Maya Usova is a famous Soviet athlete who performed in ice dancing, defending the leading positions of Soviet sports in figure skating. Currently, the Olympic champion is engaged in coaching and preparing young athletes.
Biography
The homeland of the Olympic champion Maya Valentinovna Usova is the city of Gorky. This is how Nizhny Novgorod was called during the years of the Soviet Union. The famous figure skater was born in 1964 on May 22. The girl began sports at less than 8 years old, when her parents took her to the figure skating section, which was led by coach Irina Vasilievna Druzhkova. Maya showed excellent results and started competing early. Her first experience was skating at the Winter Spartakiad of the Peoples of the Soviet Union, which took place in the capital of the Urals, Sverdlovsk, in 1978. Her partner in those years was Alexei Batalov. The Juniors finished 18th in their first championship. When Maya Usova matured, she began to train with Natalia Dubova, who chose Alexander Zhulin as her partner.
The couple took place in 1980. In addition to joint training and participation in competitions, Maya Usova and Alexander Zhulin joined their fates - in 1986, the athletes were married. Their personal life has become inseparable from sports.
Sport life
An interesting, original couple could not manage to occupy the first step of the podiums of world and European championships during their sports career. They have always had worthy competitors in sports dancing - Soviet couples Klimova and Ponomarenko, Annenko and Sretensky, Oksana Grishchuk and Yevgeny Platov. Our guys in those years reigned in the world of sports ice dancing. To turn the tide, Maya Usova and Alexander Zhulin decide to move to the United States of America, where they thought training would bring more results. They leave their homeland in 1992.
The 92 Olympics did not bring a couple of the expected medals, and the athletes decided to abandon their careers in amateur sports. However, the coach managed to convince Maya and Alexander to continue training in order to compete at the next Olympic Games. It was fate - in 1993, gold medals fell like a cornucopia. Maya Usova and Alexander Zhulin became gold medalists of the European and world championships.
At the 1996 Olympics, the athletes became silver medalists, losing to the Russian pair Grischuk and Platov.
These games were the last in the career of Maya Usova. By this time, the marriage with Alexander Zhulin had also broken up. Now, instead of competitions, creativity was made up of performances in ice shows. The famous Tatyana Tarasova became the coach of Maya Usova. She chose a new partner for Maya - Evgeny Platov. The former rivals made a wonderful tandem. Their success in professional figure skating was confirmed by their victory in the world championship.
Coaching creativity
In addition to performing, Maya Usova began to engage in coaching. She helped Tatyana Tarasova to train such world-famous figure skaters as Alexei Yagudin, Shizuka Arakawa, Galit Hait and Sergei Sakhnovsky. During the years spent in America, Usova also worked with kids who first skated.
In the two thousandth, the athlete returned to Moscow. She successfully married a talented surgeon Anatoly Orletsky. She gave birth to her husband a daughter, Anastasia. Her job is coaching. The dance duets that train at the Odintsovo Stadium have excellent professional training thanks to the Honored Master of Sports Maya Valentinovna Usova.
