Tatiana Tarasova

Infobox Figure skater
title= Tatiana Tarasova


caption= Tarasova coaching Sasha Cohen in 2003.
country= RUS
dateofbirth= birth date and age|1947|2|13
formerpartner= Aleksandr Gorelik, Georgi Proskurin
retired= 1966

Tatiana Anatolyevna Tarasova ( _ru. Татьяна Анатольевна Тарасова) (born February 13, 1947) is a Russian figure skating coach who has coached more world and Olympic champions than any other coach in the world. As of 2003, her students have won a combined 41 gold medals at the European and World championships. As of 2006, her students have won a combined 9 Olympic gold medals in three of the four Olympic figure skating disciplines.

Biography

Tatiana Tarasova is the daughter of Anatoly Tarasov, often cited as the greatest hockey coach in the history of the game. Her father introduced her to figure skating at the age of 5. She competed in pair skating with Aleksandr Gorelik and later Georgi Proskurin. With Proskurin, she placed as high as 7th at the 1965 World Figure Skating Championships and 4th at the 1966 European Figure Skating Championships. [ [http://www.eskatefans.com/skatabase/majors.html Skatabase] ]

After suffering a career-ending injury, she had to quit skating. She was just 18 at the time. A year later, due to her father's insistence, she started coaching herself. Her students have included Irina Rodnina & Alexander Zaitsev, Alexei Yagudin, Ilia Kulik, Natalia Bestemianova & Andrey Bukin, Marina Klimova & Sergey Ponomarenko, Sasha Cohen, Johnny Weir, Shizuka Arakawa, Oksana Grishuk & Evgeny Platov, Shae-Lynn Bourne, and Barbara Fusar-Poli, among others. Right now she coaches Japanese 2008 World Champion Mao Asada.For more than 25 years, Tarasova has been married to Vladimir Krainev, a world-class pianist who resides in Hanover. 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 announcing her retirement from full-time coaching and moving back to Russia in 2006.

Tarasova was awarded Order of Friendship of Peoples (1984). [cite book|title=Panorama of the 1984 Sports Year|year=1985|pages=p. 38|publisher=Physical Culture and Sports publisher|location=Moscow|language=Russian] In March 2008, she was inducted into the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame.

References

External links

* [http://www.tarasova.ru Tatiana Tarasova's official site]