What does Russian skater Kamia Valieva’s training camp look like?

From our special correspondent in Zhangjiakou,

Last Monday, on the ice of Beijing, the young Russian Kamila Valieva shocked the world by achieving the very first quadruple jump in the history of figure skating at the Olympic Games. Four days later, after the confirmation by the ITA of his positive test for trimetazidine, she (re) immersed him in expectation. Eight years after the institutionalized doping scandal at the Sochi Games, is Russia about to do it again, under its (so-called) neutral banner, and rekindle suspicion and cheating? Contacted by us on Thursday evening, before Valieva’s positive control was confirmed, Romain Haguenauer, the coach of Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron, did not really jump to the ceiling.

“When Valieva’s name came out, I wouldn’t say people weren’t surprised, but let’s say it’s been stuff that’s been around for years. Personally, I’m not aware of anything internally, but it’s true that the Russians have often accustomed us to that. It often comes from home anyway, he lamented. If true, it would mean that nothing has changed since, it would be dramatic for sport in general and skating in particular. It reflects a feeling of impunity on the part of some, it’s ugly…”

Basically, trimetazidine is a drug to fight against angina, or angina pectoris. According to doctor Gérard Dine, contacted by The Team, this substance banned by the Anti-Doping Agency in 2014 and at the origin of the suspension of several athletes (including the French wrestler Zelimkhan Khadjiev in 2020) would have “no doping effect”. It doesn’t matter, in the end, because this doping story is not the only one that interests us about Russia and its skater.

“All of a sudden, every year, four new kids are rocking quads”

When we asked him about Valieva, Romain Haguenauer raised a point that deserves two minutes. “To see these kids between 12 and 15 years old doing quadruple jumps with their fingers in their noses, it’s true that there are always questions from specialists [des sauts]. I’m not one, but I know plenty of people who are and all of them have always been extremely surprised that it happened all of a sudden. Before Sochi, Russia did not shine in women’s skating, that’s where it was behind other nations. And by far ! And then, all of a sudden, every year they bring out four new kids rocking quads. It is not a progressive evolution, there is a phenomenon. It’s normal for people to wonder. Especially since all these girls come from the same place…”.

That place is Sambo 70, a figure skating school on the outskirts of Moscow run with an iron fist by former Russian skater Eteri Tutberidze, whose training methods are controversial to say the least. If he did not wish to expand more than that on the subject, having never attended a session at Sambo 70 himself, the coach of the French couple knows the reputation of his colleague.

Valieva well controlled positive before the Games, CAS decision to come via @20minutesSport https://t.co/eAasKNAhAk

— 20 Minutes Sport (@20minutesSport) February 11, 2022

“We have said that he is very tough with his students. She works with little girls, I work more with older skaters. But it is sure that it would not be possible to train our athletes in this way in Western Europe, in the United States or in Canada. It’s very military, very abusive, even, in a way. If I used his methods in my academy in Montreal, I would no longer be on the ice and I would no longer have the right to approach children. ” The stage is set.

Intensive work and no complaints

Contacted on our behalf by Romain Haguenauer, with whom he works in Montreal, the coach and former skater Brian Orser, who took under his wing a former disciple of the iron lady, preferred “to stay out of everything that concerns Eteri and this history of doping”. With our Swiss colleagues from the Watson site, former skater Brigitte Balmain also talks about quasi-military methods: “The Russians have been focused on quads for a while. These little ladies chain rotations, and more rotations, and more rotations… They spend their days there. We send them into the air and we tell them: “Go ahead, turn”. “And no question of pouting.

In an interview with the FS Gossips site (yes, yes), Polina Shuboderova, a former skater from Tutberidze says: “Day after day, from morning to night, we do the same thing. There is no “I’m tired, I can’t take it anymore”. If you are tired or injured, you stay on the ice and work. Even if you have two broken toes, you go back and do the same thing a hundred times. Two hundred if necessary. The example is not taken at random. Landing in the group, Shuboderova had injured her toe. “It was very painful for me, I couldn’t even wear sneakers, my toes were blue. But I still kept jumping… In Eteri Tutberidze’s group, they talk about injuries only when it’s something serious. In America, he would have taken me to the hospital and I would have been arrested for a month”.

However, injuries are the daily lot of the students of Tutberidze. For the good and simple reason that she imposes workloads on them that are borderline unbearable – up to 12 hours a day, by her own admission – and that the quadruple jumps, which have become her trademark, are very heavy to bear for the bodies of these young girls. Because we are talking about kids.

“There is a truly incredible phenomenon of rejuvenation, the students of Eteri never exceed 18 years old, confirms Nelson Monfort, the doctor of figure skating in France. And they often end their careers very, very young, sometimes at 17! At the Eteri school, it’s: as soon as you arrive, as soon as you disappear. This is new and it is very worrying. It’s cruelty without name because, beyond the glory, ephemeral, inevitably, there is a form of abandonment of these young girls. These are kleenex that serve a year or two and that we throw in the trash. »

Anorexia, injuries and (very) early retirements

If these skaters are recruited with a bottle and released in adolescence, this is not trivial. Indeed, the weight is a central element in the realization of these “quads”. It is therefore better to work with a prepubescent athlete, whose body has not yet reached maturity. Not to mention the diet imposed on them. “I find them very skinny, these little Russians,” Brigitte Balmain observes to Watson. The case of Lipnitskaya is the perfect example. Olympic champion in 2014, she left Tutberidze and Sambo 70 in November 2015 before ending her career in 2017, at the age of… 19. In question, repeated injuries and serious problems of anorexia. Examples like that, we pick up in spades unfortunately. In 2014, the Russian trainer was ecstatic about the fact that her athletes could feed exclusively on “powdered nutrients”.

In 2018, in Pyeongchang, Zagitova and Medvedeva were instructed not to drink during training but simply to rinse their mouths before spitting. It’s true, sometimes a drop of water falls on her hips… For his part, Daniil Gleikhengauz, another zinzin from Sambo 70, was happy to see Anna Scherbakova eat only two prawns at dinner, when “all the other girls” were “obsessed with food”. Food or survival? No wonder then that they need a little pick-up on the ice to keep from collapsing.

“We have always heard in the middle, notes Romain Haguenauer, of these Russian skaters who would take vitamins, sometimes even from the mouth of their coaches directly. Meanwhile, the breeder of battery champions is regularly cited as an example for her performance and her results. In 2020, the international federation elected her best coach of the year. In 2018, Valdimir Putin, a big skating fan and very influential in the field in Russia, presented him with the Order of Honor “for the successful training of athletes who have obtained good results at the PyeongChang Olympic Games”.