TRAILO.IT PRESENT:
DMITRY KUCHERENKO
(Interview
by Stegal)
During the 2011 World
Trail-Orienteering Championships hold in La Feclaz (France) I
had the great opportunity to interview the new world champion in
the Paralympics class, the Russian Dmitry Kucherenko.
It has been for me a great honour to speak with him during
an interview that also involved then the team manager of the
Russian national team and then also other components of the
national team: I tried to describe here the interview done with
these very strong athletes: if there are things that I did not
well understood, this error must be imputed to me only.
I am grateful for their patience and their willingness the World
Champion Dmitry Kucherenko (DK), team manager and coach
Alexander Kobzarev (AK) and athlete Dmitry Dokuchaev (DD) who
translated my questions and then arranged and translated
responses.
Q: Do you expect this result? With what expectations you arrived at the World Championship and what do you think were the teams to beat?
Dmitry Kucherenko (DK):
first, about the result I must thank our coach, Alexander
Kobzarev. He is the most important person involved in russian
Trail-orienteering: success depends on him and his work. I am
convinced, because we have always talked about it with the
coach, that success comes step by step, continually striving to
improve the results. From this World Championship I would have
expected a silver medal, perhaps more likely a bronze medal.
After the first day of competition I was in first position, but
the ranking was very short with many athletes close, I knew that
each checkpoint of day 2 would have been decisive for the
ranking, but I must admit that I was a bit surprised by the gold
medal.
Kobzarev Alexander (AK): starting from the 2006 World
Championships, our results as a team and individual results of
Dmitry improved constantly. Unfortunately, our strongest athlete
died some years ago, and we needed two or three years to return
to the same level. But the team is made up of athletes still
young: Dmitry is 28 years old but after the first experience in
the open race open in Kiev (WTOC 2008) has already participated
in the 2009 World Championships in Open and in Paralympics at
WTOC 2010, Pavel Shmatov is 31 years old, some athletes here are
22, 23 or 25 years old, so we still have a chance to improve,
and for the next editions of the World Championship we are going
to put into the team one or two junior athletes!
Q: I'm quite surprised ...
Dmitry has competed in both classes, Open and Paralympics, in
two different WTOC?
AK: our idea, as a team and as a federation, is
that our athletes competing in the Open category have a
disability. Indeed, the World Championships in
trail-orienteering should be played only by athletes with
various disabilities, as if it were a discipline of the
Paralympics Games: we think that sport, not just the
trail-orienteering, but also other sports, is a component very
important to the lives of people who have a disability. Of
course in Russia in trail-orienteering competitions are involved
also people without any kind of disability, but till now there
is no intention to introduce them into the national team
participating at WTOC.
I mean that we are even contrary to the fact that there is a
WTOC Open class, open to everyone: athletes with disabilities
and without disabilities do not start with the same
opportunities. Just think of the possibility of an athlete
without disability to move faster, or to see the control points
from a superior height. But everything at the end gives us
another input: we want demonstrate that a disabled athlete can
have better results in trail-orienteering than an athlete
without disability.
And the gold medal gained by Dmitry will help us even more
clearly than our results, to bring other people to
trail-orienteering.
Q: How is your training
style, and how much you trained to obtain this result?
AK: The main problem is that in Russia
trail-orienteering is not considered a Paralympic sport, is not
recognized as such by our government of sports, so we don’t have
many funds. We must then look at our own money from sponsors,
and perhaps from this point of view we didn’t achieved success
comparable to the gold medal by Dmitry ...
DK: the keyword used by the
coach is "Enthusiasm". I started to practice trail-orienteering
when I was young, and now I spend all my free time trying to
improve my skills: planning trail-o courses or organizing races,
and this helps a lot. Then I study maps and I try to visualize
possible scenarios. We knew that in France the terrain would
have been different from those we are used in central Russia,
and we knew that we could find similar land in Sochi on the
Black Sea (home of the Winter Olympics 2014), in the Urals and
central Siberia. So in March we went to Sochi and we trained
constantly for two weeks, then we stayed for about a month in
the central Urals, and then we also went to Sweden, where there
aren’t so many rocky terrains as we expected at the WTOC but it
is always a very interesting terrain: the Scandinavian lands
have always been a good school and are a very important
experience.
AK: training periods in Sochi and the O-Ringen
gave us the confidence shown throughout the World Championship.
DK: another feature of the
training is that we always try to find the collaboration of our
colleagues from Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania. Competing
together is important to increase the general level: more
competition, more experience! Then of course there is the
comparison with the national teams of Scandinavia: Sweden,
Norway and Finland have a very strong team, and the comparison
with each competitor is very important. Finally, I want to say
another thing that our coach taught us: the Russian team is not
divided into strong and weak athletes, athletes who can win and
athletes settled for a mid-ranking positions. The coach always
tells us that everyone of us is potentially the winner of each
race, including the World Championship, and the leader of the
team.
