Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

The gymnasts have posted photographs of themselves at their destination in their respective Instagram sites.  They have arrived safely, and all look happy. It is night time now in Nanning (Saturday, 3pm BST, 10pm Nanning) so I hope the gymnasts are trying to get some sleep. Udachi, Rossiya! 2 pictures via Tatiana Nabiyeva on VK.com Nikolai Kuksenkov and Ivan Stretovich, via Ivan's Instagram account. Thanks to all the gymnasts for being so friendly and generous with their pictures.  It really makes Worlds seem real to those of us who can't travel to China.

Not a fake profile ... Aliya's unofficial fanpage has over 50,000 followers Have you seen the film Spartacus, the bit where the Romans try to get Spartacus to give himself up , but fail because there are so many people who claim to be him? The gymnastics online community is getting a little bit like that ... I did some counting this morning on Facebook, having come across yet another online profile of a gymnast that claimed to be 'real' yet obviously wasn't :-) 22 online profiles of Aliya Mustafina 29 of Viktoria Komova Some of these are athlete pages that present news of the gymnast's progress, but many are simply fake identities that make use of personal photographs found elsewhere on the internet to develop whole new narratives of the gymnast's life.  I love my regular Gin O'Clock updates of HRH the Queen's daily life as much as the next person, but these profiles try to pretend to be the real Aliya or Vika, without the embellishment of h...