Imagine working for something you want so much that you’ve dedicated your entire life to it. Picture what it’s like to try to live up to the standards set by your parents, world champions in your sport, and achieve results similar to theirs. Also, picture what it’s like to be closer than you’ve ever been to your ultimate goal, and even though you’ve come so far, your rise to the top is only beginning
This is the life of Maxim Naumov, a 19-year-old figure skater living and training in Norwood, Massachusetts who is rising up the national and international senior ranks. With the 2022 Winter Olympic Games set to take place this coming February, Naumov knows it will be a tough task to qualify as one of the top US men, but he’s not quite ruling it out.
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| Max with his parents, Genia and Vadim. |
He’s not the only one dreaming of his success. Max’s parents and coaches, Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, are the 1994 World Champions in pair skating, as well as five-time European medalists and two-time Olympians. Since they were already incredibly accomplished skaters, it was only natural that they had Max start skating at the age of three. When he didn’t seem to show much interest at first, his parents decided not to pursue it for a little while. When he was 5, he began skating again, and more often.
“I was already at the rink all day anyway, because my parents were there, so my parents thought ‘Let’s just get him started,’” said Max.
At that age, his parents made skating fun for him by creating new games and challenges for him. Still, as he began to grow up, he began to understand what it was like to be the son and student of World Champion skaters.
While his parents had a clear vision of what it would take to be a world-class athlete, young Max hadn’t quite grasped what all the work was being done for. “When your parents are your coaches, especially when you get to the top, they know every single step that needs to happen in order for that to happen. When they see a certain step not being done, that obviously makes them feel some type of way, you know?”
Another challenge of being coached by his parents was the struggle to escape whatever happened in the rink each day. If Max didn’t have a good session that afternoon and his parents weren’t happy with him, coming home and forgetting the events of that day was not an easy task.
With so much of his time and energy being devoted to skating at such a young age, Max didn’t understand how such a huge commitment could be worth it. Now, as one of the top-five skaters in the men’s division in the United States, he sees what his years of work are beginning to lead up to. “I’ve grown up now and realized what all that meant. All that strictness and toughness, I wouldn’t give that away for anything.”
But where did this change of mindset come from? How did the aspirations Max’s parents had for him suddenly become his own?
In 2018, after earning a bronze medal at the US championships at the junior level, Max underwent surgery for a lingering injury he sustained in a Swiss summer training camp in 2016. This was one of four surgeries Naumov had for the same injury, a chip in his navicular bone, and unfortunately, this surgery would take him out of the following competitive season.
Max had a long road of recovery ahead of him, but missing a season did give him plenty of time to get back to his former state. Itt also provided him with the chance to completely rethink his athletic career path. This was the point at which Max began to explore the idea of competing in pairs.
It wasn’t too crazy of a thought. He was, of course, the son of a world champion pair, and since the impact of doing triple flips and lutzes aggravated his injury, he could still rely on less difficult triples, mainly the salchow and toe loop, in order to be successful.
At the time, he and his training partner struggled to get sufficient time to practice together with their conflicting schedules. As a result, Vadim encouraged his son to continue working on his singles skating. From there, Max continued to work on the skills he had been trying in previous seasons, such as flips, lutzes, triple-triples, and eventually, the elusive triple axel.
Max had felt confident with this new training mindset. He was working to develop skills that could be needed down the road, instead of stressing over a quickly approaching competition. He even signed up to compete at the 2019 Lake Placid Summer Figure Skating Championships, mainly for fun, but after a solid showing that week, his scores immediately qualified him to be named to US Figure Skating’s International Selection Pool. Suddenly, he had a clear path to continue doing singles.
“Going into that year, [I had] no expectations,” said Max. “It was very low expectation at first, because I was thinking about pairs. It’s very interesting how that happened, but I guess that’s what I needed. I needed to just kind of not be so hard on myself for a little bit, because I was still upset about the injury year and the not so good year before that. I just guess I needed to have a little low pressure so I could just do me, you know?”
From there, Max continued to work toward getting his hardest jumps into his programs, and as the season went on, his results only got better and better. He returned to the ISU Junior Grand Prix Series that August with a top 10 finish, and soon became the Eastern Sectional and US National Junior Mens Champion. He attributes this success to his commitment to the detailed plan he set with his dad for the season, as well as putting effort into visualizing his success at each event.
After becoming the US Junior Men’s Champion that January of 2020, Max was assigned to the junior world team. At that point, since his experience on the international stage was relatively low, his main goal was to have a strong showing, and perhaps finish in the top ten overall. His expectations weren’t outrageous, as he knew he’d be competing against the top junior men in the world.
“Honestly, I felt like I didn’t belong at first. I knew I had earned my spot and everything, but it was just a whole nother game.”
While Max did struggle with his confidence at the beginning of that week, A nearly flawless performance of his short program put him right where he had hoped to be, tenth place after the first of two competition days. In his free skate, he landed every one of his jumps flawlessly, boosting himself up to a fifth-place in his junior world debut. Needless to say, it was a pretty big deal.
After that competition, Max began to realize the potential he had as a skater, and the level of success that his parents reached could be something he can achieve too. From that moment forward, the goal to replicate the legacy his parents left was his to own.
Following that season, Max moved up to the senior level, competing against some of the biggest names in the sport of figure skating, such as the three-time world champion, Nathan Chen. Max made his Senior Grand Prix debut at 2020 Skate America, placing a respectable eighth in a strong, mostly domestic field. The following January, Max impressed even more with his strongest competition to date, the national championships. With no mistakes across his two performances, he finished fifth, even without attempting the quadruple jumps that many of his competitors tried.
After the national championships, Max got right back to work preparing for the new season. Since the national championships, he worked tirelessly on landing quadruple jumps for the first time in order to get ahead of his competition. After landing both the quad salchow and toe in practice over the spring, his new challenge became to land a quad in competition. At the Colonial Open in early June, it only took him thirty seconds into his first competition of the summer to complete this achievement. He opened his short program with a quad salchow, earning positive grades of execution from every judge.
With the upcoming Olympic season, skaters around the world are trying their best to prepare to earn a spot to compete on the world’s biggest athletic stage. For Max, while he would love to be on that U.S. Olympic team, he knows that he is facing stiff competition from his American rivals. The Olympics may remain in the back of his mind, but what he’s looking forward to most is working to be better than he was last season.
“Our main goal, basically, is just to improve off of everything last year. That’s always been our goal, year to year,” said Max.
Training alongside Max and seeing him accomplish everything he works so hard for in practice is such an honor and a pleasure. I learned so much about how he grew up and his struggles with his injury, and I hope you did too.
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