The former personal coach of Aliya Mustafina coached the Brazil WAG team for the 2016 Olympics in Rio. The Brazilian team is planning to contest three medals.
Six years ago, under his guidance, the Russian team did the unimaginable, winning team gold at Worlds and beating USA. Two years later Aliya Mustafina became the most decorated gymnast in London, winning four medals. In Rio Brazilian gymnasts, who have been coached by Alexandrov for the past three years, are going to fight for three medals – in all-around, team final and beam final. Even if they don’t medal, the fact is that no one expected such fantastic progress from them.
Alexandrov wasn’t present on the podium. Like a shadow, he followed the team around, sometimes giving the coaches advice in the mixed zone, then disappearing again. Anyway, there was no time to follow his movements: there were too many exciting things happening in the third subdivision.
First, a teeny-tiny 16 year old newcomer to the Olympic team, Flavia Saraiva, confidently led beam qualification. Then, Rebecca Andrade, 17 years old, performed a very difficult vault, getting a score of 15.566 – the second highest score after Bejing vault champion Hong Un Jong of North Korea. Luckily for the other vault finalists, the Brazilian only competed one vault and couldn’t qualify for the event final. In the all around, on the other hand, Andrade led qualifications, placing higher than Aliya Mustafina and Seda Tutkhalyan.
Of course, it was clear that the hosts wouldn’t stay at the top for long – USA gymnasts would compete in the next subdivision. But, nevertheless, that was no routine achievement. Especially since only a fall by tiny Saraiva prevented Brazil from closely following Russia in the team qualifications.
I found the head coach under the bleachers, with the Brazilian team.
Q: Alexander, I’m not even going to ask if you are pleased with the results. Frankly, I’m speechless.
A: Well, it could’ve been better, but you need to understand that it’s not always possible to have the best results. Especially since three of our girls are very young, it’s their first competition of this scale. Rebecca Andrade didn’t even compete at Worlds – she was recovering from an injury.
Q: Was it a serious injury?
A: The same one that Aliya Mustafina had on vault in 2011 – an ACL tear. And Andrade also got injured on vault. That’s why she hasn’t started competing a second vault yet, we decided not to speed up her training.
Q: When you were invited to work in Brazil, what were the goals that were given to you?
A: I can’t say they were too ambitious. The Brazilians already had an experience of working with our [former Soviet] coaches. Oleg Ostapenko was the head coach before me, he worked in a gym in Curitiba. However, results plummeted as soon as he left. That is why, when I was invited, the Federation wanted me to work not just with the athletes, but with the coaches as well. That’s what I started doing immediately. Right now the coaching team are our former specialist Irina Ilyashenko and two young Brazilian guys who have just started coaching.
Q: Did you have to work a lot to teach them?
A: Yes, a lot. At the beginning, there were problems everywhere, but, at the same time, the people really wanted to succeed. It’s not just that I needed to teach them, but I also needed to create a team. For that, you need a common goal and to be passionate about it. If you have that, the team will gradually, with experience, become more united, doesn’t matter whether they win or lose. In that sense, I think we have a great team, everyone wants results. The whole Brazilian gymnastics system is basically just two gymnastics centres in the whole country. One in Rio and the other in Curitiba where Ostapenko was working. There are no more gyms. When I arrived, we used a Tres Rios gym: on one side there was a gerontology hospital, on the other side a fence - and we’re in the middle. The mats under the bars were too hard, like wrestling carpets, we were always afraid that someone would jump wrong and twist an ankle. We built a new gym only in 2015 – the one that serves as a training gym for the Olympic athletes right now. It has foam pits, tumbling tracks. Only then we started training properly. To be fair to the Brazilian managers, they allowed us to go to Europe to train and compete, so we had an opportunity to see other athletes and to get experience.
Q: While I was watching your girls competing in qualifications, I got the impression that they could fight for a team medal. Or was I mistaken?