Q: We talked about
training, but how much talent there is in the gold medal by
Dmitry Kucherenko?
DK: The coach always said
that in trail-orienteering is very important to have a natural
potential, but even when you have this potential, you always
need to increase your skills. And to improve your level of
athlete, you must love this sport. Love does not mean “I like”.
It means “to love”! If you don’t want to commit yourself, don’t
want to strive every day to increase your level of athlete, then
you cannot reach the gold medal even if you have a huge
potential: you have to work hard!
AK: Dmitry is not an athlete who wants to take
into account only his natural potential during training. He
really loves orienteering, he is practicing the sport he loves.
Q: The athlete who invented
this website, Marco Giovannini, bronze medal at the 2010 Italian
championships, particularly appreciate the format Temp-O. Do you
think the temp-O represents the future of this sport? Does it
could replace the classic trail-orienteering or you prefer the
original format?
AK: It’s difficult to answer this question,
because it causes every time threads, there are different
opinions about Temp-O and every athlete has a personal opinion.
In any case we were not surprised by the competition of Temp-O
with the answer "Z" which was held today: This race format was
introduced in the Russian league three years ago, so we are also
ready to race so
DK: I like the classic
format of the trail-orienteering. The way we compete in trail-O
has to remain completely within the WTOC. Then we can argue
about whether the O-Temp should enter or not in the WTOC,
probably, but should not replace the classic format.
Evaldas Butrimas
(Lithuania, 2005 world champion in paralympic category): I agree
with the opinion of Dmitry also if Temp-O is a discipline that
is evolving and becoming more and more interesting year after
year.
Dmitry Dokuchaev
(DD): our coach has some very interesting ideas
about the Temp-O. He thinks that could eventually be
divided into two or three different sports: control points with
a small number of flags or very high, or we could have the
short, medium and long distance depending on the distance of the
control points from the observation point . Who knows what
future developments could have in this discipline?
Q: Speaking of possible
developments, what are your ideas on this?
AK: The first thing to do to increase the
popularity and visibility of this sport is to have more
international competitions: a World Cup, a European Cup, a
greater number of matches involving national teams. The second
thing is to bring new forces in the Trail-O: if we don’t create
competitions for athletes younger than 20, the Trail-O will
eventually disappear, which is the reason why, as we have
already said, we will soon introduce into the national team one
or two junior athletes .
DK: more competition and
the entry of young athletes will increase the interest in this
discipline, and in addition will also help to eliminate
stereotypes... and there are many around trail-orienteering
AK: trail-orienteering today is seen as a sport
in which there is no physical effort, opposed to the c.o., ski-o
and mtb-o. This means that there are people who don’t consider
very well trail- orienteering. But we strive to engage in
trail-orienteering athletes who have already experienced, and
when this happens, very often the feedback was positive, "Hey,
it's really interesting". Despite this, people consider
trail-orienteering as a sport without effort or even a sport,
but when only athletes with physical disabilities will compete
in international competitions Trail-O will have a full
characterization, then the disciplines will be permanently
separated; I think at that point it will be easier to find
organizers who want to draw a map or arrange for a race both for
c.o. and trail-o.
DD: well, everything
revolves around the question of money. In a country like Russia,
the distances are always important: for example, for a team of
trail-O from Vladivostok is much easier to go to compete in
Japan that come to the west. For this reason at the national
championships there are not less but not more than 50
competitors each year. But the gold medal by Dmitry Kucherenko
is not only important to him as an athlete but also for us as a
team: it will be important for the visibility that we have and
to open us more doors (sponsorships).
Q: I would like to finish
this interview with a question that is close to my heart, but
perhaps it will seem strange: do you think that there are many
similarities between the "schakmaty" (chess) and Trail-O? Both
have some difficulties to declare thereselves as sports, both
involve a great mental effort...
DD: Ah! I don’t even need
to translate the question here because all have understood the
word "Schakmaty" ... Of course I could say that chess and
trail-orienteering are a constantly debated topic, and we always
talk about it. Every day someone finds another way to compare
these two disciplines, to find new forms of similarity: there
are certainly many aspects in common, and certainly is not
difficult for us to think of ourselves as the chess players of
orienteering!
When the interview is complete, once again I would like to
thank the entire team of Russian trail-orienteering for their
hospitality, patience and warmth with which they showed to me
their world, their goals and wishes. It's been a source of pride
for me to meet these athletes representing the best that could
offer trail-orienteering in the international scene.
