Remi Korchemny: The Art of Coaching
by M. Nicole Nazzaro
Winter 2002
In Russian the word is inzhenir - “engineer.” In an earlier era, it was the ubiquitous career choice of all who were part of the Soviet Union’s great effort not only to modernize the world, but to be the international leader in all things buildable, all things improvable. If you have Russian friends over the age of 40, chances are they were trained as engineers. Chances are also pretty good that they’ve got a side business tucked away somewhere in their city flats these days, now that the world’s economy has moved from one driven by the production heavy machinery and an unlimited output of bricks, mortar and steel to one of technology, trade and the Internet.
But when you know how to build something, when you know how something really works from the inside out, you can improve upon it. Witness the work of Remi Korchemny (pronounced “REH-mee car-CHEM-nee”). He’s a native of Ukraine and a longtime resident of the United States, a Soviet-trained engineer who started his career designing metal press machines. That inauspicious first job lasted all of three months. For fifty years he’s been building sprinters the way the Soviets used to build factories. Except that Korchemny’s sprinters are a whole lot more efficient. And a whole lot more successful.
Among his stable of athletes are a host of world-beaters and five Olympic medalists. The most celebrated might be his first: Valery Borzov of Ukraine, who ran for the Soviet Union in 1972 and 1976, and brought home double gold in the '72 100-meter and 200-meter races, as well as a silver in the 4x400-meter relay. Korchemny’s most recent stars include Americans Chryste Gaines (gold in the 4x100-meter relay in the 1996 Olympics, bronze in 2000) and Alvin Harrison (gold in the 4x400-meter relay in 2000). His most inspiring athlete might be someone you’ve probably never heard of: John Register, an amputee who won the 2000 Paralympics long jump silver medal. Korchemny also coached Grace Jackson, Jamaica’s 200m silver medalist at the Seoul Olympics. And his biggest 2002 success story is the current European champion at 100 meters and the co-European record holder in the event: Dwain Chambers of Great Britain.
Yes, it has been quite a fifty years for Remi Korchemny.
His first name is actually “Rem,” which neither sounds Russian nor really is. It’s a made-up name, a fancy takeoff on Lenin’s rhetoric during the heyday of the Soviet five-year plans. Loosely translated, the words that make up the acronym stand for “revolutionary electrifying peace” (“revoliutsionnii elektrifikatsii mir”). Russians love playing with language, and they especially love their diminuitives. In their tongue, “vodka” often becomes “vodichka,” a woman named “Maria” becomes “Mashenka,” and so on. So Rem Korchemny, named for the glory of a Soviet system he would far outlive, became Remi.
Every track fan knows the names Chryste Gaines and Alvin Harrison. But you have to be pretty close to the action in elite track and field to recognize the name Remi Korchemny. His story is one of teaching, learning, setting carefully-measured goals, and ultimately reaching them. As both Dwain Chambers and John Register have said, in order to be the best you have to train with the best. And they would no doubt agree that when it comes to the art of sprinting, the best is Remi Korchemny.
First Impressions
Korchemny doesn’t necessarily attract the glitter of the spotlight that shines so brightly on many of his athletes. He is a modest man, slim and healthy with an easy smile, looking slightly younger than his 70 years. It’s possible to look right past him, not realizing the amount of track and field history he carries, the victories and defeats he remembers, and the coaching skill he embodies.
That made it all the more special when, during this year’s US Outdoor national track and field championships, one hundred fifty people came together to honor him. The venue wasn’t a track stadium or a press conference. It was the banquet room at a South San Francisco steakhouse on the evening of June 23, 2002. It was Remi’s 70th birthday. He had invited students past and present, coaches and agents, and, as one of his athletes would later tell me, “everybody who was anybody in track and field,” to party with him.
At elegant round tables circling a dance floor and a band playing on stage, Korchemny proteges Gaines, Harrison, and U.S. 200-meter star Kelli White joined U.S. 1500-meter champion Regina Jacobs, Olympic gold medalist Gail Devers, and many others. Track suits discarded, they were dressed to the nines to honor Korchemny. The man himself wore a smartly tailored suit and a warm smile as he moved from table to table, greeting his guests. Later in the evening, he would be presented with a plaque from his athletes deeming him “The Greatest Track Coach of All Time.”
“It was fun,” he told me later. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen every day.”
