more tough than abroad. But I spent many years in the USA and know there are such specialists as well. But mainly - they have more rinks than we do. The kids are usually quite lazy, there are plenty of those who want to try and the federation hardly gets involved in the beginning steps of the skating. The parents are paying and they are the ones to decide who is a good coach and who is not. Hence they switch from one to the other. In my experience you need at least 3 months to figure what the coach wants from you and another 3 to be able to do it. So you switch 3-4 coaches and you wipe off 2 years. In the USA a lot of talented youth are wasted.
Another factor is not being able to make the kids do things. Here you can tell - I need her to train this and that time. There the parents will say they don't have so much money. Even those who do - see it as a hobby. And then the highschool/uni time comes and they pull the kid out of the skating. He just studies. Those who are now in the USA team find the sponsors, look for them.
Q: Anastasia Tarakanova was trying to do that.
AD: Well even in the USA that system does not always help. You know what is special about figure skating? It's like a ballet, you can't just learn it. I heard a lot of times in boxing, for example: there is that strong dude, let's teach him the right technique, in a year he'll win the regionals and in his 2nd year he'll go to the Worlds. In figure skating if you haven't started at the age of 6 you can't learn it in a year. You need a system. The training system in Russia right now is the best in the world.
Q: So we are done with the NA, let's say Europe is still in a knockout after Graz...
AD: Yes, Japan is left. There it's the opposite direction - the endless respect to the coach. The Japanese got burnt with that - the coaches were using it and killing the kids with the amount of work. The skaters did not survive. But the coach is the god and they bow to him. Eteri more or less recreated that feeling in her group - the kids are afraid of her. And respect her. You see the results.
Q: There must be a lot of problems in the Russian skating which no one talks about because it's all about the age limit and Tutberidze's victories. You travel a lot, what stands out?
AD: There are indeed some problems. Let's take one: recently there are a lot of new rinks opened. And there are no good specialists. It's what the local management talks about. We lose a lot of good skaters. The regional coaches are on the level of `give me your hand and let's do a round'. They get their 30K rubles salary and earn the rest in the private lessons. They give private lessons to their own or others' pupils. But they don't know how to teach and they are not willing to learn. They are fine as it is. You have no responsibility for your private lessons and it's not a systematic work. Half Moscow do them but it's really a waste of time. Why learn when you already have it all?
The next step is not releasing their kids. Because the parents are not stupid, they take the kids to the master classes. We have a half-American system that begins here. And all of the sudden the kids start jumping. A 2A, a 3T. And then they get back and they are re-taught, they are not allowed to do the things they were told to do in Moscow. I.e. we have a level of the top coaches and a void in the middle level. It's a big problem on a long term run.
Q: But there are so many talks about the popularity of the figure skating. Do you feel it?
AD: There are more single ladies, the level of the pairs skating is higher. But there is a height limit. If the girl is 1.65 her partner needs to be around 2m. There aren't many such guys. Besides a lot of girls are afraid switching to the pairs - the split twists and the throws are really scary. And the pairs skating becomes technically harder, there are a lot of details and not a lot can take it.
As for the ladies single skating all the doors are shut. Only the first 3 make it to the national team. The rest will stick around for a while and retire.
Q: How about the citizenship change? When speaking about Medvedeva or Tuktamysheva a lot have a very strong opinion about it.
AD: I think it will happen. Not necessarily to those two, but for some others. I don't mind say, Medvedeva switching citizenship. But is it worth it and should she insist remaining competitive? It will only mean she did not hold the pressure of the competition in Russia. She would still know that there are skaters, come to the international competitions and lose becoming 5th. That's not what she wants. So does she need that switch if it doesn't even give her a chance?
Q: This year she had a chance to make it to the team if it wasn't for that broken boot.
AD: The broken boot is a tough issue. I had a single guy in my group, his boot broke as well. The middle part was travelling around, the other parts held. He landed his triples.
Q: So Medvedeva could had competed and it was a trick?
AD: Let's say: let's believe Medvedeva, but I think it was not only about the boots. Medvedeva had done so much for our sport, let's forgive her the little mishaps.
Q: The current judging in Russia and aboard - is it a problem?
AD: No, it's all quite adequate. Perhaps in Russia we score higher than abroad. The ice dance is a story of it's own, the judging there is complicated. There is a reason our sport is called `figure skating and the ice dance'. There are a lot of ugly moments there. The rules are such that you can always not count something. Though in the singles the underotation rules become more tight. In pairs I had a team who lost after the competition was over and the protocols were published. It was in Zagreb. The judging is a hard issue, but it's not the main thing in figure skating. The most important is the quality of the skating. The ability to find the right balance between the difficulty, the musicality and the expression.
Q: Your son is one of the not so many in the world who are attempting the 4A. Hanyu is getting there now. What is so special about that jump and no one had still landed it?
AD: Arthur had the rotated attempts, but he fell from one of them. It's too late for him - he is too old. Besides, he joined TSKA, switched the coaches and lost a lot of time. Then he broke his foot with another coach, got into a car accident, had a concussion, switched the coaches again, underwent a knee surgery and then came to me. He did take things from each coach. But I'm not a magician. I understand that jump is a way to make history. Besides, working with your son is hard.
As for the 4A - it's about the rotation speed. The faster it is the easier it will be to land it, yet it has to be the ideal speed to take off. Like the pole jump - he does not speed up like Bolt in his 100m, but looks for the right moment to get off. The development of the jump up is a slow process. Another thing - you need to prerotate as much as possible without breaking hte rules. I.e. it's too many things at once.
Q: In Mishin's books there are usually a lot of that - about the geometry...
AD: You need the experience. The athletes don't need to know the geometry and trigonometry, they will think you are nuts if you try explaining them things in degrees. It does not mean the skaters are stupid. They just have different goals. The coach needs to find the right words to explain what the skater needs to do.
Q: Is Arthur ok now?
AD: Hard to tell. You were asking about the problems, so here is another one: he didn't make it to the national team, i.e. he lost all the support of the federation. The medicine, the massage, the costumes and the boots are his financial responsibility now. If you are a serious athlete earning money at the same time is almost impossible. The balance between the work and the practices is hard.
If we talk about the figure skating being popular - the times there were well payed shows in the USA are well over, now it's all about the American football. And the ability of our stars to become rich are well behind. In the 90s we were all earning in Champions on Ice. And Russia was dead poor back then. It was on the level of: you come to the rink and there is no ice. You ask the zamboni guy and he says `I have no petrol'. I would drive to the nearby petrol station, Urmanov would, we would spend our money and queue for it. In these conditions we took all the gold at 1992 Olympics. You have to really want it. Russia has all the right conditions for it now.
I guess the undeniable fact that more than a few USA skaters have those titles kind of takes the (lazy) wind right out of the sail. 
