In 2017, Ellie Black won all-around silver at the home World Championships in Montreal. This year, she did not quite have difficulty and preparation to be a medal favorite in the final, so her main goal was to enjoy the competition and show the crowd good gymnastics:
“I think I was the oldest one competing in the all-around tonight and to be fifth in the world is phenomenal. I think it shows that age is only a number and you can still improve and still be the top in the world. It was super special tonight, I was really happy with my performance. My whole perspective on this competition was to go out and try to be aggressive and have fun and enjoy it and I did that and I showed some good gymnastics. I had Covid like a month ago, so I feel like my endurance is a little bit lower, I can still feel it in my chest, and I haven’t had as much time this year to prepare as I would’ve liked.”
Coming into the final, Black was not in the top group of competitors because she placed 11th in the qualification. She finished 5th overall but for a moment in the last rotation, when she did her vault, she was in a medal position behind Jessica Gadirova, before Rebeca Andrade, Shilese Jones, and Alice Kincella finished their routines and moved higher than Black. She says she expected these gymnasts to pass her in the standings and was not nervous watching their routines:
“The last competitors [to go] were very strong, so, unless something really crazy happened, I was expecting them to be in front of me. I qualified in 11th place and to move up to fifth, so I was just really pleased with my competition. And ending on vault is always fun because it goes so fast and you can watch the rest of the competition. sitting and waiting for the scores is maybe not as fun but I think I did everything I possibly could out there today with the preparations I had. This is my fourth all-around competition if you count podium, so my legs needed a good shakeout before vault. But we made it.”
The gold medalist Rebeca Andrade’s floor routine was the last routine of the competition and Black talked about watching Andrade’s routine and admiring Andrade as a gymnast:
“I think Rebeca did a phenomenal routine to seal it, she was really to make it clean in all her landings and I like her performance. She’s just phenomenal. Her gymnastics is so amazing, it’s so dynamic, it’s strong, it’s powerful, and she’s also very artistic. And she’s so good at almost every single event, this makes her a great all-arounder but also a great event specialist. She’s a great performer to the crowd and just a phenomenal gymnast all around.”
Black missed the 2021 World Championships because she went on the Gold Over America tour with Simone Biles. She feels that doing the tour gave her extra confidence:
“I think it was a great experience. You perform like five nights a week, so it helps bring out this kind of performance and fun and playing to the crowd. I think this floor routine is also just a great one for me, I feel like I can do that, I can really express it and feel confident and connect with the judges and the crowd. I’ve been working really hard on that and I was so happy just to get another chance to go out there and perform that tonight.”
Black also tried to do some investigating about what is going on with the roof leak – during the team final, there was water leaking onto the balance beam.
She first posted a photo of a maintenance worker checking the arena roof:
As she explained to Gymcastic, the leak problem has not yet been completely eliminated:
