“Free time after the end of a career is also stressful.” Patskevich about the first season without sports

– Sasha, you have already finished your career for a year. How is life outside of sport?

– I think this is a difficult time for all athletes – the beginning of life after sports. As a synchronized swimmer who has spent so many hours in the water, I now need to move more on the ground. In this regard, all sorts of health problems have arisen, especially with the spine. After all, as astronauts, we are not used to feeling the weight of our bodies. And then my back started hurting.

As for everyday life, everything changes – schedule, habits, you are in another company. Do you have free time! And this, by the way, is also stressful. The year was for me a year of transition, of hindsight, eventful.

– You had many different projects before the end of your career, which ones did you manage to implement?

– I tried to realize my habits as a director. I had a wonderful master at VGIK – Vladimir Petrovich Fokin, our wonderful director, who believed in me and let me touch cinema.

I immersed myself in the story and I understood that it was necessary to devote all my time to it. It can’t be a side job for you. You have to dedicate your life to it, as I dedicated it to sport. At the moment I have not found it possible to combine these courses, but I continue to communicate with the guys in the group. Many thanks to Vladimir Petrovich for giving me such an opportunity.

– Did he know synchronized swimming and such a synchronized swimmer as Alexandra Patskevich?

– I was sure of synchronized swimming, but probably not of my existence. But I wrote several articles about admission, one of them was an autobiography. And he already knew who Patskevich was when I came for the interview. The first question he asked me was, “Why do you need this?”

I was very happy to be on his team, he is full of humor, sometimes harsh with a word – he makes scathing remarks. He gave us some very interesting material that I would never have been able to watch on my own. His personal work impressed me a lot. The man rediscovered Soviet cinema for me.

– So you went out on earth, and you liked it?

— I had several breaks in my career. One because of an injury, the second – on maternity leave, although I did not go far and worked as an assistant to Tatyana Evgenievna Danchenko. I didn’t feel much stress at the time, although I wasn’t going to come back.

Now that’s another story, and I can’t say that I’ve fully adapted. I take part in the show, I pass exercises for children. And when I am invited to such events, I try to participate. I always miss sport in my life.

– You were the main TikTok’er of the team, and now you run a Telegram channel on synchronized swimming. Talk it over.

– I did not pay attention to Telegram before, probably, I did not have enough time. And now we are channeling with Sveta (Romashina) and Vlada (Chigireva). This is our outlet.

Unfortunately, despite all attempts to popularize our sport, it is still not at such a high level. And there, I would like, probably, to receive the support of our federation. We have interesting ideas for filming and developing the channel. We try to focus on our sport, to which we have dedicated a significant part of our lives and which remains one of the golden sports of our country. I would like to see more attention paid to our sport and its wider coverage.

– You managed to participate in the production of programs for the Italian national team. Were there any other invitations after that?

“I can only speak for myself here. It was a great experience: I had never staged anything before, but here they gave such a high performance, with programs for the World Cup, where the Russian team did not participated. The Italian team with our combined composition won bronze, and in general the production was positively received. We have also received positive feedback from our coaching staff. I know that Tatyana Nikolaevna (Pokrovskaya) has repeatedly positively commented on our work.

Now I don’t know if it is possible to travel abroad for work, because the trail of this anti-Russian story goes on forever. I would like to believe that the rationality of actions will return to our lives, that our athletes will be invited to such work. It’s a good experience for someone who is considering linking their life to synchronized swimming.

– Don’t you think that many synchronized swimmers will leave for good to work abroad?

– A year has passed and I do not see such cases among those who trained with me. Go consult, help – yes. Leaving completely is rather isolated cases associated with a kind of personal history. If we talk about those girls who are now part of the national team, there is progress in the fact that they want to see them in the Olympics. They continue their career, work.

Have you already decided what you want to do?

– I was so paralyzed at the end of the year that the plans, at least for the next six months, are to restore my health. Whether it’s the consequences of the coronavirus, or old age.

