Jump to content

Recommended Posts

13 hours ago, iceman530 said:

Russia trolls are already jumping to defense "theyre trying to destroy the reputation of a 15 year old who made a mistake!  But but but what about the USA and the football players in the NFL?!"  

If there isnt a museum in St Petersburg to Whataboutism as a philosophical practice yet, that would be a disappointment.  

Whataboutism is the usual tool of both Russian trolls and their chinese equivalent (Wumao) who have America living rent free in their heads. Not shocked at all by their statements.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

 In this discussion, i feel there is a name that we may be forgetting.

Her coach, Eteri Tutberidze.

I heard that she doesn´t exactly have the most healthy techniques for her skaters, usually retiring once puberty go top gear.

https://medium.com/@maddnik/eteri-tutberidze-and-the-future-of-figure-skating-ede4aea1cf76 , a piece i saw into the matter.

Quote
Eteri Tutberidze and the Future of Figure Skating

Tutberidze has become a top figure skating coach with a system that creates champions who are quickly discarded once her methods fail them.

0*fdArF_aYo2dTqfMf
Eteri Tutberidze

Content warning: abuse, disordered eating

(Updated 2/2/2022) For many, the lasting image from the 2014 Olympic Games was of a little girl in a red coat skating to Schindler’s List. That girl was Yulia Lipnitskaya, then 15 years old and the first, but certainly not the last, student of Russian coach Eteri Tutberidze to capture the world’s attention. But what many don’t remember is what happened to her after the conclusion of the Sochi Olympics. Lipnitskaya went on to place second at the World Championships the same year. However, with the start of the 2014–2015 season, she began to struggle to maintain consistency. She qualified for the Grand Prix Final, finishing in fifth place. After placing 9th at the 2015 Russian Championships, she was not selected to compete at that year’s European or World Championships. In November of 2015, Lipnitskaya announced that she would be leaving Tutberidze’s group. During the 2016–2017 season, she withdrew from several events due to injury. At her final competition, the 2016 Rostelecom Cup, she was unable to finish her free skate due to a leg injury. After a discussion with the referee, she eventually continued her program, but she received an automatic deduction for the interruption and ultimately finished in last place. In August 2017, at age 19, she announced her retirement from competitive skating, citing recurring injuries as well as a long struggle with anorexia. Tatiana Tarasova, a prominent Russian coach, commented on Lipnitskaya’s retirement, saying that “Yulia is a star. Some stars shine for a long time, while others will shine too bright and burn out. She lit up everything.” Lipnitskaya was a star, but did her light have to burn out so quickly? Many of Tutberidze’s students, both those before and after Lipnitskaya, have followed the same pattern of burnout, stars whose light were snuffed out too soon.

0*m22ax7vRTTW_H1Us
Tutberidze and Yulia Lipnitskaya

In less than a decade, Eteri Tutberidze has become the dominant force in not only Russian ladies’ figure skating, but in ladies’ skating worldwide. Her students continually place on top of podiums at international events. Tutberidze, a former ice dancer, began coaching in the United States before returning to Russia. She now coaches at the Sambo-70 sports school in Moscow along with Sergei Dudakov and choreographer Daniil Gleikhengauz. Her first student, Polina Shelepen, showed promise on the junior competition circuit but left Tutberidze before her senior debut. She continually struggled with and eventually retired due to an ankle injury. Then came Lipnitskaya. Tutberidze’s next student to achieve widespread success was Evgenia Medvedeva. Medvedeva won the 2016 and 2017 World Championships and looked to be the favorite to win at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics. However, in the months before the games, another 15-year-old Tutberidze student, Alina Zagitova, entered the spotlight. Zagitova ultimately captured the Olympic gold due to her more difficult technical content and ability to place all of her jumps in the second half of her routines, where they received a bonus. During the 2019–2020 season, three more Tutberidze students, Alexandra Trusova, Anna Shcherbakova, and Aliona Kostornaia, the “3A,” became eligible to compete on the senior circuit and dominated the season with increasingly difficult technical content. Trusova and Shcherbakova add multiple quadruple jumps to their routines, and Kostornaia a triple axel. Kamila Valieva, age 15, competes with quadruple jumps and a triple axel and looks to be the favorite to win the upcoming 2022 Olympics. Team Tutberidze also has multiple other students competing as juniors and even novices who train and add quad jumps to their routines.

