Tatiana Tarasova

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Tarasova coaching Sasha Cohen in 2003.

Tatiana Anatolyevna Tarasova (Russian: Татьяна Анатольевна Тарасова) (born February 13, 1947) is a Russian figure skating coach who has coached more world and Olympic champions than any other coach in the world. As of 2003, her students have won a combined 41 gold medals at the European and World championships. As of 2005, her students have won a combined 8 Olympic gold medals in three of the four Olympic figure skating disciplines.

Tatiana was the daughter of Anatoly Tarasov, often cited as the greatest hockey coach in the history of the game. Her father introduced her to figure skating at the age of 5. She competed in pair skating with Aleksandr Gorelik and later Georgi Proskurin. With Proskurin, she placed as high as 7th at the 1965 World Figure Skating Championships and 4th at the 1966 European Figure Skating Championships.^[1]

After suffering a career-ending injury, she had to quit skating. She was just 18 at the time. A year later, due to her father's insistence, she started coaching herself. Her students have included Irina Rodnina, Alexei Yagudin, Ilia Kulik, Natalia Bestemianova, Marina Klimova, Sasha Cohen, Johnny Weir, Shizuka Arakawa, Oksana Grishuk, Shae-Lynn Bourne, and Barbara Fusar-Poli, among others.

For more than 25 years, Tarasova has been married to Vladimir Krainev, a world-class pianist who resides in Hanover. In the mid-1990s, she launched a hugely successful ice ballet show called Russian All-Stars.

Tarasova was awarded Order of Friendship of Peoples (1984). ^[2]