Seriously, all these years I haven’t been as sick as the last few months in 2022. I have to take care of my health, my well-being, to have the motivation to move somewhere. So far the focus is on health and the telegram channel. We have planned many shoots, different courses, we put our energy here. We act, of course, through touch. We don’t give ourselves titles and training that we don’t have. We don’t say we are journalists. We just invest our energy, we talk about our favorite sport. In Telegram you have to work hard on promotion, you can’t make a video that will arrive, collect and get a bunch of recommendations.

I was delighted to learn on the “Olympic Champions Show” that many subscribed to us. But many didn’t know which channel they were talking about, even in the case of those involved in synchronized swimming. It’s frustrating, it’ll be fine.

You mentioned health issues. Were there times in your career when the body was “not yours”? Have there been forced diets? The same box, which began to speak openly recently.

– First of all, you have to decide what is tin and what is not. The tin is when an athlete is deliberately brought into a psychological depression, and it’s about eating disorders.

Otherwise, it is part of the job, part of the professional responsibility for his health, on which the career of an athlete is largely based. At some point, the trainer can say something extremely reasonable and tactful, justifying that if there is excess weight, it can harm health, and also affect the result of training.

At the same time, constant and limitless obsessive control is also, I think, tin. Before, when we trained in Ramenskoye, we were weighed once a week. I don’t think it’s some kind of psychological trauma. At Krugly, I don’t even remember anyone being weighed. We never had daily weigh-ins, much less twice a day for some period of preparation, like the artists.

Our girls have a conscious approach to work in order to stay in shape. Moreover, Tatyana Nikolaevna does not even need to talk about it, one look is enough to understand that something is wrong with you. She will look at you with a special look, and you just don’t want her to say at least something about you. She very rarely makes such remarks, and in general there are very few such situations. Our body carries water.

On the contrary, Tatyana Nikolaevna and Tatyana Evgenievna (Danchenko) always told us: eat, you need to eat normally at dinner. We train a lot and before the start we literally dry ourselves off. We even have nuts and chocolate for a snack during training. So, compared to other similar sports, our nutritional situation is very different.

So you didn’t have to go on a diet?

– Not. But now I’m reaping the rewards. The amount of load has decreased, but there is no habit of limiting itself. I suffer from the fact that in terms of food, I need to stop at some point.

– That is, you don’t organize nuts for a snack around the apartment?

– Yes! The body calls for movement and the mouth for food. And you have to get rid of snacks!

– Returning to your desire to develop synchronized swimming. What’s the craziest promotion idea you’ve had?

– I’m usually crazy in this sense, an idea comes to my mind, I start writing and calling everyone. At one point, I wanted to do a series like Ice Age. I know that Masha Kiseleva also tried to do something like this. I wrote letters to Red Square with suggestions and ideas. I wanted to make it real! But everything went somewhere… I don’t know where!

– Can organize a battle of the sexes in synchronized swimming?

– Now the boys are going to grow up, and why not? I was at the Romashina Cup and was amazed, what great athletes there! I fell in love with men’s synchronized swimming again. Yet such programs were good! As the mother of a boy, she enjoyed watching him immensely.

Where do you want to send your son?

It is my great pain. He’ll be four in March, and that’s exactly the age when it’s worth giving somewhere. Husband says our son is not an athlete. But he is already swimming. We’ll put it back on ice.

As a child, I was very limited, I had a certain goal, I practiced a sport. So many opportunities have missed me. I look at Marina Golyadkina, who does rhythmic gymnastics, plays volleyball and can play the guitar… She has a very wide range of skills, and I think that’s very decent. It is necessary that the child has had a choice in terms of certain commitments. Can you do it? Yes!

I don’t ride a bike and I don’t skate. I would like my son to try more different activities, to be more capable. That’s the kind of worried mom I am. Besides, I don’t know how I’m going to survive his fall on the ice.