Rises and falls of Shcherbakov, Zagitov and other champions Eteri Tutberidze

Eteri Tutberidze has been training for over 25 years. She started her career in the USA, then returned to Russia. In 2014, Eteri’s name sounded loudly during the European Championships: two of her wards, Julia Lipnitskaya and Sergey Voronov, won prizes at once. After that, there was hardly a single competition at which the Tutberidze figure skaters did not stand on the podium. Hence the titles – “Golden Coach” or “World’s Best Coach”.

The path to success for each athlete is, of course, thorny, full of failures and significant victories. We will talk about this in this collection. Let’s start with the heroine of the latest news.

Anya is only 18 years old, but her talent is already admired by the whole world. The figure skater made a great impression on the international scene, perfectly skating the short program at the 2021 World Championships. The cleanest double axel, triple flip and triple lutz-triple rittberger cascade did not give her rivals a chance. In Russia, there is no doubt that Shcherbakov will become world champion.

Anna skated so easily and beautifully that one could get the impression that she didn’t need any effort to do it. This is of course not true. Ščerbaková’s path to 81.00 (the best result in her career so far) was not easy. And we are talking not only about exhausting training, special diets, a strict regime, but also about colossal emotional stress.

At the end of 2020, the skater unexpectedly withdrew from the Russian Grand Prix: it turned out that Anna was diagnosed with pneumonia. The disease was quite severe, it took a long time for her to recover. Skeptics assured that Ščerbaková would not be able to get in the right shape before the Russian championship, but that was not the case! Anna not only recovered in the shortest possible time (sometimes she may have overcome the pain), coped with the excitement and skated well, but also won the competition and became a three-time champion of Russia.

“I was checked by a lot of doctors: both those who are constantly with us at the rink and regular doctors were monitoring my condition. They often forbade me to train at full strength. This resulted in adjustments to the preparation, which we set up in such a way as not to overload, to give everything to the maximum at the start. This was done to avoid consequences.

A lot of athletes have had to perform in difficult conditions and worse than me, so I wouldn’t like to focus on that. Now I will rest more than usual. We will look at the condition: when I fully recover, then we will start training to avoid the consequences, and also finally work without restrictions, “Shcherbakova shared with reporters.

Julia Lipnitská’s star shone on the eve of the Olympics in Sochi in 2014. The figure skater won one competition after another and became a star at the Games. Perfect skates and first places with a large margin secured the national team gold in the team competition: Vladimir Putin gave Yulia a standing ovation.

After the triumphant victory, very high hopes were placed on Lipnitská in single skating, and it seems that the weight of responsibility for the 15-year-old figure skater turned out to be too great. As a result, Julia could not cope with her excitement, made several gross mistakes at the box office and took only fifth place. In 2015, Julia left Tutberidze.

The following two years, the figure skater continued to perform, but she no longer had clear victories. Experts believed that Lipnitskaya was broken by colossal pressure and worldwide fame. In 2017, Yulia announced that she was leaving the sport, adding that she was struggling with anorexia. Her statement shocked the public. After she stopped training regularly, the athlete, on the contrary, quickly gained weight, and therefore faced harassment on the web. In the end, this led to the fact that Julia began to lead a rather closed lifestyle.

However, after leaving the sport, Lipnitskaya established a personal life. In 2020, it became known that Julia and her lover Vladislav Tarasenko became the parents of a girl.

As in the case of Lipnitska, Evgenia Medvedeva was the talk of the town during the Olympics. True, they rather discussed her rivalry with compatriot Alina Zagitova. Both girls trained with Eteri Tutberidze, both showed the highest class on the ice and it was interesting to say the least to watch their confrontation.

At the European Championships before the Olympics, Alina bypassed Zhenya and demanded revenge. Unfortunately, at the games, Zagitova outperformed her teammate and took first place. Medvedeva then won the silver medal.

After that, everyone was waiting for the same clean skates and a beautiful confrontation of athletes at the World Championships in Milan, but Evgenia withdrew from the competition, and then completely announced that she was ending cooperation with Eteri Tutberidze. It was rumored that Medvedeva’s jealousy reached its peak: she could not forgive the coach with whom she worked for more than 10 years for not shining on the first step of the Olympic Games.

For the next three years, Zhenya showed very modest results: her name appeared more often on the posters of entertainment programs than in the ratings of international competitions. Medvedev, apparently realizing that she could not return to her former form without her native coach, returned to Tutberidze in the fall of 2020.

As already mentioned, Alina Zagitova became the main star of the Olympic Games – 2018. The figure skater, who was nicknamed the Red Ballerina for her bright image from the release of Don Quixote, won the gold medal in single skating, thereby significantly separating herself from her rivals. And unlike her main rival, Zagitova continued in the exhibition class after the Olympics and set new world records. So, in March 2019, under Eteri Tutberidze, Alina became the world champion and the first Russian figure skater to win all the world figure skating titles.

And then fatigue and a banal desire to rest appeared. In December 2019, Alina made a statement that she was suspending her competitive career. Zagitova did not finish performing on ice: after the Olympics, she became especially popular in Japan, so she was happy to participate in a number of national shows. Russian ice performances in recent years also do not take place without the participation of an athlete, while in 2020 she skipped all competitions. Alina’s popularity is not waning, but in the sports community they are curious whether Zagitová will return to big competitive sports. The question is still open.

Russian rocket – that’s what fans called Alexandra Trusova when they saw the skater in action. Sasha started working with Eteri Tutberidze in 2016 and showed tremendous results a year later. In early 2018, Trusová took gold at the Russian Junior Championships, which secured her ticket to the World Championships, which she also won. Both the short and free programs were great. In the latter, Alexandra cleanly completed a series of the most difficult jumps (for the first time in the world!) and earned a record 92.35 points.

In March 2018, Trusová became the first figure skater in history to do a quadruple lutz, a few months later she created a cascade of quadruple and triple toe loops for the first time in the world. In 2019, Sasha repeated her success, becoming the world champion again and continuing to set new world records. But at the Russian championship – 2019, Trusova got to the final only third, the same thing happened at the European championship. And in 2020, Alexandra suddenly changed her coach: she left Tutberidze for Evgeni Plushenko.

Eteri commented on the athlete’s departure much later: the coach evasively noted that it was not the first time she encountered a situation where skaters caught the star disease and began to set their own rules. Tutberidze does not give in to provocations, which becomes the reason for the athletes’ departure.

Today, the public is closely following the girl’s results, and so far she has not managed to come close to the indicators she released in the Tutberidze team. At the Championship of Russia – 2020, Alexandra became only third, and at the World Championship – 2021 she failed in the short program.

Alena is Alexandra Trusová’s old rival, yet the girls are friends. Kostornaya was lower than her colleague for some time, but then she was able to prove her superiority. Alena became the winner of the stages of the Grand Prix of France and Japan in 2019, and then worked purely at the European Championship in 2020 and won the gold medal.

On the wave of growing popularity and after the departure of Trusova, Kostornaya decided that it was time to try something new, and after her boyfriend left Eteri Tutberidze. Unfortunately, failure after failure followed Alena, and when she quickly realized her mistake, the figure skater returned to Eteri in March 2021. And then she left again.