I’m always fascinated by how coaches manage different teams, especially top level teams, at the same time. For all the criticism IAM gets (and sometimes rightfully so), I do sense they try to find programs that cater to their teams’ needs and female athletes seem to get more attention in development.
More importantly, how you manage junior teams requires tact. I came across this Igor interview from 8 years ago (from David Lease) that I found very pertinent to nowadays:
https://youtu.be/sehESel9Z-A?t=1h21m09s
He always talks from the lense of the male athlete - Charlie, Scott, Vadym… The female athletes come as an afterthought (even a prodigy like Tessa).
And in 2018, he was training CPom, fresh off a silver medal at Junior Worlds (after bronze in the previous year), and he only mentioned how very excited he was about this new team of his - Nguyen/Kolesnik. How do teenagers, who had already proven themselves internationally, react to their coach blatant favoritism? It can create insecurity, resentment, overtraining, or a feeling that the coach’s affection is conditional on being “the chosen project.”
All schools have “top teams”, but being tactful in how you create an environment that encourages the growth of your teams (specially young teams) is, to me, the mark of great coaches. And one of the reasons why I’m on the fence about Igor.
any team training full time with a coach is trusting them with their physical well being and careers - tact is the bare minimum. considering the big picture and being supportive and caring in public and private is the job and their responsibility, especially to younger teams
so yeah, some of Igor's statements haven't met this expectation. for someone who must be politically savvy, he doesn't seem to hear how his words come across sometimes. but maybe it's better that he doesn't hide his favoritism - his other teams can see where they stand and act accordingly, like CPom did
i remember that Dave Lease interview and how Igor singled out Charlie and Scott for individual praise and had nothing specific to say about Meryl and Tessa, but i'd forgotten he laid out clearly how he sees ice dance:
"It's equal, it's always a team - I'm not putting one ahead of the other. I started talking about boys because to me, male initiates things. Male not initiate the move, not initiate skating, nothing's gonna come from girl. so I want to give the credit to the boys. but I mean obviously the girl not responding, if the girl's not connected, then that would be hard to do. Because you can be the greatest skaters in the world [but] if you don't have this connection as a team, every little simple turn would suffer if you don't understand the partnering. And we credit to both of those girls that were amazing in the way how they feel [their] partner, how they respond to the partner, and Meryl and Tessa were the best examples of how the partner in the partnership should work. There was immediate response to both of those girls"
so he very much believes the man leads, the woman follows. i'm not sure if seeing what Madi and Scott did for Christina has changed Igor's mind at all, because Emilea has been only effusively complimentary publicly about him, but Christina was languishing and had disordered eating when she was at Novi. Madi Chock, too, is a stronger skater and performer in her IAM era than Novi. Igor's pov seemed to keep him from seeing the female partner as someone with equal agency and autonomy as a person and artist, and that was a huge problem
this attitude that the male partner is more important, is the initiator, that the woman is the follower isn't just an ice dance issue and is insidious in the way it creeps into how we're treated. we heard from Gabi how detrimentally it impacted her that from childhood she was told to follow Gui and not question. it stemmed originally from a difficult family dynamic, but she felt invalidated by that being continued in some of their training environments
i agree with you that though IAM has (major) failings, they have been pretty successful at least in public at balancing the competing interests of their teams. it helps that their top teams have creative control over their own material, and it's a strength of the school that their students tend to improve but develop/keep their own identities. and i can't recall Marie-France and Patrice speaking about the teams in a way that would indicate favoritism or lack of consideration (Romain, on the other hand, has sometimes made remarks that might not be well received by the team, like when he said Chock/Bates's weakness was their skating skills - not untrue, but also not tactful or wise, coming from their own coach right before the Beijing games)
IAMO does an excellent job of giving their teams the appropriate level of support -- the programs teams get reflect the goals for the season and feel carefully considered and calibrated for them. and while CPom is the top team by far, Lauriault/Le Gac, Lily and Nathan, Layla and Alex and more - they all got excellent programs that had a lot of thought and care and ambition behind them
balance at a school isn't about treating all teams the same, since teams are at different stages of growth with different needs, it's more whether a coach can meet every team where they're at, and make each student feel strongly supported and guided and believed in. and in those stories you mention, Igor's words don't reflect that level of care, maybe