Coaching Prowess
A few days later I arrived at Remi’s Castro Valley, CA home at 9:30 pm. It may have been late by American standards, but not by the rules of his Ukrainian heritage, where conversations over tea and cookies - or vodka and playing cards - can last well into the night. He led me upstairs to a sparsely-furnished room with a desk in the corner and bookshelves lining the walls. “This is where I work,” he said.
The room held simple reminders of a lifetime spent teaching athletes. Mementos from his days as a Soviet team coach, such as the gold medal inscribed “Trainer of a Champion of the USSR” on a red ribbon, with “Korchemny 1974” neatly hand-engraved on the back, sat on a bookshelf. A framed magazine cover of Valery Borzov hung on the wall. A small Soviet identification card proclaiming Korchemny a zasluzhenyi treiner (“distinguished coach”) was perched next to track and field coaching manuals. And above the sofa hung a full-color 8x10 photograph of a smiling Chryste Gaines and the women of the United States 4x100 relay team in Atlanta with their Olympic gold medals hanging around their necks.
Two computers, sitting at a 90-degree angle to one another, occupied most of the surface space of a desk pushed up against a window. One, the desktop computer, held files for the annual training programs Remi designs for his athletes. He opened up Gaines’s file for 2002. Every single one of her workouts for the coming year was spelled out neatly in one document, with past performances and future goals mapped out next to each other as surely as an engineer’s blueprint.
The other computer, a Sony Vaio laptop, was plugged into a small video camera. By filming Gaines’s starts in practice, Korchemny could analyze exactly what she was doing biomechanically to propel herself forward. “Look - this is the position of the start,” he told me. “Then leaving the blocks, look at the position of the body, the movement of the body.” Korchemny counts his athletes’ paces, marking the amount of time it takes to cover the first four steps of the race. The knee position as one leg hits the ground, the relationship between the heel of one foot and the opposite knee - all of it gives a completely quantitative visual picture of just how efficiently the athlete is running.
John Register tells a funny story about this coaching technique of Remi’s. “Chryste and I were in the room, and [Remi] pulled his videocamera out, and he said ‘John, tell me what’s wrong with this picture.’” Here Register laughed. “And I look at it, and Chryste’s right there [in the room]! I said, ‘Well, her heel’s rising up too fast towards her butt, she’s not getting forward propulsion.’ And he said [to Chryste], ‘See! I’m not stupid, you’re the one who’s stupid!’ He’s very direct. ‘Do it right, do it again!’ It’s never to belittle you. It’s always to realize your full potential, and get you to realize your full potential.”
Gaines is even more succinct about Remi’s penchant for the videocamera - and for telling his elite athletes exactly what he thinks. “If I ran 10.48 [for 100 meters],” she says dryly, “Remi would still have something to say about it.”
My second visit to Remi’s home comes after he has returned from supervising his athletes during the 2002 European outdoor season. The season’s highlight: Dwain Chambers’s European record 100-meter race at the Paris IAAF Golden League finals. His 9.87 ties Linford Christie’s 1993 mark and is a personal best by 0.09 of a second. Chambers is the first athlete Korchemny has coached under the 10.0 barrier. But even then, in the world Remi has constructed to reach the ultimate level of success, there is room for improvement. He pulls out that little video camera once again and proceeds to analyze Chambers’s record-tying run, frame by frame.
“See - here!” he points out. “Look at his leg. He is not striking the ground at the right angle. And here!” Now he fast-forwards to the last moments of the race. “He did not finish!” What Remi means is that Chambers didn’t lean forward at the finish line, instead running straight through it, Michael Johnson-style. The United States’s Tim Montgomery, who would win the race in world-record time, did the same thing. “That finish - that’s three one-hundredths of a second right there,” Remi says to me. “So his best time should be 9.84 or 9.85!”
Like the best engineers, Korchemny sees both the long road - the perfect design that will lead to large gains, great successes - and the never-ending series of small, incremental improvements that are necessary to reach that goal. And it can drive his athletes crazy.
“I know when I go out there [to California] to see Remi, I gotta be in shape!” Register says with a laugh. “So that’s the motivation! That’s right - you better be ready to work. Remi commands respect.”
Gaines talks about Remi’s workouts with such disdain that you can hardly believe they get along at all - but for them, it’s the give-and-take between their strong personalities that makes the partnership such a successful one.
