KOLESNICHENKO Svetlana

General
ROMASHINA'S LITTLE SISTER
She considers her duet partner Svetlana Romashina to be a "big sister" to her and admires her ability to balance her artistic swimming commitments with motherhood. "Sveta was my first partner and mentor and 'big sister'. She encouraged me and helped me with advice. It's a real pleasure and great privilege to work with such an outstanding athlete and person. Just imagine, she has the same training loads as me but, while I'm ready to collapse from exhaustion after training in the pool, she is going home and starting to work again, as a mother. She is worth raising a monument to." (fina.org, 08 Apr 2020)

COMPETING IN SOLO
In 2017 she competed in solo at a world championships for the first time in Hungary, Budapest. She won golds in both the solo free and solo technical events but admitted that she found competing alone difficult. "At first it was a nightmare. Before Budapest, I thought that I would only be doing one solo programme, and the second one would be done by someone else. But the coaching staff decided that I needed to do two. Before that, I performed solo only in juniors, and I did not see myself as a soloist. Honestly, I even preferred not to see my solo programmes, nor to review them. But it was a great honour, and I had to justify such responsibility. And with these thoughts we began training. There was a lot to do and, looking at the video filmed at the beginning of the preparation, I just cried. I didn't understand how one could do all this. But thanks to Tatiana Danchenko's training everything turned out very well. I wasn't 100% satisfied with how I performed, but I rated myself as a four." (rsport.ria.ru, 13 Jul 2019)