“My back just couldn’t handle the stress. » Gachinsky explained why he ended his skating career in 2015

Coach Arthur Gachinsky said he decided to end his figure skating career in 2015 due to heavy loads on his back.

— Nathan Chen has already started jumping two quads in the short program, three or four in the free program. If I approached all of this with a cool head, I had to admit that I couldn’t take it anymore. For me, at that time, a quadruple jump was already a victory. Well, five years later I still had to go to the hospital. I had two spinal surgeries after I finished skating.

In other words, at 13 I was already jumping the Axel, at 15 I was doing a quadruple toe loop and Salchow, and at 16-17 I had mastered the loop, lutz and flip. The peculiarity of my body was that there were very narrow channels in the spine and, therefore, very good permeability. Only later, during surgery, I found out that the cause of the injuries was precisely the structural features of the spine. And my back simply could not withstand the load,” Gachinsky said, as quoted by RT.

RT