“I’m thirty-two, and Remi trains a lot of young athletes,” Gaines says. “I can’t do some of the things they do, because I don’t need to. I’ve got experience and my body’s worked out at this level years more than they have. So, I probably need more rest than the average 24, 25 year old. I feel like I need to have more quality and less quantity, and Remi feels the opposite!”
Register says that despite appearances, Gaines and Korchemny are a great match. “I love it, because they fight so much! And, you know, I think that’s what Chryste wants, and she needs. She needs somebody who’s gonna, you know, kick her in the pants every once in a while!”
The Children
And then there are his dieti (children).
They are the young high-school runners whom Remi teaches when he’s not chasing his elites around the world. If you want to get an idea of how to build an athlete from the ground up, just watch Remi put his greenest charges through a conditioning workout.
On a beautiful, warm October afternoon I climbed into the bleachers at the thoroughly modern track stadium at James Logan High School in Union City, CA. The weather was typical for the Bay Area at that time of year, but resembling the warmest of summer days for most of the rest of the country. Remi was pacing back and forth in the bleachers. He cut a very different figure than he did at his home. Standing in front of thirteen high school track athletes, he was dressed in a white T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. His face, hidden underneath a baseball cap, suggested a slightly aged Gilligan, from the popular 1970’s TV show.
And his voice suggested General Norman Schwarzkopf.
“Touch your toes!” Remi yelled, as the students stretched full-out on the bleachers. “Bring your left leg down and back!” He demonstrated a quadriceps stretch while lying on his back, pulling on his left ankle as his right leg stays extended on the bench. “Straight leg in front of you! Up! Up! Again! Lay down on your back!” The “R” sound in Russian is rolled heavily, and twenty-seven years of living in the United States have done nothing to dull Remi’s accent. “Right leg! Wrap your ankle!” A smattering of melodiously rolled “R’s” echoed throughout the bleachers as the teenagers tried, unsuccessfully, to keep from giggling while they stretched.
This track, located just a few miles from his home, is where Remi trains the young athletes who might someday become international icons, or who might simply have some talent for track and move on to other things later in life. Kelli White graduated from Logan High School in 1996; now she’s part of his stable of up-and-coming world class runners. At this year’s outdoor track nationals she copped a silver medal in the 200 meters behind Marion Jones, and a bronze in the 100 behind Jones and Gaines.
Another drill, this time with the students lying down on a bleacher. “Bridge up! Down!” He instructed the kids to thrust their hips in the air, keeping feet and shoulders on the bleacher. The inevitable laughs at the move came from two boys on adjacent bleachers at the end of a row. “Up! Down!” Remi yelled again, not missing a beat.
Then it was off to the stairway railing. A complicated stretch - placing the sole of one foot on the railing, then sliding it side to side. He walked the line of kids, fixing each athlete’s technique as he went along. He made his way to Kristina Davis, a bubbly, smiling fourteen-year-old wearing a fresh white T-shirt and sporting braces and neat cornrows. “You got it,” he said approvingly, and patted her on the shoulder. Her smile got even bigger. It was the first word of encouragement he had said to anyone in thirty minutes of stretching.
“We did good job. Come on.” Korchemny gestured to his charges, and they were off to the field for drills. The only image that came to mind as I watched them march off to the field, single-file, was that of a mother hen and her obedient ducklings. Korchemny was in charge here, and everybody knew it.
Remi is something of a track scout for this high school team, having worked with some of these kids before they even hit high school. On this day, one girl carried herself with the quiet, elegant confidence of a young Marion Jones. Korchemny gestured towards her as she ran her last drill of the day. “She has the potential to be an international star,” he said quietly. Then he smiled. “But don’t tell her!”
When I described the scene to Chryste Gaines a few weeks later, I could almost hear her clucking her tongue through the phone line. “Oh, it’s very different - Remi training [the high school kids] and Remi training us [his elites]. Just different in the things he says. They’re learning the stuff more, so, he’s probably telling them, ‘repeat this,’ ‘high up your leg,’ and all of that. With us, it’s a whole bunch of madness.”
So how did this wiry Ukrainian guy end up working with some of America’s greatest - and sassiest - sprint champions? How did he get tough enough to squire athletes from schoolkids to Olympians? Finally, after you’ve spent several months getting to know him, he opens up a bit more and begins to tell his story.
