Meet Kamila Valieva’s ‘Quad Squad’ coach who’s making Olympics history but whose ice skaters are ‘disposable’ after age 17

• Russia’s Kamila Valieva is the first female figure skater to land a quad at the Olympics.
• Valieva and the rest of Russia’s ‘Quad Quad’ share the same revered coach: Eteri Tutberidze. 

• Eteri has faced scrutiny for trading on her athletes’ health and longevity for medals. 

Kamila Valieva has made Olympics history in Beijing by landing two quadruple jumps – paving the way for a Gold in the team figure skating competition.

Valieva, who is 15, and the two other Russian members of the ‘Quad Quad’ – Anna Scherbakova and Alexandra Trusova, both 17 – all work with the same revered coach: Eteri Tutberidze.  

Between the team, pair, and three athletes individual events, Tutberidze could have a hand in as many as five Olympic medals in Beijing – an unthinkable achievement for most coaches. As extraordinary as this Olympics could be for Tutberidze, the coach has been under a microscope for years over her training methods. 

Prominent Russian coaches have gone so far as to refer to Tutberidze’s athletes as “disposable” or “perishable goods,” and see her as trading on her athletes’ health in exchange for medals for Russia. Fans lament the so-called “Eteri expiration date,” around age 17, when her athletes are often forced into retirement by injury and diminishing results. (Insider reached out to Tutberidze, who declined to be interviewed during a busy preparation period.)

Excessive pressure to compete at a young age shortens skaters’ careers, and deprives athletes of being able to mature into fully-developed artists, according to Benoit Richaud, the leading choreographer among quad-less competitors.

“Eteri was smart in her approach: she was first to find a method to teach quad jumps to girls, and the method works, but only until age 17. What are skaters supposed to do then?”

Two of the three women on Tutberidze’s “Quad Squad” are nursing unspecified injuries that might be due to overtraining. Two others were left behind in Russia because they recently broke bones preventing them from qualifying for the games. 

15 year-old Daria Usacheva in November suffered a hip injury so severe while warming up, that she returned to Moscow in a wheelchair, and withdrew from further competition.

“It’s sad to watch. If they don’t compete: they’re done.” Richaud said, explaining the immense pressure Usacheva faced to compete while injured.

Richaud’s skater, 21-year-old Kaori Sakomoto of Japan, took home the only major gold medal this season that did not go to a Tutberidze student, after Usacheva’s frightening fall. 

“Of course it was ridiculous to think girls can’t do quads,but what about their careers?” Richaud said, admitting the victory felt bittersweet, because it followed a potentially career-ending injury of a competitor.

A neutral flag

This Olympics comes at a contentious moment for Russian athletics. The World Anti-Doping Agency has banned Russian athletes from competing for Russia, who are included in a special registered testing pool, and will compete under a neutral flag for the Russian Olympic Committee, instead of the Russian national flag.

The sanctions were meted out after an independent investigation found evidence that Russian anti-doping officials helped athletes cheat as far back as 2010. The officials were found to have given advance notice of testing, made positive results disappear, accepted bribes, and tampered with samples. 

Doping is relatively rare among figure skaters, since athletes benefit from being lighter rather than bulkier. None of Tutberidze’s athletes have ever had an adverse test result and they are tested more than almost any other athletes, as a consequence of their successes (winning athletes are tested more) and their association with Russia (whose athletes have been flagged due to the sanctions). 

‘For me, girls are better’

For roughly the last decade, Tutberidze’s rink in Moscow has been churning out very young, very compact, virtuosic female champions. Her athletes win by performing difficult jumps such as quads – which are worth roughly double the points of a triple, making skaters who land them nearly impossible to beat – but burn out dramatically as they go through puberty.

“For me, girls are better,” Tutberidze explained in an interview in 2018, after her students swept a Junior Grand Prix Final podium, including a record-breaking performance by then 15 year-old Trusova with two quads. 

Girls should learn quads young, when they are still light and agile, Tutberidze said.

Prepubescent girls have the perfect strength-to-weight ratio to complete rotations without the vertical spring and power of a matured jumper, once they enter puberty and their strength-to-weight ratio changes, they begin to falter in competition pushing their bodies to extremes or suffer injury.

