Harley & Katya

"Harley & Katya" by Selina Miles is a feature-length documentary. It's a well-funded documentary (by Australian standards). It's a sports documentary on the surface, but it goes much further than that; it goes deep into the world of figure skating and into the culture of competition surrounding the sport.

Harley, from Blacktown in Sydney, is struggling to find a matched partner; his Russian-born coaches, experts in figure skating, find him a good fit, Katya. What follows is a journey that leads to Russia and around the world as the two of them, Harley and Katya climb the world rankings.

Both Harley and Katya knew nothing about each other's homelands, and when Katya decides to come to Australia to train, she is not sure if it is Austria or Australia. This is not a love story, but you will most likely fall in love with Harley and Katya, who quickly become a figure skating powerhouse.

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This documentary will not disappoint, even if you are not a fan of competitive ice skating.

The narrative is strong and interviews are well done and included with amazing footage of the pair training and competing. It also gives you a wonderful insight into the world of competitive ice skating in Australia and the battles the athletes have emotionally, physically and financially.

It is a wonderfully engaging documentary and I was fully captivated the whole time and sad to see it end.

It is also devastatingly sad to know what Katya was going through and what she had went through in her pursuit of excellence.

A definite must watch.

I have to confess, somewhat to my discredit, that I was completely unaware of this real-life sporting tragedy before I watched this feature-length documentary. I suspected a dark ending in advance but must admit, when it was eventually revealed, it still came as something of a shock.

It's the story of two talented, aspirational teenagers from completely different parts of the world, who coincidentally come together to share their mutual ambition to compete at the highest level in pairs ice-skating. He's Harley, Australian and when he meets her, 19 years of age. He has Aboriginal heritage and comes from what you'd probably call a poorish working-class background with no family links at all to the sport. She's Katya, Russian and only 16 years old but if anything she's even more ambitious than him. It's important to say there appears at no time to have been any romantic involvement between the two.

Paired together with a top Russian coach, they settle in Australia and quickly achieve early success in junior competitions and are thrust into adult meets, all the time aiming for the Winter Olympics, which they manage to achieve, probably before they're really ready. She then loses her father when he dies suddenly and now thousands of miles from any kind of family support, it's no surprise when she struggles with homesickness and loneliness, not to mention poverty as she's forced by circumstances to live in her coach's house, giving her no respite from the sport. Unsurprisingly, she develops mental health issues, turning to drink and reportedly a reckless lifestyle, sadly culminating in the shocking conclusion.

Told frankly by those who knew her, with many contributions from recordings available of her own voice, this is a sad tale of young talent being pushed too far with little thought about supporting her psychological state. We've recently seen examples of other top sportsmen, athletes and gymnasts (Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles immediately spring to mind) withdrawing from competition citing symptoms of stress and it's a pity to think that young Katya was too far down the food chain to qualify for any kind of medical or financial support.

As regards the telling of her story, I found it a little tricksy and flashy at times, unsuited for the seriousness of the subject matter, with overuse of jump cuts, overlapping speech and trivially putting up a kitchen notice board to indicate the couple's changing coaches as their career progresses. I also felt it could have looked more into the circumstances of Katya's demise, with no coverage of her funeral or of the investigation into how exactly she fell to her death. I did like her partner, Harley, a candid, down-to-earth Aussie, trying to go on with his career after enduring this heartbreak.

A cautionary tale of thwarted and possibly even exploited young sporting ambition leading to disillusionment, depression and worse, one suspects it won't be the last story of its kind to come to light in the future.

I knew nothing about this pair when I first started watching this documentary, I just liked ice skating and thought I'd give it a shot. Ultimately by the end I was absolutely heartbroken for them both. Let down and failed by the adults that should have been supporting them, they were used up and tossed away. The families were left holding the pieces together, and ultimately they didn't receive the support they needed either.

These kids, and their families deserved so much better. Katya deserved so much better.

I just hope that a lot has changed since this pair were in the spotlight, but I'm guessing it really hasn't.

7.0 stars.

As I meander through this very very sad documentary, I can only think to myself: what a crying shame. We take the lives of spectacular athletes for granted. These are people.

Katya had a lot of pressure in her life and apparently it was too much to handle. Add to this the fact that she had multiple organ problems and possibly alcohol induced epilepsy? From what I've read, alcohol induced epilepsy is just another way of saying: severe alcoholism. The way that she died... How she was alone in a cold place in a cold country, where she might have been under-appreciated... I've said this before, I repeat it: so many great athletes, politicians, celebrities, heroes, have died lonely and disillusioned by what they thought was a medical comrade..."na-zda-roh-vye?" Not so much.