Figure skater Kanysheva: “I could never fall in love with dancing. Having lost the opportunity to jump, I lost my inspiration”

Russian figure skater and coach Alena Kanysheva, in an interview with , spoke about the difficulties of transitioning from singles to ice dancing.

Speaking in single skating, Alena Kanysheva won the bronze medal in the Junior Grand Prix Final in 2018. In May 2019, the girl mastered the quadruple sheepskin coat and demonstrated her performance in training. In January 2020, Kanysheva announced her transition to ice dancing, as she could not perform the required jump load due to injury. In dance, she performed in tandem with Andrei Pylin. In December 2021, she joined the Figure Skating League coaching staff.

“To skate for ten years in singles, then I was forced into dancing and falling in love with it in two years…it turned out to be difficult for me,” admits 17-year-old Kanysheva. – Still, I was bronze medalist in the Junior Grand Prix Final, I had a certain status, and now I’m doing it again. The dance already has its own champions and a queue, Andryusha and I (Andrey Pylin, Alena’s partner in ice dancing – approx. “”), it was difficult to accept all this. Even though we worked hard, we tried. But it was extremely difficult to catch up.

– When I spoke with your first ice dance coach Maria Borovikova, she made an interesting observation: that you remained a loner in your soul, you miss the jump. This is the impression she got from her work. Mary isn’t it?

– Yes, I could never fall in love with dance with all my heart, in order to give them all my energy and continue to skate. It was rather a forced action that I sincerely tried to take. But that did not work.

I can’t say that I didn’t categorically like the dance form. But it seemed strange to me – why can’t you jump on the ice?! I couldn’t get used to it and even went to the mass ice rinks from time to time just to jump.

– Why didn’t the dances impress you? Indeed, in this form there are more variations of elements, support, chemistry between partners, an abundance of dance rhythms… And the competition is not so crazy, the career is longer.

– For me, the most difficult thing is support. I didn’t understand how to perform them organically and often made mistakes. Andryusha already had experience with other girls and tried to help me master everything. We studied the simplest supports and transferred them to ice. And yet this element remains for me the most difficult.

It only seems to the viewer that the boy is carrying the girl in his arms, she is cool. But the girl is also currently trying to help her partner! And the twizzles were the easiest for me, oddly enough. Many dancers consider them the most difficult, but I fell madly in love with twizzles.

“Perhaps because here too there is a reference to a solitary species?” After all, you perform pirouettes a bit far from your partner, albeit synchronously.

– When Andryusha missed training due to illness, I worked everything on my own and succeeded. Everyone asked the same question: “Well, why can’t you skate like this with Andrey?”

For the other girls in the group, on the contrary, torture when a partner is absent. They feel inferior, many skills escape them. And I was comfortable riding alone. So, yeah, there’s something about twizzles.

– I had prepared a question: how long have you felt the harmony of playing as a duo after ten years of skating solo? But, judging by your story, you’re still not used to playing in pairs…

It’s all in the jumps. It was for them that I started figure skating. Having lost the ability to jump, I lost inspiration.

– Does your story include such a mundane reason as a late switch to ice dancing?

– Barely. You can learn and grow in all conditions when a great desire moves. The coaches felt that I lacked the fuse and often discussed this point with me. For a long time I denied the obvious: I said that I loved dancing. On the contrary, she tried to force herself to believe it. But for a long time it was necessary to formulate clearly and honestly: I like to skate, but I do it with jumps, – noted the skater.