Denis Abliazin has been dealing with leg injuries for over a year which seriously limited his training. At the 2021 Russian Championships, he is only competing on rings. He’s already training vault again but is still doing soft landings, so the coaches deemed him not ready to compete it. Abliazin won gold on rings at the sparsely attended 2020 Russian Championships but ended up with silver after a tie-break at the 2021 Championships. Grigori Klimentev won gold here.
Abliazin told media that he hopes to compete at the upcoming European Championships and do vault there. He won gold on both rings and vault at the 2019 Euros but did not have a chance to defend his titles because Russia withdrew from the 2020 competition.
“At the Russian Championships, I will only do rings to keep my legs safe. That’s what the doctor recommends and we’re following his guidance. And I’ll be working on vault for the European Championships. So far, everything’s going well. There’s a lot of work, we spend most of the time at training camps with two 1.5-hour-long practices a day, six days a week. We’re also preparing and will keep preparing for the Olympics.”
Abliazin planned to start training vault last year but the postponement of the Olympics allowed him to delay it:
“When it was announced last year that the Olympics were postponed, we focused the training just on rings, while we were waiting for the doctors’s permission to land and tumble again. After all, I had two surgeries. After the second surgery, we did x-rays every month. Now, you can say that I’m fully training but I’m still taking precautions in order not to overload my legs.”
Abliazin tried to get a nominative spot to the Olympics via Apparatus World Cup series but wasn’t able to place high enough on vault or rings and then the surgery took him out of contention. Now he hopes to get the extra individual spot Russia has and his performance at the upcoming Euros will mean a lot for the selection:
“The team for the Tokyo Olympics will depend on the Russian Championships and the European Championships after that. In any case, we are all training and will keep training until the very last day. And no one can say with 100% confidence who will make the Russian team. It depends on many factors. For example, someone might get sick.”
Photo: Elena Mikhaylova, Russian Artistic Gymnastics Federation
