Skip to main content

Russian gymnastics teams for London 2012 are announced

Image
By
Komova, Nabieva, Mustafina, Inshina, Afanasyeva - all included in the team selection for the London Olympics


Head National Coach Andrei Rodionenko on Sunday announced the names of those gymnasts who will be preparing for the forthcoming Olympic Games in London (reports Eurosport).  The gymnasts were selected according to three criteria :

  1. Results at the Russian Championship, European Championship and Russia Cup. 
  2. How the gymnasts had implemented their routines, and their compliance with 'model characteristics', complexity and quality of execution.  
  3. Moral, strong-willed and feisty qualities at the highest levels of competition

WAG : Ksenia Afanasyeva, Victoria Komova, Aliya Mustafina, Anastasia Grishina, Tatiana Nabieva, Maria Paseka, Anastasia Sidorova and Yulia Inshina

MAG : Denis Ablyazin, Alexander Balandin, David Belyavsky, Emin Garibov, Konstantin Pluzhnikov, Nikita Ignatyev, Sergey Khorokhordin, Igor Pakhomenko 

Of the eight gymnasts selected for each discipline, only five will appear at the Olympic Games, with four competing on each apparatus in the qualifications stage.  

The WAG selection controversially omits 2011 European Champion Anna Dementieva, a strong beam worker and all around competitor, who has suffered a rocky competitive programme since last spring.  Dementieva has suffered injury and illness since, and it seems likely that her consistently poor performance in criteria 1 and 3 has, sadly, led her to lose out on this occasion.  

The MAG selection is noteable for the exclusion of vault and floor specialist Anton Golotsutskov, who unfortunately is suffering from a back injury and in hospital, and was unable to compete at the Russia Cup.  It is expected that Golotsutkov will retire imminently.  Former Russian Olympian and European Champion Maxim Devyatovski has also retired following a year of training independently at his home gym in Siberia.  This was presaged by his non-appearance at the Russia Cup.  

Thus Russia goes forward to London with only three experienced Olympians on their training squads - for the women, Ksenia Afanasyeva, for the men, Konstantin Pluzhnikov and Sergei Khorokhodin.   This is not unusual for gymnastics, a sport where youth appears to have a distinct advantage.


Good luck to all the gymnasts - I wish them the very best on their way to the Olympic podium!


Picture courtesy of the RGF.
Labels:

Comments

  1. M20 June 2012 at 20:36

    Yeah disappointed for Dementyeva but if she suffers from injury and illness, then makes no sense to take her. Still would have preferred her to be on the training squad at least.

    As for criteria number 3, the only one who fits all of that is Mustafina and Ksenia. The others crumble at times.

    However, I have faith that all will be well at Olympics.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alexander Alexandrov in his own words 1 - A Difficult Decision

By
Alexander Alexandrov with his daughter, Isa, at the statue of Christ the Redeemer, Rio.  (c) Alexander Alexandrov Russian coach Alexander Alexandrov has been prominent in the sport since 1983, when he came to the public eye as coach of the brilliant Dmitri Bilozerchev.  He has over thirty years’ experience of coaching World and Olympic Champions both in the country of his birth and in his adopted home, Houston, USA.  In his most recent position as Head Coach of the national women's artistic gymnastics (WAG) team for Russia, he quite simply resurrected his country’s gymnastics programme, re-establishing his team at the very top of the sport.  Prior to Alexandrov’s appointment, at the 2008 Olympics, Russian WAG had walked away empty handed, without medals.  At last year’s London Olympics, artistic gymnastics was one of Russia’s most successful sports.  Alexandrov’s Russia won the most gymnastics medals of any country competing, and his athlete Al...
11 comments
Read more

Does Russia need Mustafina in Glasgow? Vaitsekhovskaya adds her voice

By
'Should Mustafina compete in Glasgow, considering her fragile state of health? - aren't the Olympics more important?' are the key themes of this brief news piece by Elena Vaitsekhovskaya, a top sports journalist who has interviewed Alexandrov, Arkayev, Starkin, Mustafina and Rodionenko in the last five years since Aliya won the World Championships. Elena stresses that this year nothing unusual has happened.  Aliya has worked hard with her new coach Sergei Starkin.  She did a 'great job', demonstrating her work at the European Games in Baku where she won the all around, bars and team events as well as silver in the floor exercise. But, says Vaitsekhovskaya, more important than the medals was the fact that Aliya showed a new technical level, began work on upgrades for the Rio Olympics.  Just competing in one event - the Baku games - could be enough for a veteran athlete of Mustafina's experience.  The body ages in both time - and injuries.  Athletes always respond...
26 comments
Read more

Fact or fiction? The press, gymnastics and pregnancy doping

By
It was a Sunday morning.  I was drinking my coffee and contemplating the day ahead - a workout at the gym, shopping for groceries, an evening reading a book, or catching up on last night's episodes of crime thriller The Bridge .  How nice it was not to have to think about work for a day. Then I saw it - a story about the history of doping in The Observer .  Interesting reading. Of course, cheating is as old as the hills.  It is, unfortunately, human nature for some people to try to gain easy advantage in any kind of competition.  That is why we have laws, rules, ethical guidelines.  People who cheat should face justice and shouldn't complain when they are found out. But the story about pregnancy doping bothered me.  Hadn't that been found to be fictional?  The author began with Olga Kovalenko's allegations made in 1994 - but the rumours had started way back in 1991 with the documentary series More Than A Game .  The practice...
3 comments
Read more

RRG Archive - scroll by date, from 2024 to 2010

Show more