Figure skater Timur Tursynbayev in an interview with inbusiness.kz told how he came to the sport and what he is currently doing. As it became known, the 21-year-old athlete has been working as a coach in Nur-Sultan, at the Saryarka Olympic training Center for a year.

According to Timur, his mother brought him to figure skating at the age of four. "It was an accident. We were walking around the stadium and saw children jumping rope and doing exercises. They were stretching until they hit the ice. My mother went to the coach and asked what the children were doing, and he said that I was a figure skater, and said that I was the right age and would soon be selected for the section. We didn't have any plans to go to this sport," Timur recalls. Speaking about the results achieved, he believes that it was a great success that he was able to study for a long time in the team-the Moskvich sports school, because every year there is a strict selection of children. According to him, if 120 children are recruited in the first year, then by the end of the year there are 20 children left, by the beginning of the second year – six or seven children, then groups are United, and so on for several years, up to high-performance sports. When the age came, he and his younger sister Lisa began to play for Kazakhstan.

The first small successes began at the age of six, when he studied jumping, at the same time the boy's father first brought him to Kazakhstan from Moscow to perform. So, during his sports career, Timur twice became the champion of Kazakhstan. Also in 2011, as a 12-year-old athlete, he was honored to run with the torch with seven other athletes at the opening of the 2011 Asian games in Astana. Talking about the reasons why I had to leave big sports and take up coaching, Timur explains:when he was announced for the Junior world championship in 2011, he suffered a hip injury during high loads. In this regard, I could not take further part in competitions, so I decided to engage in coaching. "This year, as soon as I got a secondary sports education, I immediately went to an official job – to train children in Nur-Sultan," Timur says. He leads several groups of children from four to 16 years old.

Note that Timur himself trained with honored masters of figure skating in Russia. His first coach was Irina Strakhova, who is considered to be one of the best coaches in Russia, then he studied with Nadezhda Kondulinskaya, from whom he received the main part of the technique and learned to do jumps – cascades, double Axel-at the age of eight. Then for three or four years I skated with Natalia Dubinskaya. When asked how difficult it is to get to a famous coach, Timur said that to do this, the coach must consider the child promising, pass the annual selection and show himself at competitions. "It often happens that in training-some results, in competitions due to excitement-others." According to him, the prospects for the development of figure skating in Kazakhstan are very bright. There are more children coming to the ice, professional personnel are coming.

In his coaching work, Timur sets goals to bring all his accumulated knowledge, provide skaters with a stable technique, and teach them to jump not only double, but also triple jumps. And, of course, in a few years to compete in the international arena. "In the new season, the goal is to prepare children for starts in Kazakhstan.

I work only for the first year, so my athletes have not yet taken part in the Championships of Kazakhstan, all this takes time – setting the technique, sliding, but the prospects are good," Timur Tursynbayev sums up. Note that Timur's sister, Elizabeth, a silver champion in Japanese Saitama, is currently preparing for the upcoming competition. We wish her good luck!

Maira Medeubayeva