Yesterday, a long-awaited return of Tatiana Nabieva to international competition happened. Nabieva last represented the Russian national team internationally in 2014. Since then, even when she was nominally on the national team at times, she was not able to get assignments, despite showing good results at national competitions.
Her comeback was marred by an unfortunate injury. According to Vera Kiryashova, one of her personal coaches, Nabieva suffered a big toe injury on beam during the last verification before the competition. She ended up having a deep lacerated wound that required stitches and was unable to compete on either beam or floor. After the injury, she also briefly stopped training vault and the bars dismount. She only returned to vault training after arriving in Naples and did her dismount on bars for the first time only in competition. Nevertheless, Nabieva leads the qualification on vault and also qualified to the bars final in fourth place. On bars, she got a neutral deduction of 0.3 for starting her routine too late. Without the deduction, she would’ve finished in the second place, thus, she has great chances for medals in both finals. She also gave us “the most flawless beam routine of this quad”:
truly the most flawless beam routine of this quad pic.twitter.com/JNBUjotybd
— gymnast relate (@gymnastrelate) July 5, 2019
The team competition at the Universiade was a bit underwhelming, since only three countries sent strong teams and, ultimately, it was a battle between Japan that basically send 3/5 of their 2019 Worlds team (Asuka Teramoto, Aiko Sugihara, and Hitomi Hatakeda) and Russia that sent World and European champions (Tatiana Nabieva, Uliana Perebinosova, Liliia Akhaimova). Perebinosova missed the beginning of the season due to recovering from an injury and while Akhaimova competed at the Russian Nationals, she has been dealing with ankle pain that caused her to miss international competitions. Despite a bit of a nervy performance, both got 53.0 in the all-around and placed behind the qualification leader Hitomi Hatakeda that got 53.800. Asuka Teramoto, the reigning Japanese all-around champion, finished behind her two teammates and did not make the all-around final as a result.
The competition continues today with the all-around finals starting at 2 pm local time (8 am ET, 5 am PT).
Photo: Russian Artistic Gymnastics Federation
Support Gymnovosti on Patreon from only $1 a month and help us bring to you even more awesome gymnastics coverage!
Buy cool gymnastics-themed t-shirts, hoodies, pillows, phone cases, and more at our store on Teepublic!
Didn’t she compete at the Grand Prix in Czech Republic around 2016/17?
She did, but that was not a national team assignment. She also competed at Voronin Cup and Dityatin Cup several times since 2014 and those are technically international competitions but again, in neither of those she officially represented the national team