0*pbrjDfL2zKy1kV3A
Tutberidze with Yulia Lipnitskaya and Evgenia Medvedeva

Eteri Tutberidze revolutionized ladies’ figure skating. In less than a decade, her students have been continually upping the technical content needed to win or even place at international events. Since Midori Ito first landed the triple axel in 1988, the technical content in ladies’ skating had largely remained stagnant. Triple-triple combinations were required to win at most events and several women competed with the triple axel, but attempts at quadruple jumps were few and far between. Surya Bonaly attempted multiple quad jumps in the 1990s, and Miki Ando landed the first ratified quad jump, a salchow, in 2002. The next woman to land a quad jump in competition was Alexandra Trusova in 2018, at the age of 13. Trusova was the first woman to ever land three different quad jumps: the toeloop, lutz, and flip, and the second after Ando to land the salchow. At the 2019 World Championships, Tutberidze student Elizabet Tursynbaeva was the first woman to land a quad at a senior competition, and the quad jump has become increasingly common in competition among Tutberidze students since then.

Without a doubt Eteri Tutberidze and her coaching team have pushed the boundaries of figure skating, producing students that have consistently won events for the better part of a decade. Understandably, many questions have been raised as to her methods of training. Tutberidze students win, yes. But the vast majority of her skaters have also struggled with persistent and sometimes career-ending injuries. Unfortunately, it seems as though many of Tutberidze’s students have an “expiration date.” When they reach a certain age, usually around 17–18, the technique Tutberidze’s team teaches simply becomes unsustainable. Oftentimes they become chronically injured and in some cases, the skaters cannot jump at all anymore. Leading up to the Olympics, Evgenia Medvedeva seemed unbeatable. She had dominated the previous two seasons and looked set to win the Olympic gold. But at the beginning of the 2017–2018 season, she struggled to compete with a broken foot and eventually had to pull out of several events. Medvedeva, then age 18, was overtaken by younger teammate Alina Zagitova at the Pyeongchang Olympics and ended up placing second. During the off-season, Medvedeva announced her move to train with Brian Orser of Canada. While in Canada, Medvedeva spoke about having to relearn effective jumping technique as well as other unhealthy habits that Tutberidze’s camp had instilled in her. Medvedeva’s story is not an outlier. As previously mentioned, Lipnitskaya was also plagued with injuries from a young age and struggled with an eating disorder. Olympic champion Alina Zagitova announced an indefinite break from competition in 2019 at age 17, citing a hip injury. However, she also spoke of her struggle to compete with her younger training mates who were jumping quads and triple axels.

Zagitova stated that she needs to lose weight in order to attempt quadruple jumps. That seems to be the basis for learning difficult elements in Tutberidze’s group. Girls learn and perform these elements at a young age, often before puberty, and when they begin to grow they are no longer able to jump as they did before. They begin to struggle with injury and are eventually overtaken by younger teammates. So far this has only been fully seen with the earlier generations of Tutberidze skaters, like Lipnitskaya, Medvedeva, and Zagitova, who have not been training quadruple jumps from a young age. It is impossible to know how repeatedly training extremely difficult elements with poor technique will affect the current generation and their bodies in the future. However, as girls begin to learn these elements younger and younger, some of the impacts can already be seen. Alena Kanysheva moved to train with Tutberidze at age 13, and a few months later videos were posted of her jumping a quad toeloop. In January of 2020, she announced her retirement from singles’ skating. At the age of 14, she could no longer jump due to a severe back injury. Elizabet Tursynbaeva, the first woman to land a quad jump at a senior competition, withdrew from nearly all events in the 2019–2020 season due to a back injury and officially retired in 2021. Some girls are now landing quad jumps as young as age 11. While we don’t know the full effect of children training quads and other difficult elements, what we do know is that the technique and methods Tutberidze teaches are already unsustainable past a certain age and often result in serious injury.

0*MIwz7NxNqWIjFGzw
Eteri Tutberidze with coaches Daniil Gleikhengauz and Sergei Dudakov and students Alina Zagitova, Anna Shcherbakova, Alexandra Trusova, and Aliona Kostornaia at the 2019 Grand Prix Final

Tutberidze and her team have repeatedly shown unhealthy and harmful attitudes towards food and weight gain. She instills in her students the idea that extremely strict control over their weight is essential. This mindset is due to the fact that the only way her jumping technique is effective is if her skaters weigh as little as possible. Many of her past and present students have struggled with disordered eating and unhealthy attitudes towards food. In 2014, Tutberidze commented that she was glad Yulia Lipnitskaya could sustain herself only on “powdered nutrients.” Lipnitskaya has talked openly about her long struggle with anorexia. Daniil Gleikhengauz, Tutberidze’s main choreographer, spoke of how Anna Shcherbakova only ate two shrimps for dinner and said she was full, and he was glad that she was not obsessed with food like many other girls. Alina Zagitova stated that during the Olympic season they were not even allowed to drink water, that “we just rinsed our mouths and spit it all out.” A 2018 Russian Times documentary on Alina Zagitova and Evgenia Medvedeva showed them during their daily weigh-in. Both girls are joking around while stepping on the scale, with Medvedeva saying “Don’t film the weight!” She explains that “In our sport every 200–300g matter,” because “We mustn’t ruin our aerodynamics.”

