Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

Angelina Melnikova, now 23, is 2021 World AA champion in artistic gymnastics.    She holds a gold medal with her team from the 2020 (2021) Olympics, her second Games.    Visit her home, and no doubt there would be a secure cabinet full of all the various honours, awards and medals she has earned through her career. Angelina Romanovna Melnikova has her primary home in Voronezh, the place of her birth.    The club where she trains is the same one where champions Viktoria Komova, Vera Kolesnikova and Liubov Burda made their names.    1980 Olympic Champion Elena Davydova began her gymnastics life there, too. Melnikova is untypical of most Russian gymnasts.    Her first Olympics, in 2016, were characterised by uncharacteristic mistakes that came in the wake of a nasty hamstring injury.    As the youngest gymnast she seemed unsure and tearful - but still helped her team to a silver medal.   A Russian gymnast beginning so in...

Today, I got a nasty shock when someone commented on a Facebook post of mine about a Russian woman gymnast.    ‘She’s pro War’, she declared, perfectly confident in her assumption, well up in her understanding of what pro War means, and thoroughly without doubt in her grasp of the context and likely rights and wrongs.    Totally blind to the fact that in her eagerness to label another person ‘pro war’, she was actually revealing herself to be ‘pro war’, even if she is on the ‘other’ side, so presumably it’s ok for her to be that way. But first I thought and I reflected on what the comment said - have I missed something?    Is the perfectly nice-seeming young woman in my post really a warmonger, an advocate of horrible, arbitrary violence?    Does she really want to see her country and her neighbours suffer and die?  I don’t think so.    It’s doubtful that she will have the same viewpoint on her country’s war as we do; it is doubtful...

That’s a bit premature, I hear you say!! Gymnastics evolves by practice, informing ideas that develop into more practice.    Leadership of the sport takes place in competitions large and small, international and domestic.    This is then formalised by the various technical committees who write up the new Codes of Point, which in turn encourage the shape of gymnastics.   What you see in competitions is the outcome of work by many different gymnasts and coaches around the world, interfered with by the process of taste distinctions held by a few people sitting around a table in Lausanne, or wherever the meetings are taking place.   If one component of that process changes, then the ‘taste distinction’ stage of the process also changes.    When the American women were dominating the sport, tastes shifted in favour of powerful tumbling and precise execution. Judges can only mark what is on the table, and so this kind of shift develops into a ...

 Source: Russia Today/Google Translate  Alia, come on. You can": Mustafina - about "nightmares" dreams, coaching career and muscle mass July 4, 2023, 15:32 Elena Vaitsekhovskaya It is better for a gymnast to be strong than thin. This opinion was expressed in an interview with RT by two-time Olympic champion in uneven bars Aliya Mustafina. According to her, weight is not a problem at all for an athlete if the muscles are well developed.    She also admitted that she had never been upset because of the competition, remembered the sudden phone call that changed her life, and explained why she did not consider it necessary to force athletes to train. “I didn’t go into coaching because of a divorce” - One of your interviews during your sports career was called "I love children too much to be a coach." Nevertheless, you are now leading the country's youth team in women's gymnastics and, apparently, you really like it. “I really love coaching. First, because i...