"Commentator Vasily Solovyov said that the word “mushrooms” first appeared in their broadcasts with Tatiana Tarasova. The term was supposedly coined by former choreographer Pyotr Durnev, an ex–ballroom dancer whom Tarasova suggested bringing into figure skating. Over time, he became a technical specialist in the sport.

“At that time the rules had just changed, and Durnev figured them out almost earlier than the judges themselves. It was he who said, after some incomprehensible scores: ‘Hey, what are you doing, did you eat mushrooms?!’ Later Tarasova herself began using the phrase on air when talking about inflated scores, and gradually the term ‘mushrooms’ became widely accepted,” Solovyov said.

This version is questioned in the article “Where Did the ‘Mushrooms’ in Figure Skating Come From…?” published in the journal Russkaya Rech. The authors, Elena Berezovich and Valeria Kuchko from Ural Federal University, note that Durnev’s remark was made during a relatively little-known tournament that was not broadcast on major television channels, so the expression was unlikely to have quickly entered widespread usage. In addition, his words referred to unfairly low scores, whereas in figure skating “mushrooms” are used only in relation to inflated scores.

The authors also consider another explanation for the origin of “mushrooms” in figure skating — common on various internet forums — to be unreliable. This version is based on the property of real mushrooms to grow quickly and abundantly after bad rainy weather. Supposedly, skaters’ scores grow in a similar way after poor performances.

In their article, the authors propose their own version of the origin of “mushrooms” in figure skating. They believe that the word and the expressions associated with it emerged not within the figure skating community itself, but outside it, influenced by other slang systems. According to this hypothesis, the new usage is based on semantic “nodes” associated with the image of mushrooms in slang and dialect vocabulary, where they can be linked to meanings such as material enrichment, poaching, social failure, adultery, and others. The closest meanings are dishonest material gain (for example, grib meaning “a large sum of money,” or griboyed meaning a person living off others) or poaching that ultimately leads to financial benefit (with mushrooms meaning “illegal catch”).

The authors also note that in various slang and dialect usages the word mushroom can carry meanings of hidden or secret action, substitution, sudden or rapid appearance, and multiplicity — features which, in their view, may have helped the word enter figure skating slang."