Figure skating fans do not need to explain who Alexander Gorelik is. This outstanding athlete has made an invaluable contribution to the history of the sport. Together with Tatyana Zhuk, he won many awards and became the silver medalist of the Olympic Games in Grenoble.
Biography and first steps in sports
Alexander was born in Moscow in 1945. At the age of ten, he came to a sports school in Sokolniki to learn how to skate well.
He received the initial base of skating from the coach Elena Vasilyeva. Then Gorelik switched to pair skating. His first sports partner was Tatiana Sharanova. The guys trained a lot and in the end showed pretty good results. In 1962, they took third place at the Winter Spartakiad. They also brought bronze from the famous international tournament "Blue Swords", which took place in the GDR.
In 1964, at the figure skating championship in the Soviet Union, they took second place. Then the skaters began to try their hand at major competitions. At the European Championships, Gorelik and Sharanova took seventh place, and at the World Championships - only fifteenth. The not entirely successful rental upset the athletes, and the couple broke up.
Successes and achievements
It is not known how Alexander's further career would have developed if Stanislav Zhuk had not intervened in his sports destiny.
The coach noticed Gorelik back in 1963, he really liked the athlete. When the sports couple Gorelik-Sharanova broke up, he invited Alexander to skate with Tatyana Zhuk. Tanya was the coach's sister, he personally worked with the girl and knew her potential.
The decision turned out to be very successful, and the new duo began to progress rapidly. In their first performance at the 1965 World Championships, the skaters won bronze medals.
At the World Championships in Davos, the Zhuk-Gorelik greenhouses became silver champions, losing only to the famous pair Lyudmila Belousova and Oleg Protopopov in those years.
Then in 1968, despite Tatyana's injury, they prepared and performed excellently at the Olympic Games, winning the well-deserved silver.
On this, Tatyana Zhuk ended her career and devoted herself to her family and child. Alexander also left the big sport and became a commentator on television. He received the title of Honored Master of Sports of the USSR, reported with Nikolai Ozerov, and was also invited to shoot various films and programs. For example, in the movie "Blue Ice" Gorelik played the main role - a greenhouse figure skater.
After Tatyana's release from maternity leave, Alexander Gorelik worked with her in the "Circus on Ice". He also tried himself as a figure skating coach. Alexander was preparing young athletes from the USSR national team for the XII Winter Olympic Games in 1976 in Innsbruck.
Personal life
In 1974 Gorelik got married. The couple had a son who tried to repeat his father's sporting success. As a child, he began to engage in figure skating and performed in ice dancing with Marina Anisina, but did not achieve significant results and left the sport.
In 1990, Alexander Gorelik divorced and no longer officially tied the knot. In addition to sports, he was interested in literature and music, loved theater.
In the fall of 2012, Alexander Yudayevich Gorelik died at his dacha in the village of Tuchkovo, Moscow Region. He was a talented and strong skater who forever inscribed his name in the history of figure skating.
