Minerva-Fabienne Hase can sometimes hardly believe the smooth journey she is on with her new pair skating partner Nikita Wolodin. “I’m a little surprised myself at how well our season is going so far,” she says, looking back at what seems like an incredible shared success story, temporarily crowned by first place in the Grand Prix final of the world’s best figure skating pairs in Beijing around a week ago.
In the place where the 24-year-old Berliner has terrible memories. There she and her former partner Nolan Seegert were stranded in last place at the 2022 Winter Olympics. No wonder, since her companion had to spend days in the harsh Chinese quarantine after a corona infection before he was cleared to go to the Olympic Games on shaky legs and could hardly walk due to weakness
A few months later, the couple separated in the shadow of Olympic high-flyers and gold medalists Savchenko/Massot. Seegert ended his career after three German championships and two fifth places at European and World Championships. But Minerva Hase was looking for a new partner for more years on the world’s ice rinks.
Tinkered from town to town
Her well-connected Russian head coach Dimitri Savin, who lives in Sochi and runs a pairs skating school there, found him in Saint Petersburg. Apparently a Russian figure skating journalist had made Nikita Volodin’s attention, who was not particularly successful as a pair skater in Russia with four partners, Sawin contacted the pair skater from the second row of his guild, who was active in an ice show.
There, Volodin traveled from city to city in Russia alongside Yuko Kawaguti, the Japanese-born, former European pair skating champion (2010/2015) together with Alexander Smirnov. This had the advantage that the athlete and esthete Volodin, who competed in his last competition for the time being in 2019, stayed fit enough alongside his prominent partner to get back into the competitive sport of figure skating.
Successful: the new couple Minerva-Fabienne Hase and Nikita Wolodin: Image: dpa
And voilà: Since October 2022, the new German-Russian combination Hase/Volodin has been preparing for the day on which the Russian figure skating association released its former junior squad skater under the guidance of Sawin, who is often connected via Facetime, and with the help of a Berlin coaching group under the proven pair skating coach Knut Schubert for the German Ice Skating Union.
They had to do some convincing with the German Olympic Sports Confederation and the Federal Ministry of the Interior in order to be able to integrate Volodin into the German sports system because of the war of aggression against Ukraine launched by Russia in 2022. In May of this year, Wolodin received the notification that he could travel to Germany with his new companion.
And then a fairytale success story began with six wins in seven competitions. At the German championships in Berlin at the weekend, the couple, who were quickly received by the audience and ranked high up by the judges straight away, won in their laps due to a lack of competition, so that Hase/Volodin were able to compete after three competitions in four weeks despite a minor cold that had not yet fully recovered The runner and her partner, who had just recovered from a severe cold, were able to save some of their difficulties for the European Championships in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas at the beginning of January.
“But we weren’t beginners”
“It’s super easy to train with Nikita,” says Minerva Hase about her congenial partner and praises his “confidence, calm and charisma”. In short: Volodin exudes the aura of a natural winner. Because two athletes with the highest ambitions got along right away, the Hase/Volodin combination was able to practice the most difficult throws and jumps with and next to each other after just five days of training.
A comment from Christoph Becker Published/Updated: Recommendations: 76 Christoph Becker Published/Updated: Recommendations: 3 Anno Hecker Published/Updated: Recommendations: 5
“We were only on the ice together for a short time, but that doesn’t mean we were beginners,” says Wolodin, looking back at the promising start. The Hase/Volodin pair are now one of the hand-picked contenders for the title at the 2024 European and World Championships in Montreal. Your triumph in Beijing acts like a beacon.
The big question that still remains is whether the dream of the 2026 Olympics in Milan will come true. To do this, the Russian, who will soon be given a residence permit, needs a German passport, which he must speak sufficient German to acquire. The qualified sports teacher, blessed with a recognizable touch of humor, will work diligently on this with a German teacher after the end of his first exciting season alongside the Bundeswehr soldier and psychology student Minerva Hase.
With the ambition blazing in him not only to enter the big stage of figure skating, but also to internalize Germany with everything that a stranger who wants to feel at home here has to offer, he can be trusted to make this integrative learning progress. Here and there he has already been confronted with critical questions about the Russian war against Ukraine.
As a precaution, Volodin’s partner says when asked about the sensitive topic: “When questions come up about politics, we try not to talk about it. We are not here to represent or represent anything politically. We are here because we love figure skating.” In troubled times, as Minerva Hase also knows, it is not so easy to completely separate one from the other. It may be that Nikita Wolodin still conquers the hearts of Germans with his charm and chutzpah. It’s a matter of time for him to find a suitable answer.