From Ukraine to America
Korchemny came to the United States in 1975. He was born in Odessa, a Ukrainian city located in the south of the country on the Black Sea. For all of Korchemny’s life there, Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union, and Soviet culture was decidedly Russian in cultural flavor. Remi’s Russian is native, while his English is consistently charming even when his accent carries a strong hint of his homeland. His father was Ukrainian, and his mother was Jewish (unlike in the West, Judaism is considered a nationality in Russia; the term “Russian Jew” is impossible to use in Russian). It was his mother’s status that helped him, years later, to gain entry to the United States. But it was the Stalinist purges of the 1930s that set the stage for what he would later become.
Sitting at his small kitchen table, daylight slowly turning into dusk reflected on the patio outside the window, Remi said that his parents had been loyal members of the Communist Party. They named him Rem - a moniker that should have demonstrated to Stalin that they were patriots, good Soviet soliders.
Then he paused. “But it did not stop my father from being executed in 1937 by Stalin’s secret police,” Remi said quietly.
His father worked near Vladivostok, a port city in Russia’s far eastern lands. He was charged with counter-revolutionary activities in a case of industrial sabotage. A shipment of materials had not been received on time, and in the insane world of Stalin’s Soviet Union, that meant the workers at the dock must have delayed the shipment purposely. Remi’s father was summarily shot alongside all of his colleagues. Remi was five years old.
His mother was told by Soviet officials to denounce her husband. She refused. She was imprisoned in a labor camp until 1941. Remi went to live with his grandparents. When Hitler’s army attacked the Soviet Union, female prisoners in Soviet labor camps were let go. Remi’s mother returned home even as Odessa was under fire.
“I don’t want to call them Germans,” Remi said of Hitler’s invading troops. “It is not the German people” who invaded Ukraine, he said. “[Hitler] brainwashed people the way Stalin brainwashed our people. It was Fascism.” Remi went to Soviet Georgia to wait out the war.
“Of course I was from a poor family,” he said. “My mother worked fourteen hours a day. If you didn’t have special coupons, you could not get sugar or bread.” He would race other boys for sandwiches. It was the beginning of his athletic career. “All my education I got on the street,” Remi said of this time in his life. “It was how I learned to be independent and make decisions. In sport especially, it is very important that a coach can make decisions and stay with that decision.”
In 1952 he got a degree in mechanical engineering. He worked as a metal-cutting machine designer until he realized he had no talent for the field. “I decide I can do nothing!” he said. So he negotiated a deal with the army to coach the track team, and they drafted him. He was twenty years old. He would go on to earn a Ph.D. in exercise physiology at a sports institute in Leningrad.
“I was born to be a teacher rather than an engineer,” he said simply.
The Munich Olympia-Stadion
A journey of fifty years may begin with a single step, but a journey like the one Korchemny has traveled cannot possibly be distilled into a single narrative. There is simply too much that happens in a person’s life, too much texture, too many successes and failures, and too many highs and lows and mundane middles, to trace a single, defining path.
But one great track stadium does have a story to tell about the greatness of Remi Korchemny. It is Munich’s Olympia-Stadion, host of the 1972 Summer Olympic Games and the 2002 European track and field championships. Two athletes, Valery Borzov and Dwain Chambers, are the players. And Korchemny is the link that bonds them.
But it’s a complicated link. You first sense it when Korchemny confides to you that he’s nervous about being profiled in a track magazine. Not because he might think there isn’t all that much to talk about. But Korchemny is afraid that we’re going to lionize him for one of the greatest sprint performances of all time - that of the Soviet Union’s Borzov, who won Olympic gold in the 100-meter and 200-meter races in 1972, as well as silver in the 4x400-meter relay. They are the victories for which Korchemny is most often credited in the press. And, he says, they are victories for which he is barely responsible. “I was not [Borzov’s] main coach,” Korchemny told me. Instead, he clarified, he worked with Borzov when he was a junior athlete, before he became an Olympic-caliber sprinter.
Then, he smiled and moved over to Russian, where he is every bit as sincere but far more comfortable when telling stories. “For his victory, I am only responsible for ten to fifteen percent,” Korchemny said. (John Register would later tell me with a laugh, “Ah, I think it was more than fifteen percent!”)
