Plans for the Olympics, the family cat, how Aliya managed her nerves in 2012 and much more - translation on Liubov's blog
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...
Aliya handles it graciously, but I wish Russian sport journalists would stop going on about Simone and the ADHD medication all the time. It's mean-spirited and unsportsmanlike, like when American sport journalists used to constantly prod about Chinese gymnasts possibly being underage.
ReplyDeleteI feel like the the mental state that helps Aliya compete so well comes across in interviews. She talks about gymnastics in a similar way to Kohei Uchimura, interestingly.