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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Here is a very thoughtful longread on the Russian approach to training with quotes from multiple coaches.

https://defector.com/how-american-women-fell-behind-in-skatings-quad-era/

[/quote]

Illuminating!

So how do you change an entire culture? Rafael Arutyunyan has ideas.

Before coming to the U.S., Arutyunyan coached for 25 years in Moscow. He knows the ins and outs of the way rinks function there and the resources and power available to coaches. Since he moved to the U.S., he’s coached skaters to 11 national titles, and under his tutelage, Nathan Chen has won three world titles. But even with Arutyunyan’s success, he says the U.S. will never match Russia (or Japan or South Korea) in women’s skating without a complete overhaul of the current structure. “We have everything in this country,” he said. “Everything, more than anyone else. Money, ice rinks, energy, population. What we don’t have? We don’t have proper management of what we have. We don’t have a system.”

Arutyunyan says he isn’t talking about U.S. Figure Skating, which he thinks does a good job providing skaters with plenty of opportunities to compete. To Arutyunyan, the problem instead is that coaches are all freelancers, each doing whatever they think is best for their skaters using different methods. He also says that coaches aren’t given enough decision-making power. In most cases they report to the rink manager, who isn’t always a figure skating expert.

“If [the coach] creates great skaters, management should help him to do it instead of being the boss and saying not this, not that,” he said. “I need more and I ask for more, because I want to win.”

The 65-year-old says he “knows what he knows” and he dreams of a system where he could create an academy to not only train skaters, but to train coaches (in his coaching style) to streamline the process. Many times, when a skater comes to him for help, it’s too late in their career to make meaningful changes. “You should get ready for war before war started,” he said. “My problem is I am coaching women, not [junior] ladies skaters, because until they get to the point to come to me, they become women and then it’s too late. The system should be created when a child comes to you from 4 or 5 years old and you give them the shortest way to get more than anybody else.”

Arutyunyan says that everything Nathan Chen does today was planned 10 years ago when Nathan first came to him for coaching. “Maybe there would be another Nathan, but consistent producing, I don’t think it will happen [here],” Arutyunyan said. “That’s why you say, oh, there is some [American] girl that was trying [a quad] and there are eight or 10 Russians who try, because they are a mass production.”

U.S. Figure Skating did not make high performance director Mitch Moyer available to the media after the Olympic team selection. His job title suggests that he is uniquely qualified to discuss how the U.S. women stack up internationally and why they’ve fallen so far behind in skating’s technical evolution, but when I requested to speak with him, the public relations director informed me that Moyer has turned down every request to discuss this topic.

While talking about her struggle in training her triple axel, Karen Chen said she wished she’d focused more on building the right basics when she was a younger skater learning all her jumps. “I think what is truly important when it comes to these women doing quads, is they have really, really amazing, like perfect technique when it comes to their triples. What’s been a struggle for me, I am going to be perfectly honest, is breaking bad habits that I have developed over the years as I skated. From juvenile, I had a really bad wrap [leg position in the air] and I actually rotated like this [she held one arm up like a goal post and one arm down]. I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong and I didn’t have that guidance.”

Eight years ago, Arutyunyan said, he “really, really tried” to create a system to develop American skaters, to make sure the talented young skaters learned the correct basics to prepare them for the technical revolution he saw coming. “I talked to people in the U.S. Olympic Committee, I talked to the best people in U.S. Figure Skating, I talked to the best people from the Professional Skaters Association, and everybody said yes, we agree. Nothing happening yet.”

If Arutyunyan sounds defeated, he’s also found some acceptance in that defeat. “I was frustrated eight years ago. Now I am not … I feel I am getting old and that it will not happen during my life.”[/quote]

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