A merry gymnastics wanderer - Brussels 2012

Arrived safely in Brussels and very much looking forward to the gymnastics.  I hope you are reading the excellent quick hits available at the All Around and the Gymnastics Examiner – see the links at the bottom of this page.  My coverage of Europeans is bound to be much more personal, and significantly less technical!  There are also now some videos of podium training available at the Full Twist - worth a look at the Russian girls' bars and beam.

Tomorrow afternoon the real action begins, with the junior girls competing for the team title and also for qualification to Friday's all around competition.  My guess is that Kharenkova and Shelgunova will represent Russia in this competition which will be one of the highlights of the Championships.  

This is my seventh European Championships and I'm joined here by friends who have been to at least as many competitions as me.  My friend Tracey, whom I met at the Rotterdam World Championships in 1987, travelled here with me from London.  Also here will be friends from France, Nadine and Christian, whom I’ve known since the early 1990s. Online friends who have been through many a tight competition with me in the virtual world will also be here in person.  Goodness knows if anyone will be brave enough to make themselves known to me in person; we’ll have to see. Gymnastics competitions can sometimes be a sociable experience, more often during the early stages than in finals.  And travelling to gymnastics competitions is certainly addictive.

My first ever experience of live gymnastics goes back to a school visit to the USSR Gymnastics and Sports Acrobatics Display team in 1976, in Wembley Arena (then known as the Empire Pool, Wembley).  I was lucky enough to see Filatova, Korbut, Tourischeva, Saadi, Grozdova, Davydova, Koval and Andrianov; as well as those Soviet sports acrobats who never failed to entertain and amuse us.   My first international competition was the 1979 Coca Cola International, where I saw Davydova for a second time.   I never imagined that just a few months later she would become Olympic champion;  I thought she made too many errors by far! 

Living in North London in the early 1980s, every year I took myself off to Wembley Arena for a succession of Displays and competitions, all of them.  By 1987, convinced I needed to work the gymnastics bug well and truly out of my system, I set off for the World Championships in Rotterdam, the main attraction being the opportunity to view a full set of six Soviet routines, compulsory and optional, men and women.  There was no internet at the time and news of the Soviets was rare.  Videos of little known gymnasts rarely, if ever, reached the hands of ordinary gymnastics fans.   So the only way to get to know the Soviets was to see them perform live; TV coverage was almost always limited to rather cursory highlights. 

Sadly, my strategy of working the sport out of my system failed and I found myself more involved than ever in gymnastics, travelling regularly in Europe.  I went to places I will never visit again: Stuttgart (1989 Worlds), where the heavily pregnant hotel manager who never smiled sent us off for a two hour walk in the rain with our suitcases while she prepared the rooms; Rotterdam, where I stayed in a canal boat with legions of other gymnastics fans whose favourite hobby was practicing their vault run up outside my cabin door.   Birmingham, enough said.  Sheffield, the worst hotel room ever.

Svetlana Boguinskaia provided the highlights of my gymnastics travelling career; for all that Stuttgart was a holiday low point, the Soviet team there was amazing, perhaps the best ever, and certainly the best I ever witnessed live.  In Athens (1990 Europeans) Svetlana utterly dominated, winning all five golds.  It was the best single competitive performance I have ever seen, and a fabulous introduction to a country I have visited many, many times since. 

You remember the small things, as well as the gold medallists:   Arkayev gently tugging the pigtails of reserve Lissenko in Athens as she wistfully observed her team mates receive their medals (she went on to win the 1990 World Cup later that year in Brussels); Yulia Kut and Svetlana Baitova comforting a crying Olessia Dudnik after a bars debacle in worlds qualifying at Stuttgart; the expression on Shushunova’s face as she took congratulation for her world gold vaulting medal in Rotterdam; the expression on Boguinskaia’s face as she congratulated Lissenko for winning the World Cup title she had hoped would be her own.    More recently, the composure of Khorkina, head bowed, waiting patiently beneath the Russian flag for confirmation that she had become 1997 World Champion.

I don’t go to every gymnastics competition any more.  I don’t have the money, can’t take the time off work, and not all of them are appealing.  But it’s great to get some time off to experience some of Europe as well as witness some great gymnastics.   

More tomorrow including some information on the real competition.