Russia, 2015 - review after the European season

Gymnastics revolves around the Olympics.  Competition and training therefore runs in a four-yearly cycle.  Gymnasts regroup and rebuild in the first two years of the cycle, peak in Olympic year and set the scene for their possible victories in pre-Olympic year.  So what happened in competition in 2013 and 2014 was relatively unimportant, but now, in 2015, the gymnasts have to begin to show their mettle.  Countries have to qualify for the Olympics at this winter's World Championships, and individual gymnasts must demonstrate over the coming year that they are ready to be selected for their respective teams.  

For Russia, qualification is the prime concern this autumn.  In Glasgow we will not see the full 'finished' article by any means and the gymnastics will to a fair extent carry the 'work in progress' label.  What did the European Games tell us about the state of their readiness for this important competition? 

Viktoria Komova

Andrei Rodionenko has already said that there is no lock on the team for the forthcoming World Championships - and that includes Viktoria Komova and her London Olympics team mate, Aliya Mustafina.  The European Games were a training competition for them, he says.  Some things worked out, others didn't and the final team selection will be determined at the Russia Cup where all gymnasts will begin from zero.  Their routines shown in Baku were all incomplete, as both gymnasts are still recovering from injury.

Viktoria Komova in particular has much work to do, says Rodionenko.  She has matured on a personal level and is technically ready for a lot, but has not competed for three years, leaving much work to be done on her competition psychology.

In my opinion Rodionenko isn't seriously suggesting that Komova and Mustafina might not make the Glasgow team, although Komova might still have something to prove; he is just underlining that the Russians have some difficult work to do if they are to look at all prepared to participate in the run-up to the Rio Olympics, and that no one can rest on their laurels.

Least of all, it seems, the dynamic Seda Tutkhalyan, first year senior who impressed so many of us with her confident and determined performances here in Baku.  Seda's contribution in the team competition was strong enough to make her Russia's second all arounder behind Mustafina for the second time this year (the first time based on her score at the Turin Trophy).  She out qualified Komova on every apparatus except bars, and was a legitimate gold medal contender on beam until that untimely fall - my, did you see how furious she was about that?  Andrei Rodionenko says that Seda had 'a good competition' - that she has some problems, but did more than perhaps he had expected.  Hmm ...

I like Seda a lot - while her D values need some work everywhere, she is what I would call a 'gymnast for the big occasion'.  Her performance quality goes up every time she hits the big stage and she did not look overawed or out of place alongside her legendary team mates.  You can train discipline and consistency, but you cannot train motivation or ambition.  While gymnasts like Spiridonova and Kharenkova occasionally appear a little nervous as they approach the floor, moral courage appears to be Tutkhalyan's big trump card.  You can see it in her eyes.

Seda's big problem, however, is that she is an all arounder - and while Russia needs all arounders, the World Championships team format means that unless they have at least one big scoring piece, their value to a team is compromised. Unless Komova falls by the wayside, Seda will likely be competing against Kharenkova, Spiridononova and Afanasyeva for her place on the team - and, unless she becomes a whole lot more reliable, she is likely to lose out to the high scoring potential these girls have on various apparatus.  My guess is that in Glasgow, if all is well with the health of the remaining team members, she will be the travelling reserve.

Aliya Mustafina made the greatest impact of all the female gymnasts at the Baku Games, winning three out of the possible six gold medals, plus a silver on floor.  Rodionenko says that he has confidence that both she and Komova will continue to make progress in the coming months and there doesn't seem to be much doubt that the 2012 Olympic gold medallist will be selected for Glasgow, assuming that she continues to heal her injuries and to consolidate the new programme and performance improvements that she and coach Sergei Starkin have been working on since spring.

Of course this wouldn't be gymnastics if there weren't some kind of controversy about the marking.  Rodionenko simply says that Aliya's floor performance (and Belyavski's p bars)  'were worth more than silver', and this is certainly borne out by suggestions that the judges miscalculated Aliya's D score, giving her 5.9 instead of the 6.1 she had earned.  A source close to the Russian team says that the judge, a Russian, failed to see her quadruple turn.

Of course the judges should get it right; no excuses.  There is a technical judge whose sole job it is to note down the elements and calculate the D score; if the limitations of the human eye don't allow time to distinguish between a triple and a quadruple, or to add an extra turn when it has been included, then the judge should have access to video evidence before the score is finalised.  The Russian coaching staff should also be more organised and take more responsibility for lodging appeals when mistakes are made.  It appears that this was a simple error of recording and calculation, but these mistakes shouldn't happen when scores determine the outcome of competitions that then become part of the historic record of the sport.  It all appears rather sloppy and unprofessional.

