Yana Ermaliuk

I’ve always liked challenge, ever since I was a child. My friend talked me into taking up break dance, and just like it always happens, she wound up giving up, while I got seriously hooked on downrock.

I used to do water polo, and even had some serious Olympic ambitions. I went all in, trained two times a day, spent hours reading special literature. I was 18 and so absorbed into sports that personal life just didn’t seem to exist for me.

Team sports help you to gain life skills that no individual sport could develop in you.

It’s the feeling of success that feeds this ambition to carry on.

When you keep on struggling to achieve something that you’re completely useless at simply because you’ve got no talent for it, — it must be some form of masochism.

Russians have always had their own idea of doing things. They might be a bit slow at the startup, but they catch up real quick. We drag feet for a long while, so that in the end we are left twenty-odd years behind everybody else, and then make this one rapid leap, and reach the world’s level in no time, although, always sticking with our own views, our own ways.

A white man will never be able to move in a way a black man can. The reason for it is certain physiological peculiarities, anatomical differences. This doesn’t, however, mean that there are no black people who couldn’t serve as the examples of remarkable stiff-as-a-pokerness (laughs).

I was offered a tremendous opportunity in France: a high-ranking position with Renault, traveling allowance, friends. But everyone felt alien to me there — they think and do things differently, so I came back.

I used to have this problem: I had always been “a bit boyish”. The thing is I was lacking some female wisdom. But that’s all left in the past now.

I can do anything! And if I don’t, I will learn!

I wanted to test myself and try to eat a maggot. Thank God, I couldn’t find a hideous thing like that in Moscow.

Of course, I do love my mom a lot, but somehow it’s always her who calls me at the most inappropriate moments. So you just take a deep breath and speak to her nicely to make her believe that everything’s fine. But if mom doesn’t call for a while, I start worrying, and it ruins my whole day.