Interview with Nathalie Pechalat/Fabian Bourzat

NHK Trophy, December 2008

 

Q: Why and when did you decide to change coaches and to go to Alexander Zhulin in Moscow?

Nathalie: We’ve trained with Sascha for three weeks in summer (2007) and one week before Worlds last year and we realized that it worked very well for us, because he really worked with us on our weaknesses.  We felt he can help us to progress. Then, when Isabelle and Olivier finally decided that they want to continue we felt there was no room for us in Lyon. We felt we don’t progress anymore, and so we decided to leave for Moscow. This can help us to improve, and the Olympic Games are only one and a half year away now and this was the time to go.

Q: When did you move?

Nathalie: We really moved in July.

Fabian: We went back to France for summer training and to do our programs. So we went back to Moscow end of July or early August. We’ve prepared the visa already for September. We had to take care of all these details, leave the apartments (in Lyon), find new apartments (in Moscow), more or less when we got there.

Nathalie: We had a lot of stress in June, July and in August. We’ve been training with Muriel (Zazoui) and Romain (Haguenauer) for ten years and it was not easy to leave them and we had good working relationship with them. They’ve put us together. But it is our career, we had to make a choice and we told ourselves we have to go. We knew it wouldn’t be easy. When we did the summer practice with Sascha, we stayed in the outskirts (of Moscow), the hotel was really bad, and we knew nobody, we had no friends.

Fabian: We stayed in a hotel, and there was no internet, so for three weeks we were completely cut off the world. We didn’t know the language and there are only few people who speak English in Moscow. As we knew that we are there for just three weeks we didn’t try to socialize too much and weren’t looking so much for the small things that make life more comfortable and that we have now. So when we left we didn’t  expect it to be great and that we will party each weekend and eat great food.

Nathalie: The training was different. We went from two and a half hours in Lyon to easily five hours of practice including stretching and ballet. Even physically we asked ourselves if we can take it, because we weren’t used to it. All these changes that happened at the same time and that we had to digest and all the organizational problems such as the visa and questions like how we will pay for everything made it very difficult.

Q: And Moscow is an expensive city.

Nathalie: Yes, very expensive. The practice is much more expensive than in France. It is a big sacrifice on each level. It became slowly better in the beginning of September. Now we can physically deal with the practices and we know our limits. When it was too much (on the ice) we did something else, like stretching.

Q: What is the main difference in your training from the training you had before?

Nathalie: Everything is different! Even the relationship between us and our coaches is different. Muriel is like a mother, she calls us her children. With Sascha and Oleg, I have the feeling that everything remains on a more business, professional level. We know why we are here. We have a very professional relationship with them.

Fabian: It is not so much affection, they respect us as athletes and our work and our ideas and everything and we obviously respect Alexander Zhulin. He is a coach who stood on the Olympic podium, who coached Olympic Champions.

Nathalie: Oleg Volkov as well gives his best for the whole team. There are some others who come from time to time such as Oleg Ovsjannikov and Maxim Staviskij and each week this gives us some fresh ideas. We weren’t used to do ballet either and now we are doing it three to four times a week. It was hard in the beginning because this is really a discipline of its own. It may sound stupid, but these people really make us work hard. The relationship with the other athletes is also different.

Q: You have a quite international group now. There is the German couple Nelli Zhiganishina/ Alexander Gazsi…

Nathalie: Yes, and the Bulgarian couple (Ina Demireva/Juri Kurakin), the Russians (Natalia Mikhailova/Arkadi Sergeev). It’s fun, the four senior couples represent four countries and we have the feeling that we are a real team. At the same time we are learning from each other. With the lifts for example we’ve discussed a lot with Alex (Gazsi) to find solutions.

Fabian: In this group we all have our strengths and weaknesses and I think Sascha and Oleg know exactly what everybody is doing and what they need. We are also able to look at the other couples, and find things to learn from them, although if they are placed below us at European Championships.  So even if not everybody is competing at the same level – it would be great if all of us were in the top five – but we still take something from them and the other way round. We have to work a lot. For example there are Natalia and Arkadi who have been working for years on the basic skills with Sascha and have a way of gliding and a softness (amplitude) that we don’t have yet. These are things we have to work on and that we learn from them every day.

Q: Do you feel you have progressed a lot?

Nathalie: Yes. Every day when we leave the ice rink we know that we have learned something. We’ve learned technique and there is progress. This feels really good and this is why we are happy that we went there.  Even after three months we are still learning each time. In Lyon we were under the impression that we had entered the dynamics of repetition. It was doing and redoing but not necessarily learning something new or going further. Maybe it was just the routine because we’ve been there for so long.

Fabian: I think that the fact that we are doing ballet almost every day was something that was really lacking in our couple. To have the opportunity to stretch your legs and to achieve more flexibility (amplitude) is very important for what we are doing on the ice and I think it has improved our skating a lot in terms of grandeur, flow, even the finish of gestures. I think this is something that really helped us to advance.

Q: What are your goals for this season?

Fabian: Our goal for now is to skate a good program. We’ve changed our lifts after Skate Canada to make sure we get the points and the levels. It doesn’t affect the choreography, but it is a minus for us to be forced to return to easier things. Our goal is to skate a good program with all we can do and to get a good score. For the European Championships the battle will be tough but a spot on the podium is something to envision. As for the World Championships, we aren’t there yet.

Q: Skate Canada was a major disappointment for you. How did you deal with that?

Nathalie: In this competition we skated two poor programs, the Original dance and the free dance.  I think we coped well because there wasn’t any major crisis.  Sascha has reacted very well. He found the right words and he knew what to do before our next competition in Japan. We didn’t have too good levels for our lifts, and usually we have good lifts. We made all the necessary changes.

Fabian: There are some modifications in our way of thinking. We know you need a level four to compete with the top couples. Now we don’t have to worry about the level we get. We took lifts we shouldn’t have any problems with.

Nathalie: Now I think we can keep these lifts until the end of the season. We’ve been doing them for two years. We realize now, a static lift when the girl has to keeps the difficult position for three seconds is something that many people have difficulties with. When you have many changes of positions you don’t have to respect this timing and so in general this strategy is much easier. It’s also easier to avoid a deduction for an extended lift. I think it is a shame that the lifts with many changes of position are strategically better, but they are not as interesting for the spectators. Yes, it’s nice, it’s moving, but there is not an image that stays with you.  For us, this is a problem of ice dancing. What is expected from us technically and strategically doesn’t really correspond with what we want to show with our skating and what the audience enjoys. There is always a lack of balance. The more years pass the more rules there are and it becomes more and more difficult for us to find a balance.  When we changed the lifts after Skate Canada we had a difficult time to take back the old lifts that we used two years ago. There is no evolution when you have to go backwards.

Fabian: We invested two, three months in the beginning of the season to work on lifts that are different and more difficult and take much more energy in the choreography. To come to competition and to get a level two, because the lift doesn’t fit completely the criteria for a level four is really disappointing.

Q: Some couples are just keeping some lifts because the once got a level four for it.

Nathalie: I think it is not the goal of ice dancing. You want to show something new, if you are first or last in the competition.

Q: Your free dance this season is on the theme of Circus. How did you find this idea?

Nathalie: This dance started to come into being already with the beginning of last year’s free dance. The people really liked our dance last year, the electronic music, and they were saying that it is something different. But maybe it was too dark, too stratospheric, and so we were asking ourselves what can we do to change from this. We were looking for something more visual, more colorful, more fun, and we talked about it and suddenly thought of the circus as a theme. We were thinking on the strategy for this program, how to show long legs, how to take speed, a fun part with jonglage. It was funny how we found the choreographer. We were at a small airport in a little town in France and we met Julien Cottereau who was the clown in Saltimboco from Cirque du Soleil. Then we sent him an email and he answered very quickly. We went to Paris to meet him. He told us the history of clowns and the different persons that interpreted clowns and we really tried to use the different clown personalities.  Each of us had to find a role that we feel we needed a music that tells the story to have the outlines of the program. Later we returned home and we worked on the elements from our side – the lifts, the footwork and we put them on the music. We’ve worked a lot on the spins, because we knew that our problem last year were the spins. Then we went to Rouen to meet the choreographer again, and I think we had the best week of our whole career! We had so much fun.

Fabian: The advantage was that we didn’t work with a choreographer, but with a clown.

Nathalie: He showed us moves from the circus and when we were practicing it happened that he suddenly said, “do something funny”. We had to transfer it from the dance floor to the ice. There was a big test at the end of the week. My sister wanted to visit and I told her to come earlier so she could watch what we were doing. We did everything on the floor, so there is no speed, but she was enjoying it so much.

Q: So it was completely your idea.

Nathalie: The past four, five years it is like this. The choreography, the music, the costumes – this is our favorite part of ice dancing. For us, it’s really about creativity from A to Z.

Q: You mention costumes. You have a costume change in the program. How difficult was it to do this and is it a circus costume?

Nathalie: Last year we had the costume with the sleeves, this year we had to find something else.

Fabian: We’ve changed our costume designer last year. She doesn’t work at all with figure skaters, she comes from doing costumes for grooms. Already last year when we came to her with our ideas she thought it was great. This year we didn’t know yet exactly what we wanted to do. When we told her that we are doing a circus program and wanted to tell the two stories – the sad clown in the beginning and then the cheerful clown – we wanted a cheerful costume for Nathalie, colorful, a doll, but also feminine.

Nathalie: We didn’t want the traditional style and colors red, blue and yellow, the big red nose and the spots everywhere.

Fabian: We talked about the colors, that we wanted a brown costume in the beginning that changes the color we thought a while about how to do it. It was rather easy for the trousers. Trousers that roll up are something simple. First we thought to take a T-Shirt that can be completely reversed but with the lifts and everything (it wasn’t going to work); so we took the Ärmel, and like last year she looked for a solution that they stay up at the beginning of the program and that they can be taken off easily and that nothing is in the way.

Nathalie: The sleeves go inside. Even I, when I watched it on the video, had to think for a moment how they disappeared. And the little tie is hidden in the collar of Fabian.

Q: You said earlier that you have been skating with Muriel for ten years. For how long have you been skating together?

Nathalie: Eight years now. We teamed up in 2000.

Fabian: I’ve been even longer with Muriel. I came to practice in her group during summer since about 15 years. After I finished school I moved to Lyon and skated there with another partner for two years, and finally Muriel put Nathalie and me together.

Nathalie: My previous partner preferred foreigners. Marina and Gwendal had set the trend, and the French boys thought they will find success only with a foreign girl. So he left me. He then skated with Federica Faiella for a few months. So I was alone and I asked Muriel what to do, when I didn’t have a partner for three weeks. I was in Lyon for two years already. When she told me that my new partner was Fabian, I said, no, that is the worst case, because we didn’t like each other. We weren’t friends at all.

Q: Why?

Nathalie: I was like 15, 16 years old, nothing had happened, but we just weren’t friends. But I told myself it is a chance to have a new partner and I should at least try it. So we skated together, but we didn’t talk much. Slowly we became friends and spent a lot of time together.

Fabian: She spent all her time with me, in fact.

Nathalie: Luckily we went along well. In the beginning it really was “uh”.

Fabian: I knew that she was a suitable partner after the tryouts we did – the lines, the speed, the couple as a whole, everything was well matched. She was quite calm on the ice, so I told myself, well, even if we don’t get along too well, at least she will be calm on the ice and we can do our job. She grew up, she has changed and from being in contact with Marina every day she picked up something from her.

Q: Many people were saying that you looked a lot like Gwendal before.

Fabian: Yes.

Nathalie: Now this has passed on to Charlie White. But you can always say something like this. Now you can say that Khokhlova/Novitski resemble Bestemianova/Bukin with her red hair. It is natural. You have a champion and you have the others training in the group, and even if it subconsciously, there is a certain way of skating, the look that is similar, with the same coaches after all.

Q: You plan to stay in Moscow until the Olympic Games at least?

Fabian: We set our goal to stay there until the Olympics, but we don’t know yet what we will do after. That it, we stay with Sascha as long as the work with him suits us. If it doesn’t we’ll change coaches again. We are determined and we know what we want and we came to him for a reason. He knows very well, when the work doesn’t go well and when we have the impression that he doesn’t do enough… I think he is motivated to work with us, because he got a couple that is in the top five at Europeans. Now there is no question, it’s going well and our goal is to go until 2010.

Nathalie: The real question is if we want to continue after that. A lot depends on the physical side and also on the development of the rules in ice dancing. I’m asking myself a lot of questions because of the rules. I am very frustrated. We’ll see if we still can be creative and can put on a show, and if we are in good shape and still are motivated to keep going.

Q: You are still young.

Nathalie: Young, but already 24 and 28. But it’s a year and a half to the Games, and it’s still far away and this is only afterwards.

Q: Thank you very much for the interview!