MOSCOW, September 22. /TASS/. An issue of introducing transfer payments for figure skaters’ switch from one coaching staff to another should be reviewed by the world’s governing body of figure skating, Russia’s two-time Olympic Champion Evgeni Plushenko said on Tuesday speaking on air of Rossiya-24 television channel.
Russia’s two-time World Junior Figure Skating Champion Alexandra Trusova announced in May her decision to part ways with Head Coach Eteri Tutberidze and to join Plushenko’s team.
"This is a very long story and we have been in talks with her parents for many years," Plushenko said speaking about Trusova’s switch. "Alexandra [Trusova] expressed her intention to carry on with training sessions with me."
Tutberidze, 46, was in charge of training Trusova since 2016 and the teen prodigy is currently the only figure skater in the history of female competitions to land a quadruple jump in combination, namely a quad toe loop with a quad Lutz jump.
In addition to two gold medals of the World Junior Championships (2018 in Sofia and 2019 in Zagreb), Trusova is also the bronze medalist of the 2019/2020 Grand Prix Figure Skating Final in Italy’s Torino and the bronze medalist of the 2020 European Figure Skating Championship, hosted by Austria’s Graz in late January this year.
On July 31, world’s famous figure skating coach from Russia, Eteri Tutberidze, announced that she had also parted ways with her student Alena Kostornaia, who is the winner of the 2020 ISU European Figure Skating Championships in Austria’s Graz. The 16-year-old figure skater was reported to join the training courses of two-time Olympic Champion Evgeni Plushenko.
Alexander Kogan, the director general of the Russian Figure Skating Federation (RFSF), told TASS on July 31 that the national figure skating federation would approve the transfer of figure skater Kostornaia to another coach as soon as it received an official application from her.