Be careful when expressing wishful ideas, this also applies to questions of rhythm. The music selection in his first pair skating winter in Berlin last year was a little too elegiac, too romantic, too soft for Nikita Wolodin’s taste. He would have liked to add a few beats. No problem, Minerva Rabbit thought. They have chosen two more powerful programs for this season, with the result that Wolodin felt a slight sense of nostalgia while working on the stepping and lifting figures in the spring. His partner says with amusement these days that “he initially found the old short routine more relaxing”.
The result of the effort is a fabulous blues, “You were mine” by Tami Neilson: explosive, synchronous and, despite the perfection, interpreted with astonishing nonchalance. The title of the album, “Chickaboom”, suggests where the journey is headed. Minerva Hase thinks they are “now on a very good path when it comes to finding music together”. Above all, chickaboom!, two temperaments have come together: the lively former Russian show skater Nikita Wolodin, 25, from St. Petersburg, for whom figure skating is always associated with a certain fun factor, and Minerva Hase from Berlin, who is the same age , which generally seeks a thoughtful, intellectual approach to things. Of course, this symbiosis on runners didn’t go unnoticed by the judges either.
:Satellite launch to the top of the world
Although they have only been together for a year, Minerva Hase and Nikita Wolodin are the best figure skating duo of the winter. How the Berliner and the St. Petersburg show runner came together despite the Russian war of aggression.
In only their second pair skating season together, the German-Russian duo has just won the figure skating Grand Prix final for the second time: the highest-class comparison in the international competition series. In Grenoble at the beginning of December, Hase/Wolodin danced their way to the top of the ranking ahead of the former world champions Riku Miura/Ryuichi Kihara from Japan. In any case, the balance of their young career is as clean and scratch-free as a freshly smoothed ice surface: Since 2023, they have made six appearances at the Grand Prix, the “1” has been written after their name five times, and they only finished second in the Cup of China in the fall away. This weekend they will present their programs, the blues and the long freestyle to an adaptation of Vivaldi’s “Winter” from the “Four Seasons”, to the audience Oberstdorf will present themselves at the German championships – where they will also compete as defending champions. And when the second part of the season begins in January with the European Championships, there is no getting around the fact that the World Cup third-place teams Hase/Volodin are the favorites.
Last winter, of all things, the European Championships ended in disappointment for the flu-weakened duo in fifth place. This time, Minerva Rabbit believes, they have divided their forces better. In any case, she sees improvements in all areas, despite the top marks from the previous season, because for a world-class runner who demands perfection, even a minimal time delay in the synchronized pirouettes is on the list of deficiencies. “It always worked out last year with the podium places, but the performance was mixed,” she says: “Especially in the freestyle, we kept making mistakes.” This year you can feel it even in the most complicated lifts, in the rotations in the air, greater security when landing after long throws on a runner: “You can tell that the training was right.”
Here too, after initial difficulties, the duo found a tried and tested routine. The Russian coach Dmitri Savin, who brokered Minerva Hase’s new alliance with Volodin after she ended her collaboration with Nolan Seegert, is on the board at the competitions, but only travels to Berlin sporadically. The daily workload takes place at the federal base in the Sportforum Hohenschönhausen under the aegis of the Berlin pair skating specialists Knut Schubert and Rico Rex.
Detailed work on the ballet barre
New to the team is a ballet master, Sidnei Brandão from Leipzig, with whom we work once a week on the details of the choreographies, on the movements that “you go through a thousand times, even in front of the mirror in the ballet hall,” as Minerva Hase says: “He shows We can learn a lot from him about how to win over the audience.” In the summer we will continue to work classically on the barre; Nikita Wolodin is a big ballet fan anyway.
The result is a harmony right down to the fingertips that you can see. It is intended to carry the Bundeswehr-sponsored figure skater Minerva Hase and her Russian partner Nikita Wolodin to the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina in a year and a half. In addition to sporting qualifications, the prerequisite is a political-bureaucratic act, timely naturalization. “We try to do everything in our power, and that is to learn German and pass the German exams,” says Minerva Hase. The sports director of the German Ice Skating Union, Claudia Pfeifer, also pushed for language lessons to be anchored in the training plan at an early stage. Because the qualified coach Volodin, who won a Grand Prix as a teenager but then no longer made it into the competition squad, has no connections to the Russian army, Minerva Hase is confident about the prospect of her Olympic future. Bruno Massot, Alyona Savchenko’s French partner, also had to learn vocabulary before winning pair skating gold in 2018. It is said that Volodin tries to use his language skills in training. And what speaks for him is that he rarely takes it easy.
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