Skaters’ punishing training schedules can often have the effect of naturally suppressing their development.

The type of injury Usacheva suffered results from cumulative stress to a body part, after repeating an element too many times during practice.  It is often preceded by muscle fatigue or soreness, according to Dr. Jane Moran, who chairs the International Skating Union (ISU) Medical Commission.

Dr. Moran added that Usacheva type of injury is common among skaters during puberty, when the growth-plates are still open. “Training for adolescents must be adjusted during this period of their development,” Dr. Moran said.

Tutberidze’s athletes’ prime medal-winning years coincide with this period of development. 

Figure skating coaches generally try to avoid training potential competitors; but Tutberidze has made it a central part of her winning strategy. 

“They are like a stable of thoroughbreds competing and pushing one another,” says Canadian skating official Ted Barton of the extremely disciplined training environment Tutberidze has created. 

The depth of talent at her rink is so great, that nineteen of the top 20 highest women’s scores recorded by the ISU were posted by five Tutberidze students.

Baptized by a bomb

As a young teen, Tutberidze’s own competitive career was brought to an abrupt halt by an early growth spurt that left her injured. 

After failing to find a coach willing to train her to jump, she switched to ice dance and signed on for a 36-city U.S. tour with the Russian Ice Ballet. 

When visa trouble and disappeared investors left them stranded and penniless in Oklahoma City, they found themselves in 1995 at the Oklahoma City YMCA. 

On April 19, 1995, when a bomb was set off at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building – just across the street from the YMCA – the entire troupe barely escaped with their lives. Tutberidze said she emerged from the building still holding her toothbrush, only to find a chaotic scene of injured people and cars on fire. Their names are among the 600 inscribed in granite on the “Survivor Wall,” at the Oklahoma City National Memorial.

After a brief stint with the Ice Capades, Tutberidze and her skating-partner husband settled in San Antonio where they coached beginners. In search of more competitive students, Tutberidze eventually returned to Moscow with her daughter, Diana Davis. 

Davis has followed in her mother’s footsteps, and will compete in the ice dance event in Beijing with partner Gleb Smolkin. 

“Russian women were always strong, but never as dominant until Eteri came along,” Valeri Prudsky, one of the skaters Tutberidze was with during the 1995 bombing, said. “She made it happen for the women, she changed the world around.”

Prudsky is in awe of her staggering success and accolades. In 2018, President Vladimir Putin awarded Tutberidze with the Order of Honour for her contributions to the sport in Russia. 

It’s easy to forget that Tutberidze’s dominance marks a significant shift in the world standings: the American women’s figure skating heyday of the 90’s when skaters like Michelle Kwan were able to hold their own against Russian counterparts, gave way to a strong Japanese field in the 2000’s. 

Russian women didn’t win their first Olympic gold until after Tutberidze was promoted to head coach in 2013. They’ve been winning ever since.

Prudsky, who came up in the same elite Soviet figure skating schools as Tutberidze in Moscow in the 1980s, described Tutberidze as a skater of only modest talent, but great work ethic. He says the key to Tutberidze’s success is her ability to seek out students who share her hyper-competitive work ethic. 

“She can push them to do things they did not know they could do,” Prudsky said.

The original Quad Queen

Surya Bonaly, who rose to fame in the 90s for performing backflips, is proud of her lesser-known achievement: in 1992, she became the first woman to attempt a quad on Olympic ice. 

Bonaly identifies with the new “quad queen” Trusova’s daring style and has been rooting for her.

“Those quads are amazing, I can’t believe she did that while injured,” Bonaly said with a hint of concern after witnessing Trusova easily win a competition in October, despite nursing an apparent stress fracture. 

“I’m worried these athletes won’t last long,” she said. 

Bonaly, who now works as a coach in the US, is in awe of Tutberidze’s achievements as a coach.

“She’s the best, she has the world in the palm of her hand,” Bonaly says, referring to Tutberidze’s numerous titles and champions.

She also knows all too well the toll that quads can take on the body as it ages, and had to eventually stop performing the skill after having hip surgery at 25.

“It’s good to win medals, but you don’t want to be traumatized for the rest of your life.” Bonaly said.