Cross-posting from Canadian Men thread:
Elena Vaytsekhovskaya interviewed Patrick at the GPF in Vancouver few weeks ago, the interview was published today
Here’s FS-gossips translation
https://fs-gossips.com/patrick-chan-a-man-cannot-do-badly-what-he-truly-loves/
Thank you, @Sylvia
Elena Vaytsekhovskaya interviewed Patrick at the GPF in Vancouver few weeks ago, the interview was published today
Here’s FS-gossips translation
https://fs-gossips.com/patrick-chan-a-man-cannot-do-badly-what-he-truly-loves/
From the journalist point of view you had a benchmark career ending with an Olympic gold medal won in a team event. But what did you feel when you’ve already decided to finish your career, but haven’t announced it yet?
– If I say that it was easy it’ll be a lie. It was very difficult and scary. Probably, these are normal human feelings when it comes to changing your life forever. For more than 20 years my life could have been described in two words: “Patrick is a figure skater”, and everything else has been all about it. At some point, as I grew older, I began to wonder who am I actually outside the ice? How can my future life develop without figure skating? How to plan it from scratch? Now, when all these worries have subsided, I cannot but admit that I chose a very proper time to leave. Taking into account the current tendencies in men’s single skating, I would have been just swept out of the way if I hadn’t taken this step myself.
It seemed to me that you were pretty close to finishing your career four years ago, when you took a one-year break after the Games in Sochi.
– You don’t even imagine how close. I was absolutely lost after those Games. I just suddenly realized that I can’t do anything else except skating. Then, I began to think about the future, to think what would be interesting to me, could I be happy, could it happen that this new life would fit into the sad wording “Patrick is a former figure skater”? These four years from Sochi to Pyeongchang helped me a lot to figure it out.
There is a version that in 2015 you came back to figure skating just because of the Olympic team event.
– To be honest, in 2015, I didn’t even think about it. I returned to a comfortable zone for myself, where everything was thoroughly known to me: how to train, how to perform, and where every hour of my life was clearly scheduled. Then, naturally, the question arose “Why am I doing all this?” I knew perfectly well that I couldn’t fight for individual medal anymore – I missed that boat in Sochi. And the team event has become an excellent motivation. A very strong one, by the way. I didn’t have such before Sochi.
You said so calmly that I you missed the boat…
– What’s the big deal? When an athlete realizes that he will not be the first, even if he skates the program of his life, it hurts, but actually this is the most valuable experience that sport can give. At this moment you really start to understand what is the most important thing in your life. Medals? Nonsense! Any medal is just a momentary material thing. If you make it the only meaning of your life, then you will be left with nothing, if you don’t win. Even if you win. To have a long life in sport, and so it doesn’t become a torture, you need a completely different motivation, an ability to enjoy even very hard work, an understanding that you skate because you want to, because you love it. And this should be at the forefront. Just a few think about it. You need a certain inner maturity to realize it.
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In your sports collection there are three Olympic medals and five more, including three gold ones, from World championships. Which of these awards …
– Is the most memorable?
Not. Brought you, strange as it may sound, the biggest disappointment?
– This is definitely individual silver in Sochi. It has been a long time before I accepted this result and stopped considering it a terrible failure.
Has it something to do with the fact that Yuzuru Hanyu, who won the gold medal, didn’t skate the best way in Sochi?
– Yes. The door was open. But I wasn’t able to take advantage of it. Now when time has passed, I must admit that the result was fair. I just wasn’t ready to become an Olympic champion. And if so, then I didn’t deserve a gold medal. But in Pyeongchang, I had the feeling that the time has come. I matured to become a champion, even if it was just a team event.
However, you had mistakes.
– It’s different. It is a bit strange to explain this, but these are different things to be ready to fight for a medal and just to desire it. The undoubtful pros of that defeat in Sochi – it made me wiser. In sports, we often become hostages of the result: how many Grand Prix Finals you have, how many medals, how many titles. Behind all this, it is somehow forgotten that skaters, even such incredible ones as Evgenia Medvedeva and Alina Zagitova, are living people, not animals who can be chasen with a whip from medal to medal. And they are not robots. They have emotions, this is as much the part of their career as the performances, and who knows what remains in memory of the fans. I myself felt like a robot before the Games in Sochi, I was programmed only to win and I really broke when this program wasn’t completed.
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Thank you, @Sylvia