Tatiana Tarasova

Tatiana Anatolyevna Tarasova (born 13 February 1947) is a Russian figure skating coach and national figure skating team adviser.

Tarasova has been coach to more world and Olympic champions than any other coach in skating history.

Her students have won a total of eight Olympic gold medals in three of the four Olympic figure skating disciplines, in addition to 41 gold medals at the European and World championships.

Tatiana Tarasova is the daughter of Anatoly Tarasov, a famed ice hockey coach, who introduced her to figure skating at the age of five.

They finished 7th at the 1965 World Championships and 4th at the 1966 European Championships.

At 18 years of age, Tarasova sustained a career-ending injury.

Tarasova started coaching at age 19, at her father's insistence.

Her most notable students have been Alexei Yagudin, Ilia Kulik, Natalia Bestemianova / Andrei Bukin, Oksana Grishuk / Evgeni Platov, Ekaterina Gordeeva / Sergei Grinkov, Marina Klimova / Sergey Ponomarenko, and Irina Rodnina / Alexander Zaitsev.

In the mid-1980s, Tarasova launched the Russian All-Stars, an ice ballet.

Tarasova was awarded Order of Friendship of Peoples (1984).

She lived for more than a decade in Simsbury, Connecticut before moving back to Russia in 2006.

She coached for ten years at Simsbury, Connecticut's International Skating Center before announcing her retirement from full-time coaching and moving back to Russia in 2006.

A notorious chain smoker, Tarasova was known for smoking cigarettes during her coaching sessions.

Her students have included:

Tarasova is assisted by choreographer Jeanetta Folle.

In March 2023, Tarasova lashed out at Canadian athletes who signed a petition calling for a continuation of the ban on Russian athletes amidst the Russo-Ukrainian War:

"We do not care if they don't want to see us. It always seemed to me that Canadians are a friendly, non-violent nation, they never showed themselves that way [negatively]. But here they can be understood – of course, they want to win, including in figure skating, at least something in [ice] dance. They don't need more competition. There is no other way to explain this statement. I don't want to believe that Tessa [Virtue] is an evil and unfair person. And I also think that we will participate in the [2026 Winter Olympic] Games."

In March 2008, she was inducted into the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame.

She is the widow of Vladimir Krainev, who died in April 2011.

Tarasova competed in pair skating with Aleksandr Tikhomirov and Georgi Proskurin.

With Proskurin, she was a two-time Soviet national medalist.