After her move to Canada to train with Brian Orser at the Toronto Cricket Club, Evgenia Medvedeva opened up about having to change her mindset about diet and weight. Medvedeva said that during the Olympic season, she had to be the strictest in regards to her weight control, otherwise she “wouldn’t have been able to skate her programs.” This method of weight control was very difficult for her, and it “hurt the body a lot.” In Canada, she worked with a nutritionist, and instead of focusing on the number on the scale, she gained muscle instead of losing weight. Some level of diet control is common for elite athletes, but it should be done safely, usually with the help of a nutritionist. Tutberidze’s methods of diet control are undeniably harmful. She teaches her students that they should eat (and even drink) as little as possible while training for long hours.

In recent years, prominent figures in other sports, like gymnastics, have spoken up in an attempt to uncover and eradicate systemic abuse. Figure skating seems to be doing the opposite. At the first ISU (International Skating Union) Skating Awards, Eteri Tutberidze received the award for Best Coach, despite the mountain of evidence available as to Tutberidze’s abusive treatment of her students. The figure skating establishment seems willing, even eager, to turn a blind eye to Tutberidze’s methods as long as her students continue winning. And when yet another one of her students leaves her camp or struggles with injury and is unable to keep up with younger teammates, the blame is always placed on the skater. On July 31st of 2020, Aliona Kostornaia announced her move to Evgeni Plushenko’s team, mere months after Alexandra Trusova also left Tutberidze in favor of Plushenko. In response, Tutberidze posted on Instagram claiming that Kostornaia refused to work with the other girls on the team. In the same post, she brought up Lipnitskaya and Medvedeva, saying that they were both the problem as well. When Alina Zagitova finished in sixth place at the 2019 Grand Prix Final, Tutberidze’s sister commented that “there are no problems except laziness.” This is always how it is when a student leaves her or no longer performs as they used to. According to Eteri Tutberidze, “Will we change anything in our training system? No. We are doing everything right.” And to those who hold power in the world of figure skating, she is correct. As long as she and her team get results, Tutberidze’s treatment of her students will continue to be encouraged.

Update February 2, 2022: Evgenia Medvedeva, Alexandra Trusova, and Aliona Kostornaia all returned to train with Tutberidze. Medvedeva was unable to return to Canada to train during the pandemic, and Trusova and Kostornaia did not receive the scores that they were used to under Plushenko. On deciding to return to Tutberidze for the 2021–2022 season, Trusova stated that “The [2021] World Championship was a failure — in training I skated clean, but it turned out like this.” She finished in third place. Medvedeva, recently retired, said in an interview that she can now only jump the salchow and occasionally toeloop without pain. At age 22, she has permanent back damage and cannot turn it in one direction. Kostornaia qualified for the Grand Prix Final before its cancellation but had to withdraw from Russian Nationals due to a wrist fracture (Tutberidze commented that she believed it was possible for Kostornaia to compete despite the injury). Alexandra Trusova has been named to the 2022 Olympic team, along with two other Tutberidze students, Kamila Valieva and Anna Shcherbakova, but has also had to deal with a persistent injury. Daria Usacheva, age 15, in her first senior season, was injured during the warmup at the 2021 NHK Trophy and had to be carried out of the rink. Usacheva was diagnosed with a fractured hip and has not yet returned to competition after this injury. During the Olympics, Tutberidze’s students will be making headlines for their incredible technical feats and likely victories; however, we must keep in mind what is happening behind the scenes in order for this to occur.

Thanks to Maria for helping with translations!

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 minutes ago, Scotguy II said:

Her suspension has been lifted and she is free to compete in the Women's programme Tuesday.

When she wins (which she will) this will cause outrage.

Says who? CAS will only decide tonight.

Either way, it‘s an absolute PR diaster for figure skating as a whole. That Russian teen torturer even being hailed as coach of the year etc…not that I‘m really surprised, but this now getting dragged into bright daylight probably also has a positive side.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Scotguy II said:

Tara lipinski is the current youngest female olympic skating champion. Same age as Valieva... not sure about the days but Valieva could make history come tuesday.

She already made history as the youngest ever Olympuc drug cheat. Probably too young to deserve the blame here, but her name is marked forever, thanks to her cold blooded trainer and ROC. And of course the CAS/WADA/IOC for letting Russia get away pretty much unhurt from the Sochi debacle.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Katarina Witt, herself once a teen sensation with a tough coach, has weighed in on German media, sharply criticising how nowadays especially young girls are being built up to more and more jumping skills, shining bright and disappearing quickly again like disposable goods.

