Andrei Rodionenko followed the comments on multiple issues at Worlds made by Valentina Rodionenko with his own critique of the organizing committee:
“There’s never been such a number of injuries as during these worlds. All the injuries were caused by the organization’s problems and not by the gymnasts’ weak preparation. During the first days, every team had someone injured in training including even Kohei Uchimura who’s never been injured before. Even the head of the FIG tried to find an answer to what caused such a big number of injuries. The training rules that were set by the organizers did not allow us to prepare for the competition normally. And all these little details created the environment that caused that plethora of injuries. Athletes had to go from the shadows to the podium under the rays of bright light, and the lights in the warm-up hall were placed very low and hit directly in the eyes. How would the athletes be able to prepare normally in conditions like that? This is unacceptable for a competition of such level.
Rodionenko also noted that the delegations weren’t allowed to arrive well in advance and had no time to recover from the jetlag and adapt to the local climate:
“We didn’t even have one day here to adapt. We landed on September, 27 and the next day we already went to the training hall, while on the 29th we already had a podium training. And on the peak adaptation days, we were already competing. The Federation executives also agree that it’s not a very healthy schedule and they will take all the mistakes of these Worlds into account in the future”.
