Mustafina: When I could retire on a high note, I didn’t do it

Aliya Mustafina had a quite spectacular return to gymnastics after having a baby. She started training only three months after giving birth and only a bit more than a year after, she went on to win a silver medal as a part of the Russian team at the 2018 Worlds and helped to qualify Russia to the Olympics. She started 2019 strong, winning bronze in the all-around at the Russian Championships and then going on to win gold at the Birmingham World Cup. She opted to miss the European Championships to take a bit of a break and prepare for the European Games.

However, an injury forced her to miss the Games and this seemed to have affected her greatly and contributed to her loss of motivation for training. Mustafina stopped training after coming back from a training camp in Japan in July and the reports since then have been conflicting. Valentina Rodionenko kept retiring her in the media while Mustafina herself either refused to comment or said that she planned on going back to training but without committing to any specific timeline.

Mustafina gave a very open interview to MatchTV in which she talked about needing mental breaks and dealing with a changing body. Her body has been under intense public scrutiny for a long time now, so the decision to allow filming herself after gaining weight and showing it on national tv for everyone to discuss must have been incredibly hard. However, Mustafina says doubts and snide comments fuel her and she believes she will be able to come back because she still has some unfinished business in gymnastics.

When asked if she ever regretted doing gymnastics, Mustafina says:

“No, never in my life I thought like that. And in the past couple of years, I stopped regretting anything that happened in my life.”

Her parents signed her and her sister up for gymnastics because it was convenient:

“It was quite logical. They didn’t plan for us to become some sort of superstars or Olympic champions. I had a misaligned back. We just started training for our development, and it was very convenient, because my mom studied near CSKA, so she would bring us, go to classes, and then take us. It all went smoothly and we weren’t staying at home and our parents went on their business.”

However, Mustafina says she quickly became competitive and became good at competitions, whether what was at stake was an Olympic medal or just a new leotard:

“At around the age of ten, I guess, I performed a very difficult dismount in order to get a new leotard. That was very memorable. Because I was given only three attempts, I was ten years old and I knew it was a difficult dismount, only I and my friend Tanya Nabieva did it. I remember how I overcame my fear because of the leotard, and I did the element.”

“I have this trait – I’ve known how to compete, since childhood. Sometimes, things would not go well in training, but when I went to compete, I would do everything. I don’t know for sure how it happens.”

Her ability to build walls around herself might have something to do with it:

“I’m a very closed person. Especially, when it’s a stranger or something, I don’t like to talk. I guess I can build a kind of barrier, which no one can penetrate. For example, I remember that when I competed in the bars final in London, all the stands were black for me, as if I was completely alone, I didn’t hear or see anything, only the bars.”

In 2011, Mustafina was the reigning all-around champion and on track to repeat it. An unfortunate landing on vault in the all-around final resulted in a torn ACL and could have potentially ended her career. She says at the time she didn’t see the Amanar, that unfortunate vault, as something extremely difficult or dangerous:

“I don’t remember it as some sort of a super vault. Yes, we didn’t land it on a hard surface often compared to, say, floor, but it wasn’t especially hard. We trained it on a soft surface, and in verifications, we did it on a hard surface, just like the rest of our routines.”

While she recovered from the injury, she never managed to get that Amanar back in competition and even tried training a triple-twisting Yurchenko instead, in order to avoid a blind landing:

“I wasn’t able to recover this vault for competitions. I even tried doing a triple twist instead of a two and a half, it was easier for me. Still, it wasn’t exactly fear, but I didn’t vault for 8 months, my leg muscles changed.”

Her first thoughts after the injury weren’t about a potential end of her career but about being embarrassed:

“I was thinking about how the whole country was watching me and I like grabbed my leg and sat there. I thought a lot about why it happened. And this injury happened because of a simple technical mistake. I did not have control over the landing and the injury happened. And after the hospital, maybe three days after, I flew to Moscow, to Round Lake, and, I guess, in another two days, I went back to the gym.”

“Specialists said that after such an injury, no gymnast could fully recover and make the Olympic team. On one hand, such talks angered me but on the other hand, I always liked them. I would reply in my mind: I’ll show you, you’ll all hear about Mustafina, you’ll see! No one could do it but I’ll be able to!”

Previously the team leader, Mustafina was largely dismissed by the team management leading up to the 2012 Olympics and it was made clear to her that she wasn’t one of the gymnasts expected to bring individual medals:

“I went to London as I call myself “a plug” on the team because no one really expected much from me since other girls were stronger. Vika Komova went there as an absolute leader, of course. Ksyusha Afanasyeva had a floor routine. Nastia Grishina was a favorite. Masha Paseka had a very difficult vault. I had a not so difficult vault, the same bars as Vika, regular beam, and a very weak floor routine. Then, I was supposed to do only two events for the team but in the end, I did four and three of them as a lead-off.”

