Skip to main content

Tanya Nabieva - World Champion, and so much more

Click to play this Smilebox slideshow
Create your own slideshow - Powered by Smilebox
Photo slideshow created with Smilebox

17 year old Tanya Nabieva has been a gymnastics champion for many, many years, always enthusing her friends and audience with that special brand of cheeky determination and flighty innovation that could only be hers.

Tanya is a fearsome competitor and an excellent gymnast - her gold medal from the 2010 World Championships in Rotterdam, and her silver medal on bars at last year's Tokyo World Championships, were her highest honours, but she also contributed to the team's success at the Europeans in Birmingham in 2010 and won many, many medals at national and junior international level. She has always been so much more than a gymnast - full of joy and sadness, all of it always expressed so clearly. And such a good, generous friend to her team mates, especially Aliya, with whom she shares a special bond.

A painful back has troubled Tanya since her earliest days as a senior. Her Olympic preparations were disturbed by this and, most recently, by a leg injury incurred in the very last few days before team selection. Unable to train at her usual intensity, Tanya could not regain the level of difficulty for which she had become so renowned. She has been selected as a reserve but most likely will not compete in London. The most recent pictures of her show her in a reserved but contemplative mood. Tanya must have known her chances were limited, but it can't be easy to train for an event all your life, only to miss out by the tiniest margin.

The Smilebox is my way of wishing Tanya best of luck for whatever she chooses in the future - whether to continue training and support her team next year, or to concentrate on her studies at the Lesgaft Institute, or do something completely different. It is pure sentiment.

Comments

  1. Aww that was such a touching slideshow :-) Love that photo with Aliya and they're both doing peace signs. So cheeky! Wishing Nabsy all the best for her future!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Really nice montage. Nabs gymnastics might be messy at times, but she had an interesting personality. I didn't know she was studying at University now. That's great for her.How am I the last to know these things? lol

    Wishing her the best in whatever she does.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

30 years in elite sport: Oksana Chusovitina

You've been competing internationally for over 30 years. How has gymnastics changed over that time? Is there anything about your sport that has remained the same for decades? First of all, the age has changed. More mature athletes are competing now, which makes me happy. Secondly, the apparatuses. They've become more comfortable and sophisticated. Gymnastics in general has become more challenging, but in my youth, people performed mostly the same elements as they do now. Back then, this was par for the course, but now it surprises many. It's a bit amusing. Has the nature of the training itself changed? For me personally, absolutely. Now, my life isn't just about my athletic career. I'm involved with the Oksana Chusovitina Academy, which was personally opened by the President of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev. It has 155 students, both girls and boys. I used to train three times a day, but now I train once. The entire afternoon is taken up with the academy and organi...

Tatyana Nabiyeva on work and love in China

Some highlights from a long interview with 2010 World champion Tatyana Nabiyeva.  Source: Russian team page on VK.com.  Translation - Google translate A big interview with Tatyana Nabieva about the peculiarities of work and life in China, the bright years of her sports career, a little about modern gymnastics and about love. On the Nabiyeva flight — At the same championship, you presented a new element on the bars, which was later added to the rules with your last name (flying over the top bar with a straight body, difficulty group F. — Sport24). How did you come up with the idea to try something new? — Actually, it happened spontaneously, I think. We worked with Vera Iosifovna [Kiryashova] on the purity of the elements on the bars, sometimes I didn’t fly all the way to the Shaposhnikova element. Once I didn’t fly all the way to the bars either and stood on my feet between the bars, bending my legs in flight for safety. Then Vera Iosifovna said that this was a different eleme...

Viktoria Komova - Happy Birthday!

Viktoria Komova, born 30th January 1995, celebrates her birthday today.  Happy Birthday, Viktoria! Have a lovely day. Time to revisit a picture gallery posted last year ... and to hope for a good year for Viktoria and her fans. I was doing something far more important, researching an article, when these pictures of Viktoria Komova  caught my eye. They are far from the standard gymnastics pictures of gymnasts celebrating, commiserating, or caught in the midst of their most graceful pose.  Not the best, most aesthetic images to view.  When looking at pictures of gymnasts I am often conscious of selecting the ones taken from the most flattering angle, avoiding the shot with the bent legs, the out of control arms. I took a different viewpoint here, choosing Komova at the most stressed, the least stagey point of her work.  These pictures capture Komova in flight, in the height of motion and effort.  There is no contrivance to them, no trained pose or pause...

RRG Archive - scroll by date, from 2024 to 2010

Show more