Figure skater and coach, holder of the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, IV degree, is not a frequent occurrence in Soviet and Russian sports. However, Alexey Nikolaevich Mishin is one of the representatives of the glorious galaxy of athletes who received this award.
Alexey was born in 1941 in Sevastopol. Soon the war broke out, the Mishins' family was evacuated to Ulyanovsk. It was a hungry time, and little Alyosha fell ill with rickets, the disease of malnutrition. He was saved by his mother, who started growing vegetables in a small vegetable garden.
After the war, the family of officer Mishin traveled to different cities until they settled in Leningrad, in the same room in a communal apartment. In this city figure skating imperceptibly entered the life of Alexei. It's just that the father took the children to the skating rink, and one day his older sister saw how much Alyosha liked to skate, and gave him skates.
The agile boy not only rode on the rink - he clung to the truck and wrote out various dangerous pirouettes, balancing on the slippery road.
Not far from their apartment was the Anichkov Palace, where famous skaters came to skate. Alyosha did not suspect that he would soon train with them - he just studied at a figure skating school.
Skater career
Alexey's first coach was Nina Leplinskaya, the teacher of the first Olympian Nikolai Panin. She gave Mishin basic knowledge and skills. At this time, the coach Maya Belenkaya created her own team of skaters, and invited a novice athlete to her. Here he had a meeting with Tamara Moskvina, which determined his entire future professional destiny. The Mishin-Moskvin duet represented the Soviet Union in many competitions:
1968 - silver at the European Championship;
1969 - winners of the USSR championship;
1969 - silver medal at the World Championship;
1969 - bronze medal at the European Championship.
In all these tournaments, Lyudmila Belousova and Oleg Protopopov performed with them, and everywhere they were stronger. Mishin realized that he and Moskvina had few prospects of becoming absolute champions, and decided to leave for coaching.
And he was not mistaken - after five years his student Yuri Ovchinnikov won the USSR championship. There were real nuggets in his team - for example, Tatyana Oleneva, who also became the champion of the Soviet Union, participated in European competitions.
In 1976, an incomprehensible thing happened in the fate of the coach: he became "restricted to travel abroad", his book was not published, and they stopped inviting him to radio and television. For three years he was in the dark until it became clear that there was a misunderstanding.
Mishin began to work with enthusiasm: he trained, looked for new techniques. In 1994, the result exceeded expectations: his student Alexei Urmanov won the European and World Championships. Later, the world famous athlete Evgeni Plushenko received the same titles. And all thanks to innovations and experiments, of which Mishin has always been a supporter.
Now the coach is of considerable age, but still skates, teaches students at the university, participates in television programs, he is invited as a consultant by foreign skating teams.
Personal life
We can say that figure skating smoothly flowed into the personal life of Alexei Mishin, because his wife is the same Tatyana Oleneva, whom he trained in the 70s. He persuaded her to become the coach of the women's team of Russian figure skaters.
And later they got married and never parted either on the ice or in the family.
Alexey and Tatiana have two sons: Andrey and Nikolay. They are also athletes, only not figure skaters, but tennis players. So the sports dynasty of the Mishins continues.
