Honored Master of Sports, 4-time world champion and 5-time European champion in ice dancing, the famous figure skater Natalya Filimonovna Bestemyanova was born on January 6, 1960 in Moscow. Her parents had nothing to do with sports: her father worked as a teacher, her mother looked after the household and raised the children.
5-year-old Natalya got into the figure skating section by accident. The future figure skater had a tumor removed under her knee, which caused the girl to limp. And the doctors advised taking her to some sport to strengthen her muscles. Natalia’s mother chose figure skating. The young athlete’s success on the ice was such that it almost immediately became clear that Bestemyanov had a great future in sports. This was the opinion of her first coach, Antonina Kartseva.
At the age of 15, Bestemyanova joined the group of the honored coach of the RSFSR Eduard Pliner, won the USSR Junior Championship and the 1976 USSR Cup in single skating and was included in the national team. In 1977 she began ice dancing.
After graduating from school, Natalya Bestemyanova became a student at the Moscow Institute of Physical Education, then graduated from GITIS and received a diploma as a figure skating choreographer.
The promising athlete was invited on a tour of the cities of Siberia. She presented her program to Alla Pugacheva’s composition “Harlequin”. After another brilliant performance, the famous coach Tatyana Tarasova drew attention to Natalya Bestemyanova and invited her to join her pair dance group.
Natalya Bestemyanova, Andrey Bukin and Tatyana Tarasova at a training session. 1984 Photo: RIA Novosti/Dmitry Donskoy
This is how the couple Natalya Bestemyanova and Andrey Bukin came to be. After the athletes “skated”, they began to show quite good results in competitions: they won bronze medals in the Soviet Union Championship and took third place in the World Championship. In 1982, the couple won the national championship, and they also received the main prize established by the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. The following year, the skaters became European champions for the first time. In 1984, the couple went to the Olympics in Sarajevo, where they managed to win silver, losing only to a couple from Great Britain.
Over the next four years, while preparations were underway for the new Olympics, Natalya Bestemyanova and Andrei Bukin did not lose a single world championship and brought gold four times. As a result, in 1988 they became winners of the Olympic Games in Calgary (Canada). By that time, the whole world already knew and loved them.
It’s not for nothing that the Bestemyanova-Bukin couple is called one of the best dance duets in the history of figure skating. They looked very harmonious on the ice – the tall and stately Andrei and the swift, graceful “red-haired beast,” as her fans called her, Natalya, invariably amazed the audience with excellent technique, bright emotionality, high speed and ideal “dancing.” The duo’s most famous productions were numbers that perfectly reflected the athletes’ temperament: “Carmen”, “Russian Fair”, “Polovtsian Dances”.
Bestemyanova and Bukin looked so good together that fans of the couple had no doubt that they had a romantic relationship in life. Although this was not the case. Andrei Bukin was happily married, and Natalya’s heart belonged to someone else. At first sight and for the rest of her life, the athlete fell in love with the European champion, Honored Master of Sports of the USSR Igor Bobrin. The young people got married in 1983 and have been together for more than 40 years.
In addition to his career as a professional athlete, Igor Bobrin was also the artistic director of the Ice Miniature Theater. It was there that Natalya Bestemyanova went to work as a coach when she graduated from big-time sports. In 2006, she took the position of general director of the Theater. Also, Natalya Filimonovna, as a coach and as a judge, has repeatedly participated in television shows (Russian and foreign) dedicated to figure skating.
Natalya Bestemyanova and Igor Bobrin. Photo: RIA Novosti/Ilya Pitalev
Andrey Bukin, Natalya Bestemyanova and Igor Bobrin have maintained wonderful friendly relations, which is not only very rare in sports, but also in life. Together they have repeatedly staged programs for the world’s leading skaters.
Natalya Filimonovna is still full of energy, fire, and enthusiasm. She is in great shape. The figure skater is not going to say goodbye to the sport – she goes on tour, participates in various projects and, perhaps most importantly, continues to raise new generations of skaters.
Source: rodina-history.ru
