Skip to main content

Ksenia Afanasyeva should compete floor, vault at Europeans - Valentina Rodionenko

Image
By
Twice Olympian Ksenia Afanasyeva with the gold medal she won on floor at the Universiade last summer

Russia's most senior female gymnast, Ksenia Afanasyeva, is recovering well from an ankle operation, and expected to be ready to compete on floor and vault in May's European Championships, said Russian coach Valentina Rodionenko in an interview with press agency Itar-Tass this weekend.  

Afanasyeva has suffered from ankle pain since well before the 2012 Olympics, and after a busy first half of  2013 the injury forced her out of the Antwerp World Championships.  A first operation carried out by Russian doctors last year did not help ease the pain.  'We are very pleased that the second operation, done by German doctors, was successful', said Valentina.

First year senior Maria Kharenkova has also been mentioned as in the running for a place on the Europeans team, and in a February interview Aliya Mustafina also stated her desire to compete in Sofia (May 12th to 18th).

Good luck to Ksenia and to all the Russian team as they prepare for the Russian national championships (31st March to 6th April) and then Europeans.

Link to the report : http://www.sports.ru/others/gymnastics/158505663.html
Labels:

Comments

  1. Queen Elizabeth10 March 2014 at 18:49

    Thanks to Veronika who has pointed to a comment by Ksenia on VK to the effect that she is preparing vault and would be happy to help on floor, but didn't exactly expect to do so.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maria Filatova: Russian Sparrow Made in the USSR

By
Maria Filatova – the first ever picture taken of her doing gymnastics! By kind permission of Maria Filatova Kourbatova My first memory of Maria Filatova is a little girl with huge, white ribbons in her hair, so tiny she seemed to have to stand on tiptoe to be able to see over the balance beam.  At 4’ 6” tall, she was the smallest competitor at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, yet she was already part of the Soviet senior team, competing alongside such established stars as Ludmilla Tourischeva, Nelli Kim, Elvira Saadi and Olga Korbut.  The ‘Siberian Sparrow’, trained in Leninsk-Kuznetsk by Innokenty Mametyev since a very early age, celebrated her 15 th birthday on the 19 th July 1976, the day of the team final.  That night, she slept with her first – not her last - Olympic gold medal beneath her pillow. For all her cuteness, Maria Filatova was a fearsome gymnast and competitor.  If the crowd were awed by the pyrotechnics of Romanian technician Nadia Comaneci, they we...
5 comments
Read more

The State of Gymnastics - 'Soviet' or 'American' style?

By
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...
15 comments
Read more

Viktoria Komova - I will be ready for the Rio Olympic Games. Interview with the Russian WAG team.

By
Aliya shows off the team#s patriotic manicure!  Picture courtesy of the RGF Veronika has kindly translated two TV interviews with the Russian WAG team in Baku.  At the moment, the videos aren't available in the UK as they have been geoblocked, but I have provided the links below. Now read on ... Interview with Dmitry Zanin (correspondent). A couple of years ago an interview with Aliya was a difficult test for a journalist, but now everything is quite different.  - So was your job simply to win and nothing else?  Or just to compete with all your strength and show everything that you can do? Aliya - Not at all, you can't set a target to win or to take first place - the task was the same for everyone.  We had to compete our programmes, perform well enough and then the result will follow.  - How is your health, how much of your programme is ready, do you have pain? Vika - No trouble or pain, I am about 70% ready.  It is hard to compete...
1 comment
Read more

RRG Archive - scroll by date, from 2024 to 2010

Show more