Tatiana Tarasova

Tarasova in 2007.
Personal information
Full name:	Tatiana Anatolyevna Tarasova
Country represented:	Soviet Union
Date of birth:	February 13, 1947 (1947-02-13) (age 62)
Former partner:	Aleksandr Tikhomirov Georgi Proskurin
Retired:	1966

Tatiana Anatolyevna Tarasova (Russian: Татья́на Анато́льевна Тара́сова​ (help·info), born February 13, 1947) is a Russian figure skating coach and national figure skating team adviser.^[1] Tarasova has been coach to more world and Olympic champions than any other coach in skating history. As of 2003, her students have won a total of 41 gold medals at the European and World championships. As of 2006, her students have won a combined total of 9 Olympic gold medals in three of the four Olympic figure skating disciplines. Thus, she is popularly called the "Champion maker".^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Biography

Tatiana Tarasova is the daughter of Anatoly Tarasov, who introduced her to figure skating at the age of 5. She competed in pair skating with Aleksandr Tikhomirov^[2] and later Georgi Proskurin. With Proskurin, her greatest successes were placing 7th at the 1965 World Figure Skating Championships, and 4th at the 1966 European Figure Skating Championships.^[3]

At 18 years of age, Tarasova suffered a career-ending injury. One year later, at her father's insistence, she started coaching. Her students have included Irina Rodnina & Alexander Zaitsev, Alexei Yagudin, Ilia Kulik, Natalia Bestemianova & Andrey Bukin, Marina Klimova & Sergey Ponomarenko, Michelle Kwan, Sasha Cohen, Johnny Weir, Shizuka Arakawa, Oksana Grishuk & Evgeny Platov,Galit Chait & Sergei Sakhnovski, Shae-Lynn Bourne, and Barbara Fusar-Poli. Currently, she coaches Japanese 2008 World Champion Mao Asada, and American 2009 World Champion Evan Lysacek. She also worked briefly with the two time Olympic gold medalists Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov.

For more than 25 years, Tarasova has been married to Vladimir Krainev, a world-class pianist who resides in Hanover, Germany.

In the mid-1990s, she launched a hugely successful ice ballet show called "Russian All-Stars."

Tarasova lived for more than a decade in Simsbury, Connecticut, where she coached at the International Skating Center of Connecticut, before she announced her retirement from full-time coaching and moved back to Russia in 2006.

Tarasova was awarded Order of Friendship of Peoples (1984). ^[4] In March 2008, she was inducted into the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame.

[edit] References

1. ^ http://www.sovsport.ru/gazeta/article-item/205225
2. ^ (Russian) Tarasova, Tatiana (1985). Chetyrie Vremeni Goda. Moscow: Sov. Rossia. pp. 176. 
3. ^ Skatabase
4. ^ (in Russian) Panorama of the 1984 Sports Year. Moscow: Physical Culture and Sports publisher. 1985. p. 38. 

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Tatiana Tarasova

• Tatiana Tarasova's official site