Skip to main content

Aliya Mustafina : R Sport interview, 7th March



A nice interview with Aliya from just before the Russian Championships.

Key points from the Google translate :

She won second place in an R Sport vote for the best Russian sports woman, behind Evgeniya Kanaeva but ahead of Maria Sharapova.  She says Evgeniya came first because she is a beautiful gymnast; but knows little about Sharapova.

She has no time for life outside of gymnastics, as she trains three times a day - can only meet with her friends on rare occasions, and declines to comment about whether she has a boyfriend in gymnastics.

Her father is her main supporter, but the person whose opinion she values most in gymnastics is her coach, Alexander Alexandrov :-)

She does not have any gymnastics idols.

Good luck to all the Russian gymnasts as they prepare for the European Championships!  

Comments

  1. It makes sense that Kanayeva is the first because she's a two time Olympics champion and the best rhythmic gymnast ever existed.
    I'm glad that both of them are ahead of Sharapova-I can't handle her scream!!
    Oh, I heard that Aliya is practicing double layout now. So excited to see her new skills!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WAG FX EF QUAL RUSSIAN CHAMPS 2026

Russian Championship 2026 — Women’s Artistic Gymnastics Event: Floor Exercise Venue: Central Sports Palace, Kaluga, Kaluga Region Dates: 28 June – 6 July 2026 Report generated: 1 July 2026 at 14:44 --- Final Results Place No. Athlete Region Difficulty (D) Execution (E) Penalty (Pen) Total Qualification 1 234 Lyudmila Arkadyevna Roshchina Krasnodar Krai 5.700 8.000 0.00 13.700 Q 1 221 Anna Dmitrievna Kalmykova Moscow 5.700 8.000 0.00 13.700 Q 3 240 Elizaveta Vladimirovna Us Krasnodar Krai 5.500 7.333 0.00 12.833 Q 4 205 Aleksandra Ivanovna Anufrieva Smolensk Region 5.100 7.700 0.00 12.800 Q 5 245 Kristina Konstantinovna Shavlovalova Moscow 5.100 7.533 0.00 12.633 Q 6 207 Varvara Viktorovna Belova Vladimir Region 5.500 7.066 0.00 12.566 Q 7 244 Elena Yuryevna Chursina Moscow 4.500 7.933 0.00 12.433 Q 8 230 Zlata Sergeyevna Osokina Leningrad...

Fact or fiction? The press, gymnastics and pregnancy doping

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...

The State of Gymnastics - 'Soviet' or 'American' style?

Lioudmilla Tourischeva, 1972 Olympic All Around champion in artistic gymnastics, was held up as an example of the ideal Soviet citizen.  Here she coaches one of the Soviet Union's leading gymnasts from the 1980 Olympics, Natalia Shaposhnikova The Soviet Union had a genius for lifting sport beyond the textbook, injecting the aesthetic where previously only goals had been in plain view.   This was not only manifest in gymnastics.  Do you remember the ‘Russian Five’, the players who elevated ice hockey to a creative sporting display, mesmerising their opponents and spectators with intricate patterns of play, so rhythmic and entertaining that they could have been set to music?   In gymnastics, a sport where the aesthetic counted as much as the outcome, it was this ability to create spectacle out of competition that resulted in the most extraordinary athletic performances.  The ‘Golden Era’, most commonly understood to cover the years from 1952-1...

RRG Archive - scroll by date, from 2024 to 2010

Show more