"Humennik skated almost flawlessly, it's difficult to talk about short cuts"

Mikhail Shaidorov, Olympic champion in single figure skating, representative of Kazakhstan, is not a stranger to Russia. He was born in Alma Ata, but Sochi is listed among the cities for training in the ISU profile. And our renowned 1994 Olympic champion Alexey Urmanov is working with the athlete. Until recently, his name was in the shadow of other Russian specialists — Eteri Tutberidze, Alexei Mishin, Tamara Moskvina. But at the Olympics in Italy, Urmanov's student beat Ilya Malinin, Yuma Kagiyama, Adam Xiao Him Fa — that is, representatives of three completely different schools. In an interview with Izvestia, the coach spoke about the details of this miracle and expressed his opinion about the controversy surrounding the estimates of Peter Gumennik's rental.

"Millions of times we changed the arrangement of elements in an arbitrary order"

— Alexey Evgenievich, have you even dreamed of this? Or did you go to the Olympics specifically to win?

— No, it's wrong to say that we were going to win. It's true to say that we've been preparing very seriously all season for this particular tournament. The Olympics have been a priority from the very beginning. This does not mean that we were negligent or careless about other tournaments.

And the season was very difficult. We went back to the old short program, changing the arrangement of the elements in the random one ten million times. That is, we were looking for the keys so that both programs could skate cleanly at all competitions. And Mikhail practically did it at the Olympics.

I always encouraged him, and at the Olympics too, so that we wouldn't think about any places. But we thought first of all about what we should do.

— Are your emotions comparable to those you had when you won Olympic gold in 1994?

— It's already late in the evening outside (the conversation took place on February 13 immediately after the free program. — Ed.). I must, if you'll excuse the expression, sleep with this extravaganza and win. And tomorrow a different understanding will come. But we're hot on the trail now... It's generally different. When I was skating myself and when I'm training now, it was completely different.

Now I have a very serious pride in the boy. Or rather, not for the boy, but for this man, Mikhail Shaidorov. Because he's a great guy.

I am very proud to have such an athlete that I can trust. I can trust the risks. Today's quadruple flip in the free program was very raw, we didn't practice it much. I was very worried about it. If another athlete had been in his place, he would never have sent him to be executed. And I trust this athlete.

— Immediately after the victory, you said something to Mikhail. Any important words?

— I said such a thing in his ear... You know, he did such a great workout this winter that it was amazing. And I said to him, "Look, just try not to become an Olympic champion after skating like this in training!" And now I've told him: "Do you remember what I told you?"

"There is a feeling that we will have international launches soon"

Track and field athlete Polina Tkalich — about her chances of being broken up on the world stage and her immediate goals

"I saw Malinin's performance on the monitor. It was a shock."

— Ilya Malinin's rental must have been watched. What was that?

— I saw it on the monitor, of course. I can't comment, honestly. It was a shock. For those people who were sitting in the audience on the podium, and for the judges, for everyone. And those who watched the broadcast on television. And those who are not particularly related to figure skating and will see this rental later. Anyone will be shocked.

"Have you ever seen this?"

— Anton Sikharulidze, the president of the Russian Figure Skating Federation, called me just now, my friend, and he said: "Listen, Alexey Evgenievich, your story and Misha's story are connected a little bit, one repeats the other."

Let me remind you: in 1994, before the Olympics, the skaters who had already turned professional, Viktor Petrenko, Brian Boitano and others, were allowed to return to the competition. When they went on a short program, they messed up everything. We have an expression in figure skating that you can't win a competition with a short program, but you can lose. Something like that happened. But all the same, all these situations are different, there is no need to compare. What happened today, that's what happened.

— Could Mikhail's rental have had a psychological effect on Malinin?

— To be honest, I'm sure none of the guys were watching...

— Ilya says he watched it in the locker room.

— Then the question is probably more for the athlete than for me. We can point fingers at the sky, guess. What influenced was this or that... Or maybe the team tournament had an impact.

There's a lot going on behind the scenes. He didn't come to the official training session on the day of the short program. And on an arbitrary day. That says something, too. That is, it's not just "I decided to get some sleep." This means that the coaching staff, together with the athlete, made a decision for sure, usually like this. Maybe there was some kind of accumulated fatigue, something else.

I remember myself very well — when we arrived at the NHK Trophy in Japan, as luck would have it, acclimatization fell on the evening before the free program. I didn't sleep all night, training at 8 a.m. I'm calling Professor (coach Alexey Mishin) at 6 a.m. — Ed.) and I say, "I'm falling asleep, we're not going to practice today." He's like, "Are you crazy? We've never done that." Me: "Alexey Nikolaevich, how am I going to go to training? What kind of vegetable am I going to compete in?" There are very fine lines here.

— It is unlikely that you were before Peter Gumennik, but in Russia there is just a flurry of emotions. They believe that the medal was taken away, there are many questions about the shortcomings. Did you manage to watch the rental?

— I saw it out of the corner of my eye, because we were in the warm-up area at that moment, and the monitor was far enough away. I know that Humennik rolled out his program almost flawlessly. I watched from afar.

It's always very difficult and painful to talk about the uncool and uncool. Especially when it comes to your athletes or Russian athletes. I do not know the printout, I have not seen it yet. It seemed to me that, by and large, everything was done very decently and well. I'm sorry, but it's probably not for me to judge whether the medal was taken away or not.