Former promise of figure skating, at 21, she is already in her second life. A look back at his years of highly toxic training in Infrared: Sport and sexual violence, the end of silence? on France 2, Wednesday May 11 at 11:45 p.m.
You have agreed to put your skates back on for a ice therapy, a course organized by the choreographer Benoît Richaud. Was it a happy or painful moment?
MARINA POPOV: Happy, because it feels good to rediscover the pleasure of skiing and to express the suffering experienced in an environment that began by seducing us before destroying us. My family is from Russia where skating is a national sport. My mother put me on skates at 5 years old and little by little, I got screwed.
Where is the tipping point?
When you are gifted, you quickly taste success and you are trapped by the desire to always go higher, further. The second layer is coaching based on the abuse of power to advance athletes. The famous Russian method that meant that I spent all the afternoons of my adolescence at the ice rink.
You lose your mother at 13 and the noose tightens around you. When will you become aware of the influence of your coach?
I think I always knew something was wrong. She was blowing hot and cold, but I wanted to skate. It’s the only thing that kept me standing. I was hurt, I suffered martyrdom, but I had been taught to grit my teeth. Even today, I have this behavior of not showing when I’m in pain. I must learn to complain!
One evening, your coach violently insults you and you film the scene. Are you aware that you may be sealing his fate?
It was when I got home that I realized this. I sent the video to several friends as collateral, and I did well because I ended up deleting it because I felt so guilty. Afterwards, I lost my touch. I never found out who sent it to the federation.
And what was the official reaction?
No reaction. But it has allowed athletes and parents to break the silence and take legal action against the coach.
Today, you are in sports college and have plans to become a new generation skating coach…
I know from experience that psychologically mistreating athletes is counterproductive. We can push them to progress without plunging them into total insecurity. I hope that the new generation of coaches emerging from the faculty will take the same approach and that we will change things.
And if you come across a small Marina?
I will put her in the Detection section (training which aims to prepare for competition, editor’s note), while cultivating with her the pleasure of skating.
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