Skip to main content

Russia - mixed fortunes in Gwangju

Image
By


The Russian women won the gold medal today in the team competition at the Universiade in Gwangju, ahead of the Japanese and Korean teams.  


The picture is Alla Sotnikova's gold medal ... from her Instagram account - thank you, Alla!  Congratulations!


It was a fantastic team effort, highlighted by Polina Fyodorova's stable performances on bars, beam and floor, Maria Paseka's powerful vaulting (strong Amanar) and bars work, and Kramarenko's bars.  I loved the way that Fyodorova's technique on bars looked so effortless (wonderful 1.5 turn on the top of the high bar), the expressiveness of Sidorenko's floor work, and the power and emphatic charm of Elizarova.  This is not to ignore the great efforts of Kramarenko and Paseka, but we see these two often on the international scene and their gymnastics is familiar, and on a different level.   Alla Sidorenko, for example, has not featured on a national team before, and the native of St Petersburg showed her class here with calm, well rehearsed gymnastics.  She was a credit to the coaching of the Kiryashov family, Alexander and Vera, who also coached 2013 Universiade champion Tatiana Nabiyeva.  With the exception of Paseka, this wasn't Russia's A team, but they faced some strong competition from Japan and showed good teamwork to earn the gold.


Daria and Polina are through to tomorrow's All Around final ... Good luck, girls!  


Video of today's live stream - http://youtu.be/Tc467oTdQqU


The Russian MAG team didn't really do very well today, finishing in fifth place as a team.  It is difficult to comment on the standard of their performance as hardly any of their routines were shown on the livestream, but the scores give every indication that they were just outclassed here.  The Japanese were very clearly the best, ahead of the Chinese, and showed some good work.  The Ukraine team's effort was spoiled by a difficult time on the high bar, but Oleg Verniaiev looks likely to contend for a medal in tomorrow's AA final and there will be plenty of further medal chances in event finals for him and for Igor Radivilov. The modest Mukhail Kudashov will represent Russia in the AA final tomorrow and has qualified to vault EF.  Alexei Rostov has also qualified to high bar final.
















Labels:

Comments

  1. Anonymous10 July 2015 at 19:11

    Paseka's Amanar was the best one she has every done. What great progress! Thanks for posting.

    Russiafan

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mustafina, Melnikova and Afanasyeva - Russia’s three divas train together to the tunes of Michael Jackson

By
M elnikova, Mustafina and Afanasyeva take creative control at Round Lake.     You can see the video on Angelina Melnikova’s YouTube channel. They are discussing a new floor routine for Angelina; she wants to dance to Michael Jackson. Afanasyeva, 2012 Olympic medalist and a world champion on the floor, has been a choreographer for the national team for a few years now.    She says, ‘Gel, first we need to understand the plan—what we’re actually doing.’ They discuss how many tumbles Angelina will perform, and where the tumbles will come in the routine.    Angelina says, she likes ‘Billie Jean’, it’s her favourite … But Afanasyeva has other ideas, linking into the dance shapes she has seen in a video: ‘Thriller . Start with  Thriller . It begins with that image, right from the beginning when it starts.’    She shows us the dance. ‘I suggest taking a 1.5-minute or 1-minute segment of the dance directly.’ They promise to be in touch by email. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Russia - back to training

By
Valentina Rodionenko reports that the men's team is in full training at Lake Krugloye. Denis Ablyazin hasn't needed a break and is training 'at full strength' - (and if you subscribe to his Instagram account you will see him practising routines on p bars and high bar). David Belyavski joined training a little late, as he has been abroad on his honeymoon. Maria Paseka is returning to training on the 4th December after taking treatment for a back injury. Rodionenko says that Aliya Mustafina is excused training for the time being - Liubov Baladzhaeva helped with the translation here.  Apparently the gymnasts, as salaried athletes, cannot just take time off without permission from the Federation.  I understand that this means no change to Aliya's competitive status, ie she will not be training or competing for the time being, until such time as she gets bored and decides she wants to make a comeback!  From her Instagram account, Aliya is currently suf...
30 comments
Read more

Pongo’s predictions for Russia MAG in Rotterdam

By
Pongo is my AI assistant.  Read here his calculations of who might make the best Russian MAG team at the World Championships in October.  Please do feel free to disagree audibly, in the comments and note that Pongo admits, even he makes mistakes.  I don’t generally write such statistical material, so this may be a one off. With apologies for any errors, mine entirely and I wrote the brief.   Yes. I’ve treated this as a genuine team-construction problem , rather than simply taking the six gymnasts with the highest AA scores. For the calculation I used the most recent strong competitive score available for each gymnast: the Spartakiad scores for Yakubov, Novikov and Kisel , and mainly European Championship team-final/final scores for Dukhno, Marinov, Zaika and Sieedin , supplemented by Russian Championship scores where a recent European score was not available. That matters because Dukhno and Marinov, for example, were substantially stronger in Zagreb than some earlier...
Post a Comment
Read more

RRG Archive - scroll by date, from 2024 to 2010

Show more