“The athlete still lives in me, there is a desire and motivation to work in training” – Shcherbakova

2022 Beijing Olympic Champion Anna Shcherbakova admitted that she still had the motivation and desire to engage in figure skating, and also talked about restoring physical fitness.

— This year has been a bit of research and misunderstanding. When you achieve the greatest goal in sports, there comes a time when you don’t understand what’s coming next. Everything was on time, I was gradually moving towards it, I didn’t have a sudden and unexpected takeoff, everything went as usual. But in fact, there has been a year of misunderstanding. But I also had surgery for an old injury, which probably gave me time to think about what to do. This year, I didn’t really have a choice, because anyway, I needed to heal. It was a year of respite from professional sports that was needed.

I missed you a lot. Now I arrive at training, and this athlete clearly still lives in me, wanting more and more. I have the motivation and the desire to do something else in training. It is still difficult to say what will happen next, but there is always sporting excitement. Little by little I am getting back into shape, I have restored all the triple jumps, stunts. There is progress,” Shcherbakova said on Laysan Utyasheva’s YouTube channel.

Shcherbakova won the gold medal of the Beijing 2022 Games in the individual tournament. She also has World Championship gold, two European Championship silver medals, three Russian Championship victories. The figure skater entered the reserve team of Russia for the 2023/24 season.