Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

I’m reading a post on Twitter that relates Komova’s second place in the AA to her botched Amanar landing.  History often rewrites such stories, forgetting the whole picture - an AA comp is the best of four apparatus, not a vault control duel.  We often see the same arguments about other close finals - was Shushu’s vault in 1988 really a ten?  People forget, or choose to ignore, or never knew in the first place, that the AA comp in those days was a composite score of Compulsory and Optional TF + the AA score.  Silivas had errors on floor in team final and on beam in AA final.  Without those errors she would have beaten Shushu by a country mile in the AA, but Shushu was on fire and didn’t give a mm.  The vault scores don’t say it all. The 2012 quad was a curious point in gymnastics history.  Russia had made their rush for world lead in 2010, but wouldn’t have got the gold in Rotterdam without the help of mistakes from the USA team.  Mustafina was ...

It has been a long time since I reflected on Russia and its gymnasts, but there have been some significant events recently so here is an update. 1    The continuing depletion of the national team reserve. MAG head coach Valery Alfosov has stressed that although the men's team appears to be thriving at present, this does not reflect a complete turn round in Russia's fortunes.  There are concerns that the longer term development of the team will be erratic. Conditions in WAG seem highly uncertain.  The national team relies on maintaining its veterans to ensure the appearance of being in contention for individual medals.   Without Paseka and Mustafina the team would have only Ilyankova and Melnikova as gymnasts of medal potential.  Furthermore, the measure of Mustafina is purely reputational.  There is little evidence that she will return to competition at her previous level, and promising her appearance at the European Games could end up ...