Alexandra Trusova spoke about her early career, her relationship with fame, and how she handled becoming one of the most well-known figure skaters of her generation at a young age.
Looking back at her journey, Trusova said it is difficult for her to judge because she never had another type of life. Like any ordinary child, she first simply listened to her parents and coaches. Her daily routine was built around ice training, recovery, and returning to practice the next day. Around the age of 11 or 12, she began to understand her own goal: she wanted to win the Olympic Games and started working toward that dream.
Trusova admitted that titles, popularity, and money were also important to her. From the age of seven, her father paid her for her performances. She remembered seeing his iPhone and saying that she wanted one too. Her father told her that he would give her prize money for her achievements. From that moment, she understood what she needed to do to earn money.
Until she was 17 years old, Trusova wanted to become famous and earn good money. By that time, she had achieved almost everything she wanted, except for the most important goal — an Olympic gold medal.
Trusova became widely known while she was still a teenager, but her access to social media was heavily limited until the end of the Olympics, when she was around 18 years old. She could only use it for a maximum of one minute a day. She could make posts from her mother’s phone, but she could not read what people wrote about her or understand from the internet how popular she had become.
At the same time, people started recognizing her on the street when she was around 13 years old. It did not matter what color her hair was — she first dyed it red, then blonde, and later returned to light brown. People still recognized her. She even recalled a moment when someone recognized her while she was wearing a hat and a mask, only by looking at her eyes. This happened before the Olympics, when she was about 16 years old.
Trusova said she naturally felt that people were interested in her. However, her parents and coaches tried to control that feeling so she would not develop “star disease” — an inflated sense of self-importance. Looking back, she believes that she actually experienced it at the age of 16.
When she was training under Evgeni Plushenko, Trusova started feeling that she was better than others. She said that she no longer feels this way today.
She explained that it was more about feeling special rather than simply believing she was better than other athletes. At certain moments, she felt that she was allowed to do more than others because people knew her and she had a large audience.
Trusova said she trained alongside younger children and sometimes behaved improperly toward them because of that feeling. She could not remember a specific example, but admitted that this attitude sometimes affected her behavior.
