love and big feelings, do everything the best they can. And I never, ever, not with any student — even two-times Olympic champions Katia [Gor- deeva] and Sergei [Grinkov] — I never focus them to win something.” Shpilband and Zoueva also refuse to indulge in a long-popular pastime of ice dancers and their coaches: griping about results. “We always try to make the skaters not focus
on judges,” Shpilband said. “In my experience in many years of teaching, I did see a lot of different things. I may think the judges are fair or less fair, [but] it’s the nature of the sport, it’s a very subjec- tive sport. “We are always trying to make skaters focus on what they could have done better, to make sure that’s not going to happen next time. Tey always have to be ahead of the competitors and then the judges will have to give it to them.”
ROOTS OF SUCCESS Shpilband and Zoueva grew up skating at
Moscow’s Red Army club, where they shared the ice with most of the great Soviet ice dancers of the 1970s and ’80s. “My coach, Elena Tchaikovskaia, taught
Igor’s coach [1976 Olympic champion Liudmila Pakhamova], so we are from the same environ- ment, the same vision,” Zoueva said. In 1977, Zoueva placed fifth in the world
with her partner, Andrei Vitman. She retired from competition in 1978 to study choreography at Moscow’s National Teatre Institute. In 1982, she began working with Gordeeva and Grinkov. Shpilband won the 1983 World junior title
with his partner, Tatiana Gladkova, but retired from competition in 1986 after the untimely death of Pakhamova. While performing with Tati- ana Tarasova’s All-Star Tour in New York in 1990, Shpilband and then-wife Veronica Pershina, a pairs skater, defected to the U.S. along with fellow skater Gorsha Sur, a future U.S. ice dance cham- pion with Renee Roca. “It was not planned,” Shpilband said. “Basi-
Davis and White continued their impressive run of victories with their triumph at 2011 Hilton HHonors Skate America.
cally, we were helping Gorsha and two others get their luggage together, and other people found out we were helping them. We got spotted and then we were afraid to go back to Russia. So we thought we had no choice [but to defect]. Tat’s the short version.”
Te skaters settled first in Brooklyn and then
moved to the Detroit Skating Club (DSC). Sur soon began touring and competing with Roca, leaving Detroit. “Fortunately, DSC at that time didn’t have a big ice dance program, so I was able to get stu- dents,” Shpilband said.
“THEY FELL INTO MY LAP”
In 1992, Jerod Swallow and Elizabeth Punsa- lan, the 1991 U.S. ice dance champions, lost their title and failed to qualify for the 1992 Olympics. In the aftermath, they moved from Colorado Springs to Detroit.
“Our choreographers [Roca and Sur] were coming back to compete, and we shared the same coach, Sandra Hess, so obviously there was a con- flict there,” Swallow, now managing director of DSC, said. “We had heard about Igor; he was skating
[professionally] with Suzy Semanick at the time and they had some interesting programs. So we came to Detroit to have him do a show program for us. We liked it so much, and liked him so much, our coach said, ‘Why don’t you have him do the original dance?’ And it worked so well, we said we’re going to have him do our free dance, too.”
After they had worked with him in Detroit
from April to August, Swallow recalls Shpilband asking in his then-fractured English, ‘I did all the work for these programs, shouldn’t I be the one who trains them?’ Te skaters agreed. Un- der Shpilband, they won another four U.S. titles (1994, 1996–1998) and competed at the 1994 and 1998 Olympics; their highest-ever Worlds finish was sixth. “Igor had some ideas and creativity that we
were not exposed to before,” Swallow, who is still great friends with Shpilband, said. “He has an in- teresting reaction when people ask him how it all started. He says, ‘Well, Liz and Jerod just fell out of the sky into my lap.’ We kind of gave him a chance. We all grew together. We grew as skaters and he grew as a coach.” Zoueva immigrated to Ottawa. She had
immigrated there after the collapse of the Soviet Union and worked mostly with pairs, including Canadians Kristy and Kris Wirtz. In 1998, Zoue- va’s son, Fedor Andreev, moved to the U.S. to train under Tamara Moskvina, and she wanted to join him.
“I applied for my green card,” she said.
“Johnny Johns, the [then] director at DSC, had sent me a pairs team and I did choreography for them in Ottawa. And then in April, he called me and said he wanted to have me as choreographer for pairs and also as an ice dance coach.” Shpilband — who by now coached Jamie Sil-
verstein and Justin Pekarek, and Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto, among others — was searching for a new coaching partner since his previous partner, Briton Elizabeth Coates, had moved to Dallas. “I didn’t even think, I said yes right away,”
Zoueva said. “My whole career, I looked at Igor’s teams and I always loved his work. At the [1998] World Championships in Minneapolis, I was re- ally disappointed with Liz and Jerod’s result. [Tey placed sixth.] I thought, seriously, how can that happen? So I always appreciated the job Igor did.” Shpilband spent 14 years as DSC’s ice dance
director, and in 2006, he and Zoueva moved to the Arctic Edge. Teir off-ice partners, Johns and Adrienne Lenda — both best known as pairs coaches — made the move with them, and lend their expertise to the ice dance school. “Tey work a lot on the elements — the lifts, the spins — and cleaning up the programs,”
SKATING 25
PHOTO BY OLEG NIKISHIN/GETTY IMAGES
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