“They told me I was rude and didn’t respect anyone.” Alena Kostornaya said that Eteri Tutberidze forced her to train with fractures
Alena Kostornaya became a guest on Laysan Utyasheva’s show “Daring Cooking” and talked about how the coaches treated her when she trained in the Eteri Tutberidze team, which trained many Olympic champions, but is famous for its harsh work methods. According to the skater, after a serious injury and fractures, they showed no sympathy for her and forced her to train, and after refusing, they accused her of disrespect for their work.
Alena said that, despite the injury, she still went out on the ice because she wanted to take part in competitions in the near future, but she was offered to work on difficult elements.
“I’m in a stupor: my arm is in a cast, I can only move in the shoulder joint. I try a jump in one rotation - the cast is outweighing, my arm doesn’t bend. I think, well, let’s say... I go into the jump and just crash on my head. I decided for myself that I won’t go jumping. Why, I’m about to break something else,” she recalls.
However, after the refusal, as Kastornaya said, the athlete began to be insulted. “They told me that I was rude, I didn’t respect anyone - neither my parents, nor my coaches. How dare I even refuse to work. I decided that I was no stranger to it. If they created the image of a rude person for me, I will be a rude person, what can you do, it happens.” However, despite training, she was removed from the competition.
When she recovered from the fractures, she was soon injured again - she broke her second arm. During training they started laughing at her - they said that she forgot which arm to put the cast on. And soon after that he was completely kicked out of the team. “The coaches say: “You’re broken and broken, you don’t want to work, you don’t care about us. We won't work with you anymore. Great support."
Kostornaya left Tutberidze twice: in 2020, she left the team for the first time, but returned a year later. In 2022, she left Tutberidze completely. Now the skater is paired with Georgy Kunitsa, whom she married last summer.
Alena Kostornaya is the 2020 European champion and winner of the World Grand Prix final in single skating. She trained with Eteri Tutberidze, Evgeni Plushenko and Elena Buyanova. Since 2023, she and Kunitsa have been training in Sergei Roslyakov’s group.
