Nina Derwael, the reigning World champion on uneven bars, came to the European Games as a clear favorite to win the gold on this event. However, she is currently doing a new, more difficult routine and still struggles with consistency a bit. She fell in the final and finished fourth. She then went on to win gold in the beam final and said getting angry likely helped her to do it:
“I was really sad about bars but I was mostly mad at myself, so I think being mad helped me a lot for beam to be a little more aggressive. I really wanted to end on a high note, so I’m really happy I was able to do that.”
“It’s a rather new routine, so I think I just didn’t have the numbers and the confidence in my routine that I usually have before I get to compete it on a big stage. So, now, I think we’re just going to get the numbers and do routine after routine to really get consistent, to really get that confidence that I need for this routine.”
Derwael is known for her astonishing bars routines and is sometimes seen as more of a specialist, despite the fact that last year, at the World Championships, Derwael finished fourth in the all-around final. Nevertheless, she sees herself as an all-arounder, most of all:
“I like to think of myself as an all-arounder because I really like to compete on all four apparatuses. I’m an all-arounder but bars is my specialty and then my beam isn’t that bad either.”
Despite learning crazy skills on bars, she’s been struggling with upgrading her vault from a FTY. Partially, it is due to an injury that keeps bothering but she says she also doesn’t feel vault as well as she feels bars:
“I don’t really know why I can’t upgrade my vault. If I knew, I would’ve fixed it. I just need to break it mentally. It’s difficult to explain. It’s just a feeling that one day everything goes well and the next day it doesn’t. I feel like I’m doing the same thing but then it’s just not how it’s supposed to be. I think it’ll come, it just needs time. I’ve always had a good feeling about bars, I feel the bars very well. It isn’t that difficult for me to learn new things. I have this feeling inside me, I really feel the bars well, but then on vault, I don’t have that.”
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