She came from London as the most decorated Russian gymnast but still attributes her two gold medals on bars to luck:

“At the first Olympics, I just did my routine extremely cleanly, even though my difficulty was 0.1 lower. And the Chinese and the British gymnasts made mistakes, though small ones. The second time it was the opposite. I generally did a good routine but my difficulty was also 0.1 higher than the rest of the gymnast, it was the highest. Although I came to Rio with a completely different difficulty, it was much lower.”

While she was only 18 after the 2012 Olympics, she started thinking about retirement then:

“Mentally, you realize that you’re only competing and training, competing and training, and you would like to do something else. Physically, every competition, every practice, every camp drain you. Especially, since after the Olympics I constantly competed in every competition for two years. So by the end of the year, I went up [to the coaches] and said: I guess I’m retiring, I can’t anymore.”

The second quad was extremely hard for her and even resulted in a break in the summer of 2015 when she quit training for a couple of months. However, when she was at competitions, she gave it her all, however hard it was. She talked about competing with a fever in the all-around final at the 2014 Worlds and how upset she was to finish fourth:

“My body temperature was around 37.5 C and that was after two sachets of antipyretics. I had a cough, runny nose, sore throat… Of course, when you go out to compete, everything is less noticeable but you still feel it. You’re doing a routine on bars and your throat hurts. I managed to get through three events but then I fell on my first pass on floor and finished fourth instead of third or second. It was extremely upsetting, I could barely hold the tears.”

That was the second year Mustafina competed against Simone Biles and she believes Biles is so much ahead of the competition, other gymnasts should focus on more realistic opponents instead:

“She’s the only number one like that. I think she doesn’t even have to compete, you still give her the first-place medals. I’ll never be able to get such leg muscles to tumble like her. She’s also short and has very strong muscles. The girls and I talked about her a lot in Rio. It’s important not to set some sky-high goals like “do better than Biles”. You need to understand that with her difficulty, no matter what you do, you won’t beat her. So, before the team final, I said: “Girls, let it be like that – America just performs and we’re competing with Japan, China and those who are close to us. Let’s compete with them because we can do better than them.”

She took a long break after Rio during which she got married and had a daughter. She was in the gym only three months after the birth and it was a challenging experience:

“When I came back, I couldn’t do even the simplest elements, the ones that girls learn when they are 5 or 6 years old. It was embarrassing and funny. Like “Hello, a two-time Olympic champion who can’t do a kip cast”. What? I thought the skills would stay forever.”

Her current comeback might be not much easier, though. She says she completely stopped training in the summer:

“I did nothing. At all. Well, perhaps, I would do a split sometimes. I sleep when the kid sleeps. I eat when the kid sleeps. At night, I wake up when the kid wakes up. Even though that never happened to me before that I would wake up at night and couldn’t fall asleep again. It was so hard that, perhaps, it was something similar to depression.”

At the time of the interview, she was slowly working on getting back in shape, doing Tabata workouts:

“I need this training in order to get in shape. It’s functional training, of course, it’s all the muscle groups, it’s good training in terms of the tempo, very useful and effective. Can I get into the shape I had in 2012? Yes. And get even better. Everything is possible as long as you want it.”

Mustafina said she hopes to compete at the Russian Cup in June and prepare for the Tokyo Olympics. Now she might have even more time in store if the Olympics are postponed due to the pandemic.

She also hopes to have more elements named after her, one of her big dreams is to compete a Shaposhnikova transition with a one and a half turn.

She won gold at Euros, Worlds, European Games, and Olympics but she feels like she wasn’t able to finish on a high note and doesn’t want to be remembered as one of the gymnasts who tried to come back but couldn’t:

“You know you can finish at the moment when you truly feel it when you tell yourself and agree with yourself that yes, I did everything I could. You know what I don’t have? A good ending. When I could retire on a high note, I didn’t do it. After London, after Rio, after the Worlds in Qatar… I could retire in those moments. But I was so focused on the Tokyo Olympics, I couldn’t think about anything else.”

When she finally does retire, she hopes to do something for gymnastics:

“My life will be without the sport, but not without gymnastics. It would be a pity, I gained so much knowledge… I want to share it with other athletes because I’ve filtered it all through myself. After giving so much to gymnastics, I want gymnastics to become better after me so that more kids would do it, more people would simply know what artistic gymnastics is. Because there are people who are like “oh, you’re a gymnast, with the ribbons, right? No? What, there’s another kind?” I want that not to happen.”

Photo: Russian Artistic Gymnastics Federation

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