A: You know, these are the first Olympics in which I haven't really seen how the other teams are training, whether they’re prepared. As you’ve seen I’m not on the podium, because there’s a limited number of podium accreditations for the coaches and I’ve decided that this experience would be more useful for the other coaches on the team. I mean that discussing the medal chances is possible only in comparison to the other teams. Our girls are weak on bars, so if we really want to fight for medals, we need to upgrade their bars. Right here in qualifications we lost too many points on this apparatus.
Q: Considering the progress that you’ve made with the team, why weren’t you able to upgrade their bars?
A: Brazilians are traditionally afraid of bars. In order to train bars well you need to hang from them correctly, have good handstands, have a whole range of abilities that are developed in childhood through special training. In addition, you have to have proper conditions in the gym – like a trampoline. It’s even important where you land if you fall from the bar. When the surface underneath is hard, it’s not easy not to think about falling.
Q: For years you’ve been doing this: trying to reach the maximum result in the shortest possible time. What’s the secret of your success?
A: Physical and special preparation. Modern gymnastics is, first of all, legs, right conditioning of the leg muscles. In Russia coaches never cared about it, thinking that Russian gymnastics is, first of all, about choreography. Beautiful lines – that’s great. But if you don’t have strong legs, you can’t perform difficult routines. And there are more injuries. All in all, gymnastics training is horribly hard and it’s tedious, you get tired fast. If you’re not focused enough, if your concentration is lowered – there’s an injury. If her legs aren’t strong enough, a gymnast will never be able to do difficult acrobatics. Which is required on floor, beam, vault. It’s just that you need to start this conditioning before the girls reach the national team, when they’re still juniors. Only then can you change the situation and succeed. We managed to do it in Brazil. You saw it yourselves – a Brazilian girl is first after three subdivisions. And she wasn’t performing her maximum difficulty. I’ll think about whether we should risk her doing harder routines in the AA final. You know, risk is not always justified in our sport.
Q: Are you in charge of deciding the difficulty of all the routines?
A: Who else? You need a certain experience to make decisions like that. Take, for example, the horrible injury of the French gymnasts on vault: this was the coach’s mistake to let him compete such a difficult vault when he’s only just recovered after a serious injury.
Q: Do you do a lot of hands-on coaching yourself?
A: I do everything, as a coach and as a consultant. At the beginning of each season we decide on the routines: which elements to include, how to train them, how to spot the gymnast so that she won’t get injured. All the decisions go through me. When I arrived in 2013 the girls couldn’t even do the required elements on apparatus. We couldn’t upgrade the difficulty then. That is, we started working from scratch.
Q: Do you have any other specialists helping you besides the coaches?
A: We have quite a lot of psychologists, the federations brings them, but, in my opinion, they’re not needed. But I don’t speak the language well enough to tell them politely that they’re meddling with our work. The problem is that everyone means well. But people just don’t understand the sport and what the athletes need. That’s why it takes so much time to explain to them: the most important thing in gymnasts is to teach an athlete to overcome her fears in the gym and just in the gym, not in a psychologist’s room. There they are only exhausting the gymnasts by picking their brains.
Q: Did you have an opportunity to talk to your former gymnast in Rio?
A: Yes, of course. I've always been in touch with Aliya, we talked a lot in Glasgow during the Worlds.
Q: What can you say about her current performances?
A: As a coach, of course, I would want to see her in a different situation. But she’s a big champ just because she managed to get to the Olympics. Only recently she seriously wanted to retire. She called me then to ask for advice and I didn’t support her intention. I said that it’s just stupid to work so hard for three years and throw everything away so close to the Games. About her routines here – because my team competed in the next subdivision, I only saw her bars. I liked it. If an athletes is a fighter, you’ll see it everywhere even if she’s not in her best shape.
Q: Is it true that right after the Games you will stop working with the Brazilian team and return to the US?
A: Where else would I go? Staying in Brazil wouldn’t make sense, right now there’s a complicated political situation here, a financial crisis, impossible to predict who’ll be the next president and how the situation will change.
Q: And when you return to the US, will you continue coaching?
A: First, I’ll have some rest, then I’ll think about it hard. I’ll look into all the offers, which, I hope, will arrive, and think about all the pros and cons.
Q: What if you are offered a job in Russia again?
A: Are you kidding? Who do you think would offer me a job there?