“Everyone has Alina.” Coach Gorbacheva explained why the skater wanted to change the short program during the season

Alina Gorbacheva’s coach, Sofia Fedchenko, said she considered changing the skater’s short program last season due to backlash.

Gorbacheva in February won the junior championship of Russia.

– It was after the adult championship of Russia. We thought about changing Cruella’s program, because there was a lot of negativity around him – there was always a kind of hatred on all sides: everyone has Alina, everyone has me. I don’t mind, I can abstain, but it was more difficult for Alina, although she also tried not to be careful.

A lot of people said the program was great and everything was fine. On the other hand, there were a lot of people who directly and specifically hated the production.

We could not skate the program only for the third start: we passed two stages of the Grand Prix, the Russian Championship. In training, Alina skates perfectly, as soon as we enter the competition, something is constantly happening, even if the program is in place, the elements are light. We thought a tremendous amount of negativity still puts pressure on the athlete and we need to change the program.

Alina has long wanted to skate the East. We even considered this option for the free program last season, but we rejected it because we liked a different composition.

And we decided to do a short program with an oriental theme in the middle of the season, after the Russian championship. It so happened that we contacted Sergei Komolov, he offered to fly to Dubai and set up a program. In winter we were already packing our bags, but at the last moment we decided that we wanted to put the pressure on this Cruella, skate him cleanly and show at the start how cool he looks in training. Alina did a great job showing the image change from Estella to Cruella in the workflow, but at first it was blurry. Therefore, we have set ourselves the task not to give up and not to back down, to skate this program so that everyone can see this idea,” Fedchenko told Sport24.

Sport24