Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

    Courtesy of vk.com Aliya Mustafina plans to try out her skills on all four apparatus in this week's European Championships, says Valentina Rodionenko.  Also going on all four apparatus will be newly crowned Russian Champion, Angelina Melnikova.   Daria Spiridonova will compete bars, where Mustafina is also currently very strong.   In podium training today, Mustafina walked through a floor routine and was closely spotted by head coach Evgeny Grebyonkin.  2011 World floor champion, Ksenia Afanasyeva, did not warm up floor, looking on forlornly while her team mates, including Daria Spiridonova, practiced on her favourite piece.  There is no news yet as to Afanasyeva's competitive status here in Bern. Official start lists for the competition will be published late tomorrow.  As with all competitions, believe what you see.  This year's Europeans is a team competition with event finals and no official all around competition, although there will...

Russia won today's team final at the European Gymnastics Championships with an impressively consistent performance - not one fall!  Led by the charismatic David Belyavski, the team showed leadership over the entire field, finishing first in every apparatus except rings and high bar.  It was a very close competition against Britain, who last won Europeans just before the Olympics in 2012.  Russia's victory at the equivalent time in Olympic preparations leaves open the possibility that they could perform even better in Rio.  Their team score of 271.378 was roughly half a point higher than Japan's winning score at the Glasgow World Championships last winter. Russia's 'shock' events were pommels and vault; pommels showing a huge turn round in form as Russia has so very often faltered there.  Not only did Britain feel the absence of their leader Max Whitlock on these pieces, it is true to say that Russia have also improved considerably.  Their strategy of develo...

Just picked up Peter Aykroyd's 1987 book  International Gymnastics: Sport Art or Science?.  Seeing it reminded me that gymnastics is in a constant state of flux and change; its identity has been subject to debate and conflict since the earliest days of competitive gymnastics, well before it existed in the form we recognise today.  I want to try to talk about the state of the sport today, how it compares to past models, how it arrived at this point, and what are the questions arising. I make no apologies for publishing the picture comparisons on this page, which were created by Lifje.  Some have seemed to find them rather challenging in the past, but they are not airbrushed or altered in any way.  Yes, the pictures are purpose selected for the sake of comparison, but they express a truth about the direction the sport has taken over the past few years.  They are not so much about Russia versus America as artistry versus athletics.  I do not pretend...

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...

"Twenty years ago, these guys brought a completely new style of hockey to the NHL," Bowman said. "Nowadays, a lot of teams play a similar type of a game. When the Russian Five were on the ice, you had to have your popcorn ready because you knew that you were in for a treat. They didn't just play hockey; they created masterpieces on the ice." https://www.nhl.com/news/russian-five-changed-hockeys-fabric-forever/c-784942 https://johnnykerrigan.com/tag/viacheslav-fetisov/ In many respects, the loss to the Americans at the 1980 Olympics, where the Soviets captured silver, was the beginning of the most dominant stretch of hockey the world has ever seen. They perfected a balletic, teamwork-intensive style of hockey that left opponents dumbfounded and has never been replicated. They won the world championships three straight years from 1981 to 1983 and Olympic gold in 1984 and 1988.  from http://www.wsj.com/articles/slava-fetisov-and-russian-hockey-after-...

Aliya Mustafina and team candidate Seda Tutkhalyan - both from Moscow Five days left before the MAG European Championships open in Switzerland, and Russian gymnast Nikita Nagorny is posting videos of himself practicing a full twisting Roche vault - I wonder if he will compete it in Berne?  The men's team seems fairly well prepared and ready to travel as announced some weeks ago - Kuksenkov, Belyavski, Ignatyev, Nagorny, Ablyazin.  But the composition of the women's team, who will travel to their first major competition of 2016 next week, seems somewhat undecided.  Will Natalia Kapitonova make her major senior debut in June, or will Seda Tutkhalyan, her dynamic yet unpredictable rival, grace Russia's team?  Or will other gymnasts be brought into play; will further, unexpected, changes be made? If head coach Valentina Rodionenko's recent announcement is to be believed, it is a simple case of replacing the injured Maria Paseka (a vault specialist) with Natalia ...

Barely two weeks will elapse before the WAG European Championships begin in Berne, Switzerland, and the news we had been fearing has been confirmed : world vault gold medallist Maria Paseka is  off the Russian team while she nurses a back injury.  This leaves Russia significantly weakened for the coming competition, with co-star Viktoria Komova also missing from the line-up.  It is a little disappointing, but it seems the right decision to rest the gymnasts so that they can be at their best when and where it really matters. Who will replace Paseka?  Valentina Rodionenko says that the youngster Natalia Kapitonova, who trains in Penza, has been chosen on the basis of her solid performances at national championships.  Well, we will have to wait and see - these announcements often turn out to be unreliable.   I personally would prefer to see the dynamic Seda Tutkhalyan be given a chance at this level, but Kapitonova has certainly shown herself to be more reliab...

Olympic hope Tula Ksenia Afanasyeva: I see the goal and go for it August 5, Brazil Rio de Janeiro will start XXXI Summer Olympic Games, on which our gymnast Ksenia Afanasyeva deliver a high degree of probability.  38 comments Sports correspondent Dmitry Myslo Zakhar'in met with Tula sport gymnast and Olympic hopeful our Ksenia Afanasyeva. The interview took place in an unexpected place - in a nightclub. Pass the word to Dmitry!   With Ksenia we met a year ago in the hall Tula Youth "Gymnastics" in competitions in her honor. Then Afanasiev managed to carve hard in his schedule a few days to visit his hometown to visit his parents and look at the younger generation, which is growing in Tula. A year passed, and the situation was repeated with the only difference being that the athlete's visit to Tula was literally planned out every minute: the evening came late in the morning has to leave. Plucking chutzpah, I asked for a conversation with a participant of two Olympic Ga...