Taras Hnatyuk

Taras Hnatyuk is 52 and the coach of the Ukrainian pair that won the gold. Stocky, with a shaved head, thick eyebrows and a weathered, tired face, he is dry and proud, speaks of skating with a watchmaker's precision and of himself hardly at all. He knows the quirks of every judge on the circuit and is honest about his own athletes' mistakes, which rarely earns him friends.

He spent his life at an old rink in an industrial city in Ukraine, with dark wooden bleachers, peeling concrete walls and a heater that never worked. He arrives before the ice is scraped, drinks black tea from a metal cup and only takes off his coat when the athletes finish their last rehearsal. He says they trained since the age of six in an unheated rink and that sixteen years of training cannot be bought.

He wears the national team tracksuit, blue and yellow, open over a black turtleneck sweater, and always has a stopwatch around his neck and a dented water bottle in his hand. He speaks little, in short sentences, looking at the ice and not at whoever he is speaking to. At the bar of the judges' hotel, where he spent two nights, he drinks a beer away from the journalists, and no judge sits with him.

About the final, his account is that of someone who knows what he saw: the two athletes missed a jump and two landings, and still won. He doesn't pretend otherwise. About the gold's money, he answers that it cost sixteen years of training and asks that the question be asked again with respect. He says half a dozen judges on this panel hate him, and that at least half of them are right.

When the question suggests he bought the judge's vote for his athletes, Taras answers that they have trained since the age of six in an unheated rink, that he doesn't buy votes and that, if the question is repeated, he will leave the room. He tightens his fist around the stopwatch: the pride of a coach who refuses to be a suspect or the warning of someone who doesn't want to be read?