Skip to main content

Verniaiev, Belyavski take 1, 2 in European Championships

By

Ukraine's Oleg Verniaiev confirmed his position as Europe's leading male all around gymnast yesterday with a strong performance at the European Championships in Montpellier.  Verniaiev, who was competing with a tender ankle, is making a case for himself as a rival to reigning World and Olympic Champion Kohei Uchimura.

David Belyavski performed reasonably steadily here but for a stutter on pommel horse, finding a silver medal to complement the gold medal he won in Moscow two years ago.  If the elegant gymnast from Ekaterinburg can ever finally manage to hit all six apparatus in a row, without errors, he too could fight for gold at Worlds, alongside his Ukrainian friend and competitor.  He reminds me of Soviet Valentin Mogilnyi, 1990 European Champion, whose beautiful line on the apparatus was often marred by unpredictable errors.

Britain's Daniel Purvis competed wonderfully for third place.  Russia's second all arounder here, Nikolai Kuksenkov, was rather unsettled on the apparatus and ended up in 11th place.

You can find the full results here.




Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Svetlana Boginskaya: I was always a bitch* in gymnastics

By
Svetlana Boginskaya, 15 years old, with her medals from the Seoul Olympics Nico translates the latest interview with gymnastics legend Svetlana Boginskaya, during a recent visit to her home country of Belarus. Svetlana Boginskaya: I was always a bitch* in gymnastics, so now I ask for forgiveness from everyone who came in contact with me. The National Olympic Committee of Belarus held a press conference with three-time Olympic Champion in artistic gymnastics, Svetlana Boginskaya. The meeting was devoted to the 25th anniversary of the Olympic Games in Seoul. In South Korea the Belarussian won two gold medals in the team competition and vault. As a gift to the Olympic Hall of fame, the famous gymnast, now living in the United States, donated one of her trophies that she won at the 1990 European Championships and a pennant for Best Female Athlete of the USSR in 1989. How happy we were when we could share with such stars as Boginskaya, Scherbo, and Ivankov,...
14 comments
Read more

Our Nelli Kim : a new documentary

By
Nelli Kim at the 1980 Olympics, courtesy of Nellikim.net I have mixed feelings about Nelli Kim.  She was certainly one of the most talented competitors the Soviet Union fielded in gymnastics, and that is saying something. She harvested first place  all around at the 1979 World Championships, her country's only gold medal in a somewhat disastrous competition for the Soviet women.  (That competition has become a very notorious one in history, if one remembers poor Nadia Comaneci's brave performance despite a serious wrist infection, and the winning Romanian team's sickeningly unhealthy appearance in Fort Worth.) Nelli was also a great performer and character.  Her career overlapped a time of fundamental change in the sport - when the lyricism of such performers as Tourischeva was overpowered by the pyrotechnical advances of the likes of Comaneci.  Nelli managed to reconcile the two qualities, and to span the gap between the two eras.  I don't think she ever r...
3 comments
Read more

RRG Archive - scroll by date, from 2024 to 2010

Show more