How Sergei Polunin, Ballet’s Gifted Train Wreck, Turned Himself Around

“I was sort of sabotaging myself,” says the now-26-year-old – who became a Royal Ballet principal at 19 and got compared to Nureyev and even Nijinsky – of the turbulent period that saw him storm away from Covent Garden and later from Moscow’s Stanislavsky Theater, which took him in after he burned his London bridges. Then one YouTube video gradually changed everything.