The Russian Cup starts next week and will serve as one of the major trials for the Russian Olympic team. The other trials will be behind closed doors – verifications at Round Lake, so this will likely be our only chance to see Russian Olympic hopefuls compete before the Olympics start.
For a change, the competition will take place in Novosibirsk and not in Penza. We will also get a proper live stream of both qualifications and finals, so good bye, shaky Instagram streams.
Russians originally considered to stay in Novosibirsk for their pre-Olympic training camp, move it to the Russian Far East, or train in Japan, mostly to get used to the new time zones and the climate. A direct flight from Moscow to Tokyo takes 10 hours. Training in Novosibirsk would shorten the flight time to 6 hours and a Vladivostok-Tokyo flight would only be 2.5 hours. The plans for alternative Russian facilities were scraped because they are not as good as Round Lake. Russians then hoped to train in the city of Kamo – they even held a month-long camp there back in the summer of 2019. But the pandemic led to the cancellation of this plan as well. It was reported that the city of Kamo spent over $600,000 to prepare its gymnastics facilities for the pre-Olympic camp.
At the end, Novosibirsk will only serve as the host of the competition and gymnasts will then go back to Round Lake where they will stay until their flight to Tokyo.
The competition will take place on June 8th-12th and the field includes most of the national team in addition to other senior elite gymnasts representing their regions. On the women’s side, we will not see Uliana Perebinosova, Arina Semukhina, and Irina Komnova, because these three will compete at the Osijek World Cup. Elena Eremina has announced today she will miss the Russian Cup due to health issues. On the men’s side, Artem Pleshkin and Sergei Krivunets will compete in Osijek instead of the Russian Cup.
We are expected to see three post-surgery comebacks of Olympics contenders. Ivan Stretovich missed the Russian Championships because of wrist surgery. Dmitri Lankin competed there with a foot injury and had surgery a week after. Artur Dalaloyan tore his Achilles the day before leaving for the European Championships and will try to compete in Novosibirsk only two months after his surgery. Denis Abliazin who only did rings at the Russian Championships and wasn’t able to recover in time for Euros will come back on vault at the Russian Cup.
We saw Russian main contenders for the team spots compete at Euros, but in addition to the four spots on the team, Russian MAG and WAG each have two additional spots for specialists. On the men’s side, one of those spots is likely to go to Vladislav Poliashov, whether he will get it from the WC series (which we will learn after the conclusion of Doha WC) or not. Poliashov has strong routines on parallel bars and pommel horse but he is also a decent all-arounder and perfect potential alternate. In fact, he served as an alternate on the Rio team and on the Worlds team in Doha. Thus, it makes a lot of sense for Russia to take him to Tokyo – both for his bars and his ability to fill a team spot if someone gets injured at the last minute. Russia is likely to bring a floor/rings/vault (in any combination) specialist for the second individual spot to complete Poliashov’s strengths. At the moment, the most likely candidates are Dmitri Lankin and Denis Abliazin but both are dealing with injuries.
On the women’s side, Anastasia Iliankova unsuccessfully tried to get the bars spot through World Cups. She wasn’t able to pass Fan Yilin but might still get an individual spot for Russia if she manages to stay consistent. Irina Komnova also has a good bars set but she also hasn’t been able to show consistency at competitions. Yana Vorona might be a good option for the second individual spot. Similarly to Poliashov, she has a very strong event (beam) but is also a decent all-arounder and can be a built-in alternate.
The competition promises to be quite interesting and every single session will be streamed on the federation’s website.
Schedule (local time GMT+7, ET, PT)
June 8
17:00 – 19:30 (6am-8:30am ET, 3am – 5:30am PT) MAG Qualification
June 9
16:00 – 18:00 (5am-7am ET, 2am-4am PT) WAG Qualification
June 10
14:00-16:30 (3am-5:30 ET, 12pm-2:30am PT) MAG AA Final
17:00 – 18:30 (6am-7:30am ET, 3am-5:30am PT) WAG AA Final
June 11
16:00-19:00 (5am-8am ET, 2am-5am PT) Event Finals
June 12
16:00-19:00 (5am-8am ET, 2am-5am PT) Event Finals
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