Olympic short track speed skating champion Semyon Elistratov in an interview with , he said he was ready to end his career in 2010 after the Vancouver Games.
After that, Elistratov became the champion of the Sochi Games and won medals at the Pyeongchang and Beijing Games.
— February, Canada, Vancouver. 24th place. Total devastation, complete unwillingness to train, to move somewhere. We arrived from the Olympics and I said to Andrei Ivanovich (Maksimov): “That’s enough, I’m taking a break.” Not really a break. I wanted to leave, I thought it was the point of no return. I’m 20 years old and there are no results… I think when one of the athletes reads this interview, they will understand what I’m talking about. This happens in a professional career. Good experience. It came and went.
In general, for six months I didn’t train at all, I didn’t do anything. And after a long break, at the beginning of the season, Andrei Ivanovich says: “Let’s try, if it doesn’t work, we’ll finish.” We accompany him to the first training camp in Novouralsk. Of course, after doing nothing, I’m dying in this training camp, there’s no other way to say it, it was really, really hard. But at the very first stage of the Russian Cup, I became third at one of the distances. We decided to try further. The national team was then coached by Korean specialist Jimmy Jen, and I was invited to the team. Already in December I won the 500m in Changchun, becoming the first Russian in history to win the World Cup.
— But short track racing was clandestine at that time?
“We had total control, I don’t know how else to say it.” One of the most unrecognizable sports. There were no significant results. There was a medal in 1992, but no one remembered it. We literally started from scratch,” Elistratov said.
Source : MatchTV
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