A wide circle of sports fans does not know the name of the figure skater Yulia Lautova well because of the lack of significant titles and victories at major international tournaments. However, for more than ten years she was the first number of the Austrian national team, skated beautifully and fell in love with many lovers of female figure skating. For several years, Julia was the wife of a more famous athlete - Olympic champion in ice dancing Roman Kostomarov.
The beginning of the way
Julia Lautova was born in Moscow in 1981. With four years, the girl began to engage in figure skating. The physical characteristics of Julia made it possible to hope that she would make a good loner, and she worked hard at the rink for several hours a day. The first coach in the sports biography of Yulia Lautova was Elena Tchaikovskaya, a legendary Russian specialist, an honored trainer of the USSR. Later, the girl moved to the group of Marina Kudryavtseva, on whose account there were such pupils as Elena Sokolova, Ivan Bariev, Alexander Uspensky.
Socio-economic disasters in Russia in the early nineties forced the parents of Julia Lautova to pack things and emigrate abroad as soon as possible. So at the age of twelve, Julia was in Austria, where she continued to engage in figure skating.
However, local experts were not as strong as Russian ones, so at the first opportunity the girl returned to Moscow, where she continued to work with Marina Kudryavtseva with an Austrian passport in her pocket.
Big Ice Debut
Despite the fact that in Russia, Julia Lautova did not stand out so much among the other skaters, in Austria she was head and shoulders superior to local athletes. Having made her debut in the national championship at the age of thirteen, she easily won a gold medal and confidently maintained the position of the first number of the team throughout her career.
Julia Lautova early enough began to speak at major international tournaments. At the adult world championships in 1995, she made her debut at the age of fourteen. At that time, there was still no age barrier, according to which girls were not allowed to play in adult tournaments before the age of fifteen.
Julia successfully passed the qualification selection and earned the right to perform in the short program. Here, the lack of experience already affected, and the Austrian girl did not go into the free program, taking the final 27th place.
The most successful for her was the 1997 World Cup. Julia Lautova took 11th place in the short program, and then shocked everyone, brilliantly skating her free speech, which the judges rated quite highly. According to the results of the entire tournament, the girl took eighth place, which was her highest achievement for many years to come.
Trophies and defeats
After the successful performance of his young athlete at the 1997 World Cup, Austrian figure skating fans hoped that Yulia Lautova’s future career would continue to develop in an upward direction. However, after completion of the inevitable restructuring of the youthful organism, Julia was not able to maintain her former flexibility and plasticity.
She still slid pretty well on the ice, even pulled up her choreography, her skating became more adult, feminine, but Julia failed to make a qualitative leap in technical terms. The best skaters of the planet with each performance complicated their program, introduced cascades with triple jumps, while Julia could hardly make a single triple. So she performed, alternating between failed performances and relatively successful ones. There were times when she could not even qualify for a free program at major tournaments.
Nevertheless, on the account of Julia Lautova there are several significant trophies. Twice she won the Karl Schaeffer Memorial in Austria, took awards at the Ondrei Nepel Memorial.
However, the biggest success for her was a silver medal at the Grand Prix stage in St. Petersburg in 1997. Julia lost only to the mistress of ice - Irina Slutskaya, and, according to many witnesses of those events, Julia Lautova that evening deserved to win. Slutskaya skated unsuccessfully, fell all the time, but the judges pulled the mistress of the tournament to victory.
She finished her sports career as a native of Moscow in 2004, having noted herself as a successful performance at the European Championship, where she entered the top ten.
