clairdelalune wrote:
Personally I do not agree with such policies and I do not understand them. A lot of other coaches have open seminaries and training sessions (Orser for example, which is not ashamed to train Fernandez or Hanyu, who are Chan's rivals). Banning Carolina or Fernandez make Mishin and Evgeni look like they were afraid of tough competition.
In my opinion skaters should attend as many training camps as they could, it is the only way to improve their skating overall.
It is the prerogative of Mishin and his team to decide whom the take on in their camps, in any given year. That is all. Nevertheless, I am not surprised that some of the less-than-friendly would try to make a big deal out of it with their talk of "Russian drama". It doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with what Orser or anyone else. It doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with being "ashamed" (of what?). It doesn't have any to do with "being afraid of tough competition", because if Evgeni were afraid, he wouldn't have tried to do what he is doing on. As he has always said over the years and many, many times over, his competition is always only with himself. Perhaps now it is true more than ever.
Orser is the coach of Hanyu and Fernandez and that's his business. Mishin isn't any top foreign skater's coach, and as far as I recall he has never been. He is Evgeni's coach, and Artur and Liza's coach, and the coach of the other young Russian skaters in his group. Of course they should come first. And while I don't know exactly how Orser (or other Canadian/U. S. coaches or anyone else) considers questions of national interests in sport, it would not be so surprising that an (old-school!) Russian such as Mishin would see them differently. Perhaps not many people in skating nowadays would think or phrase this question in terms of the word "honor", but that word is what Mishin used.
I was reading the sovsport article via Google Translate, but even from the machine-translated language, I think one can sense there is something indeed different this year, in this stage of Evgeni's journey. He's trying to do something no one has done before; this is truly "into the unknown". There is so much uncertainty, so much to overcome that I'm sure we can't even imagine. If you want to talk about being "afraid", well, maybe Evgeni and Mishin and their team are not afraid, but I sure as hell am. And it's not of Fernandez or Hanyu or Chan or any other "rival". This is why I am so grateful for the people around him at Pinzolo, not only Yana and the kids--his own family in the usual sense--but also those who love him like family: the Mishins, David, Vitaly, and all the others. I find it plenty understandable that outside top skaters, rival or not, would be the last thing they needed around, in a situation like this, which--once more--has nothing to do with "being afraid of rivals".
The logical explanation is that Mishin has no time to focus on other top skaters than Evgeni, which makes totally sense. 
You can't blame me because I think Mishin's statements were strange and maybe funny, I'm not the only one. 
and maybe you would like to see Caro on first place.. 