Korchemny was in Munich as a vsyepomogatel’nyi treiner (support coach) for the Soviet sprint and relay teams. Borzov was there to make history. Never before had a European won the 100/200 double. American stars Eddie Hart and Rey Robinson missed their 100-meter quarterfinal when coach Stan Wright got them to the track late, using a months-old schedule that had since been amended. But according to Track and Field News, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. In its Olympic preview issue in August, four out of six of the magazine’s expert predictors named Borzov, the two-time European champion at the distance, as the race favorite. In the Olympic results issue a month later, Jim Dunaway wrote “The presence of Hart and Robinson in the final might have made a difference, but probably not in the name of the gold medalist. One must believe this 6-0 175-lb. Soviet when he says, ‘I gave 90% of what I had to give,’ and believe that the other 10% would have been more than enough to handle any other finalist he might have faced.”
Remi wears an entirely genuine air of modesty when discussing Borzov’s achievement. “I am happy that Borzov gives me credit, and we remain on very good terms to this day, but…” He smiles again as his voice trails off, and you sense that he sincerely hopes you will set the record straight. “I would say that personally I did not prepare Borzov to win Olympic gold,” Remi says. “If people ask me my achievement in working with Borzov, I would say I did not destroy him!”
The Olympia-Stadion was also home this year to Dwain Chambers’s greatest victory - the 100-meter title at the European outdoor championships. And again, Korchemny insists that he is not responsible for all that much. Chambers’s main coach is Britain’s Mike McFarlane. Korchemny was approached by Chambers’s agent last year; at the time, Chambers had not improved in the 100 in two years. The agent asked Remi if he thought Chambers could improve. He said yes. “And I was asked to take responsibility for his preparation” for the 2002 season, Remi said.
“I cannot say that I developed Dwain,” Remi added. “I just channeled his development in the proper direction.” Chambers came to California to train with Remi during the winter, and Remi went to London. “Now he starts to accelerate much better,” Remi said. “He starts to fold his leg much better.” As for the astonishing improvement Chambers experienced in less than a year’s time, Remi is philosophical. “It’s one expression of talented people if they can improve a lot, not gradually. In the sprints, you have to make big jumps [in progress].”
Again, a barrier goes down, and Remi confides more of his own experience. “I don’t know any great sprinter who improved gradually. I ran 11.4, 11.6…then suddenly in one season, I was running 10.8. Then I got down to 10.4.” I was stunned. Borzov had won his 1972 gold medal in a time of 10.0, when Remi was already forty years old. It had taken three interviews and four months for Remi to tell me that he himself had been a world-class sprinter in his day.
It may be part of the Russian philosophy towards athletics. In some ways it’s a very big deal when an athlete does well at the Olympics - but in another respect, the athlete simply learns to honor his or her talent, and then move on to other things when competition life is over. Remi knows how good he is. But he doesn’t tell you unless you ask. Of course Borzov’s achievement was a big deal in the Soviet Union, Remi said. It was an opportunity for Soviets to feel as though they had created a system that was superior to America. But Remi doesn’t wear Borzov’s achievement as his own. He uses it instead to explain his respect for the centralized system that created Borzov and athletes like him.
“I strongly believe that system for sports selection and sports training was much superior,” he said. “Everything was centralized so the best coaches could contact the best athletes. The majority of coaches in the United States don’t have coaching education.” It is the opportunity to learn the best fundamentals at a young age that made the Soviet system so strong, Remi said.
And so two sprinters touched by the coaching magic of Remi Korchemny blasted to their greatest victories in Munich. The circle was completed amazingly at Europeans, when, as the London Daily Telegraph reported, it was Valery Borzov himself who handed Dwain Chambers his bouquet on the victory stand.
Chambers ended his season with his European record-tying run at the Paris IAAF Golden League final and a gold medal from Europeans around his neck. Remi went home with his video camera and started searching for the next three-hundredths of a second.
Remi quotes the Russian folk singer Vladimir Vyssotsky when asked what keeps him motivated. Vyssotsky’s trademark coarse, anguished voice communicated both tragedy and hope to the generations of Soviets who adored him. For Remi, he speaks of ambition better than anyone. The language is lyrical. Remi leans forward in his chair in his little office and recites it for me:
Luchshii gor mozhet byt’ tol’ko gori Tekh kotorii nikto ne byval.
The rough translation: “The best mountains are the ones nobody has yet been able to climb.”
As of this writing, Remi Korchemny is still climbing.