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

i've just read the "eteri tutberidze and her girls" article and i have a few points to write down:

- tutberidze is obviously from georgian roots in straf of russian origin

- after reading the article its like that she is a cruel patroness

- i understand that each grammage counts in the game but girls-bodies in puberty times are causing difficulties

- its high likely that tutberidze (& her team) have reached an ultimate and maybe an extreme template/formula to create unique winners/champions with all its cinsequences for the general health if sporters/olympians.

- the russians/chinese will cerrainly have other if not more cruel methods to reach gold

- the west world is working more with scientific methods with less pain for the general health of their sportsmen/olympians (thats what i think)

- when i was younger i watched the russian couple klimova-ponoramenko ice-dance back in 94 in albertville and wished wich will be next romantic-russian-names at the europeans/worlds/olympics.. i thought always that there was a figure skating machine in russia that produces gold medalists.. but now im 42 and think tottaly otherwise about whole this issue.. These girls/boys are not robots.. human beeings who have pain when it comes to unsuccesfull results because of those cruel methode in their childhood.

- afterall figure skating is a wonderfull sport.. but maybe there would been settled an age-norm for girls especially so they would be saved in their puber-years. So they jump triples in junior-games and then quadruples after their puber-years so they will have a healthy-bidy overpass to the senior games..

- But as with speedskating and cross-country, biathlon etc.. it takes every breath of body-cell because of the thin air when you are sporting through your classment to reach the final.. wintersport is something tottaly else then summer sports

 

thanx for the reading, fatih

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, AustralianFan said:

I think that with both WADA and the IOC appealing the Russian body lifting the ban, I this young athlete’s chance of competing again in these Olympics is zero.

It’s a banned substance.  Game over.

 

In theory, absolutely, this should be an open and shut case. Legally speaking unfortunately, it is not. Michael Pavitt over at Insidethegames does a nice job of laying out all the possible legal scenarios including ones where Valieva is cleared to compete, wins more medals, then gets sanctioned later. What is most telling is his bit about the entourage including her coach. Going all the way back to the state-sponsored doping programs of the USSR, GDR and pretty much the entire Warsaw Pact, there's always been talk about going after the entourage, but 40 plus years later it doesn't seem to happen.

If you're interested there's been a number of documentaries on the subject particularly about the famed East German women's swim teams who were notorious for anabolic steroid use. When you see the what condition many of these athletes are in today with regards to health problems. It's a sad situation.

Michael Pavitt: Teenager at centre of case but focus should be elsewhere (insidethegames.biz)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, stryker said:

If you're interested there's been a number of documentaries on the subject particularly about the famed East German women's swim teams who were notorious for anabolic steroid use. When you see the what condition many of these athletes are in today with regards to health problems. It's a sad situation.

Michael Pavitt: Teenager at centre of case but focus should be elsewhere (insidethegames.biz)

Even the movie Top Secret made fun of the East German's Women's Olympic team.:lol:

ArcticSardonicAnaconda-size_restricted.g

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, stryker said:

In theory, absolutely, this should be an open and shut case. Legally speaking unfortunately, it is not. Michael Pavitt over at Insidethegames does a nice job of laying out all the possible legal scenarios including ones where Valieva is cleared to compete, wins more medals, then gets sanctioned later. What is most telling is his bit about the entourage including her coach. Going all the way back to the state-sponsored doping programs of the USSR, GDR and pretty much the entire Warsaw Pact, there's always been talk about going after the entourage, but 40 plus years later it doesn't seem to happen.

If you're interested there's been a number of documentaries on the subject particularly about the famed East German women's swim teams who were notorious for anabolic steroid use. When you see the what condition many of these athletes are in today with regards to health problems. It's a sad situation.

Michael Pavitt: Teenager at centre of case but focus should be elsewhere (insidethegames.biz)

YU79DuT.jpg

Source: ABC News Australia - 11 Feb 2022

 

In the end, the Kamila Valieva had taken a medication with performancing enhancing properties before competing in the Beijing Olympics.

This is gives an unfair advantage to her against the other competitors at the Games.

Yes, she is under-age - but Valeiva still had an unfair advantage to her against the other competitors at the Games.

Yes, perhaps her coach or another of her entourage may have has a role in her taking it - but Valeiva still had unfair advantage to her against the other competitors at the Games

I firmly believe that today the appeal to CAS from WADA, International Skating Union and the IOC will be upheld and Valeiva will not be allowed to compete any further in these Games.

It’s very sad for her at such a young age.   Someone in her entourage also needs to be held to account for her taking a banned substance.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...