Oleg Verniaiev is currently enjoying his vacation in the Maldives. This is the first time he took a break after Rio despite being injured this whole time. He finished his last two competitions of the season – the Cottbus World Cup and the Bundesliga final – and took a break before going to Germany for his two surgeries in the beginning of January.
Gennady Sartynsky, Verniaiev’s personal coach, talked to Segodnya.ua about Verniaiev’s injuries and the recovery plan:
“Oleg has never been on a vacation anywhere. At most, he had a week off from training and then we went on. This year he asked for a vacation. I said: that’s it, come on, you can spend the time before the surgery however you want. And he went somewhere. I don’t even call him there, don’t distract him.”
“He had this leg injury even before the Rio Olympics, but the doctor said that he’d be able to compete for another season with the injury and nothing bad will happen. But when his shoulder started hurting as well, the doctor suggested: let’s do both surgeries at once in order to not waste any time. Maybe, if not for the shoulder injury, we wouldn’t do the leg surgery. Why didn’t we make his competition schedule lighter this year? Oleg wanted to do [the competitions] and it was good for us: we worked on new routines, prepared new elements. He’s been working like this all the time. I guess we’re going to make some changes now. It all depends on him: if he thinks that he can, we participate in a competition, if he’s tired and can’t – we scratch him. For example, at the last World Cup, we only did two apparatuses instead of the usual six, and the routines on those two were easier than usual. We got rid of the apparatuses where he could’ve made his injury worse. We already made arrangments for the surgeries to be in Germany, probably on January 2nd or 3rd.”
“His shoulder injury is very serious. Many [gymnasts] don’t recover from injuries like this. It’s not even related to his training loads, just to the type of work he does. There’s such a delicate ligament that isn’t used to all sorts of twists and turns that we’re doing. And Oleg has torn exactly this ligament. The doctor said the following: three months of complete rest, three months of recovery and only after half a year he can start training. The same goes for the leg.”
If you like Gymnovosti, consider supporting us on Patreon.
