http://www.absoluteskating.com/index.ph ... xeiyagudinMay 15, 2011Alexei Yagudin: "You always have to find the little competitions for yourself"....
- Your Olympic victory was one of the greatest moments in figure skating. How often do you think about those days in Salt Lake City?
- It happened nine years ago, but those memories will be always in my head.... This time figure skating is taking 75 per cent of my life and of course memories are still with me. Even if I lost in Bratislava 10 years ago [at the European championship in 2001 against Plushenko], the memories of it are bright.
....
- Do you still follow the figure skating competitions? What do you think of the future of Russian skating?
- It’s definitely not bright. I think it’s going to be really bad in Sochi, but after that I think we will get up. If we take any country, nobody is on the top all the time. Of course it goes up and down. In Russia, we all know that there was a hard time when the Soviet Union was torn into Russian federation. It was the time when we lost our coaches, they left our country. We pay now for those years, and it will take some time to recover. But we will recover, I’m sure.
- Do you think it’s real for Evgeni Plushenko to skate in Sochi?
- He is going to be 31, it’s my age right now. If my hip allowed me, if it was possible, I would probably compete, so yeah, why not? But he is not 18 anymore, injuries and health will be the major question. But I believe that he will be there.
- There were legends about your rivalry, how you hate each other and don’t speak with each other. What was true about it?
- It was always made by the media. We never hated each other. We were not friends, that’s true, but we weren’t enemies. We can talk to each other and we are fine, but we are never going to call each other and ask ‘how are you’.
- Was this maybe caused also by your former coach, Alexei Mishin, who always preferred Evgeni to you?
- Between those four people – Tarasova, Mishin, Evgeni and me – the main problem was given by Alexei Mishin, not Evgeni.....
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... Honestly, coaching is the last thing I would do in my life, because it’s not the easiest thing to do. I want to try something else, some new profession. As for Evgeni, I just think he didn’t find himself in this different world. He knows how to do figure skating. And he knows it really well. But he doesn’t know who he is besides figure skating. Me, I’m trying to do something else, definitely not coaching....
(Yags mention Plushy again, unprovoked 
... his old problem "I am multi-talented person" 
- of course, after 9 years out of competition, you must find to do something "else"! 
)....
... In general I don’t follow figure skating, but if I catch Europeans or Worlds on TV, I watch it. Of course I watched the Olympics, because Evgeni was there....
... not so "good" (about Plushy) as BBC commentator 
