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Pavlova, Mustafina, Afanasyeva, Grishina - four Russian Champions!

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Some of the medallists from this weekend's Russian National Championships
The Russian National Championships drew to a close this weekend with gold medals for three of the best Russian gymnasts of the past five years, and one up and coming star, including 2008 Olympian Anna Pavlova (vault), 2010 World Champion Aliya Mustafina (bars), 2008 Olympian and 2011 World Floor Champion Ksenia Afanasyeva (beam) and first year senior Anastasia Grishina (floor).  Full results are available in Russian here.  All members of the 2011 World Championships team competing here (Komova and Nabieva were not) managed to secure a medal in these national championships.

Vault results were noticeably flat this week with only one national team member (Grishina) competing (Maria Paseka is in the reserve squad) in the final.  National team coach Alexander Alexandrov has commented on his team's performance on this apparatus as trailing that of their main rivals, the USA (thanks to Gymnastics Coaching for this link). If this competition is anything to go by, Russia still have to find their consistency, and certainly in this respect they are clearly behind the USA, who must by now be strong favourites for gold in the team event at the London Olympics.  Next week's Troffeo de Jesolo will surely provide more evidence.

Vault

Anna Pavlova           14.49
Anastasia Grishina    14.34
Maria Paseka           14.12

Uneven Bars

Aliya Mustafina         16.22
Yulia Inshina             14.32
Anastasia Grishina     14.24

Beam

Ksenia Afanasyeva    14.98
Anastasia Grishina     14.48
Kristina Goryunova    14.44

Floor

Anastasia Grishina      14.64
Ksenia Afanasyeva     14.18
Yulia Belokobylskaya 14.06

Go-Tribe is doing some brilliant work uploading her home videos of the competition and I believe will be updating her channel over the coming two or three days.
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