There has been much comment over the 'lack of choreography' in Mustafina's new floor routine, set to an instrumental version of the Frank Sinatra song 'My Way'.  I personally find this rather funny - could it be a self parody?  I certainly hope that Aliya has a different cut of the music, and some more compelling dance composition, before the Glasgow World Championships.  But aren't we guilty of applying double standards here?   On past form the Russians have thrilled with the completeness of their floor routines, generally speaking - remember London.  However, it is not as if this added dimension of their work has boosted their marks.  We've agreed that deductions have to be applied when steps have been taken on landing, or other errors are made, and that the score is a simple calculation of D+E.  Now Mustafina presents a floor routine in which she sticks the tumbling - not forgetting the stumble out of her Memmel - but which is noticeably dance light.  And we complain about it.  Well really, why should the gymnasts bother with dance at all when the mark is basically D+E + (A x 0)?    And is it me, or have the judges taken an autonomous decision to ignore it when a gymnast lands a tumble, but then takes a hop back with both feet, as Steingrueber did three times on Saturday?  It is, however, true that neither Mustafina nor Komova's routines were well finished - despite what one commentator here has described as their 'refined' quality of movement.

Incidentally, in an interview with Sports Express that Dolly-Z has translated on her blog, Aliya says that she chose Sergei Starkin as her coach because she 'trusts him'; he arranged for her to go to Germany for her back problem and she largely, I think, credits him with hauling her back from the edge.  When asked what on earth you target when you have collected gold medals at all the major competitions, she replied 'a second Olympic gold medal'.

That would be nice to see, Aliya.

I will be brief about the men as it is well past my bedtime, but I should say that this competition was really an occasion for Nikita Ignatyev to celebrate, and he certainly did that with great aplomb.  Nikita has suffered in the past because (a) he is an all around gymnast without the high scoring potential of some of his teammates and (b) his performances have frequently been marred by mistakes.  He certainly seems to have overcome (b) in recent competitions and to an extent reminds me of Vladimir Artemov, the quiet one on the team who always took the back seat until one day in 1988, at the Seoul Olympics, he took the competition by storm and won the all around gold.  Well now, I don't expect that Nikita will compete for gold with Uchimura and Verniaiev but he does seem to me to have set the psychological bar high and grabbed a leadership position on the Russian team.  He enjoyed himself immensely here en route to his multiple medals, including gold for the team.

And now that Rodionenko is saying that this competition 'determined the team roles' in Glasgow and beyond, I might be a little bit worried if I were David Belyavski.  He is beginning to look a little bit like Valentin Mogilny, Artemov's team mate at many World Championships and a beautiful, genius of a gymnast, who ended up sitting on the reserve bench at the 1988 Olympics as Arkayev considered him just too unreliable to merit a full place.

Well actually, I don't expect anything half as dramatic as that - the Russian team doesn't have the depth to leave anyone as great as Belyavski on the bench - but it does seem as though Ignatyev has grabbed the leading role all around for the time being at least.  It will be interesting to see if he can repeat that on the World stage, where there will hopefully be two gymnasts from the Russian team in the all around final, one of them Nikita, the other David.  Or will Nikita Nagorny have his say?  We'll have to see ...

David is a very fine gymnast indeed who always does best when he is in the lead and competing for gold.  This was evident in the superb performance he gave on parallel bars in the event final - but he too ended up with the 'better than silver' estimate from Rodionenko thanks to partesan judging in favour of Azerbaijan's Oleg Stepko.  I suppose it's hard when the audience are baying for gold, but then again I have never particularly understood the reasoning behind a home advantage in gymnastics, other than that the gymnasts themselves perform with more confidence.  Especially if the formula is D - E, what remit is there for emotional marking?

Finally, let's have a moment for Nikolai Kuksenkov, formerly a Ukraine team member who is having rather a difficult time with his gymnastics at the moment, and looking a bit under par.  Nikolai, like his counterpart Viktoria Komova on the women's team, won a gold medal in the team competition, but didn't manage to qualify to any of the event finals.  As I have mentioned, Rodionenko has said that team roles in Glasgow have been determined by the outcome of this competition - perhaps, therefore, Nikolai will cede his all around berth to Nikita Ignatyev and take up a role as an apparatus specialist?  He would complement Denis Ablyazin well on pommels, p bars and high bar.  But much rests on the shoulders of Ignatyev and the question of whether he can confirm his reliability on the world as well as European stage.

It must be rather nerve-wracking being the head coach of the Russian Federation these days.  Andrei Rodionenko does certainly seem to have executed a strategy where both teams have greater numbers than they did a couple of years ago, but the big question is whether he has got his timing right, especially in terms of the women's team which still relies fairly heavily on the veterans.  Can Mustafina, Komova and Afanasyeva all be ready and healthy at the same time?  Can the youngsters make it to full maturity by Rio?   Can the teams execute the necessary upgrades in the available time?  I certainly hope so.