Russian national teams in various sports are currently returning to centralized training. As the coronavirus pandemic is still not quite slowing down in Russian, there are certain measures that teams and training centers have to take. For example, all gymnasts who arrived to Round Lake by private cars had to be tested for coronavirus and stay in their rooms while waiting for the results. Gymnasts from outside of Moscow who had to take trains or planes will go through even a longer isolation period in their rooms as they will need to take two tests before being allowed to train.
In addition, the Federal Biomedical Agency which, among other things, is responsible for clearing athletes to train, published guidelines for training during the quarantine. In these guidelines, there is a requirement that people age 65 and older should be excluded from all parts of the training process that require their physical presence. This poses a problem for the artistic gymnastics team where several national team coaches and personal coaches are older than 65. Among them are the head coach Andrei Rodionenko and the men’s team head coach Valeri Alfosov. It is not clear whether the requirements will be actually enforced as it seems that at the moment, all coaches are at Round Lake and participating in the training process. However, if any of those coaches get sick, the federation could potentially face charges and fines for breaking those rules.
The rules also require wearing masks outside of private rooms at all times. Only athletes during practices are exempt from this rule. Athletes are also required to use liquid sanitizer to disinfect their hands every our and it is recommended that the federations provide each athlete with 50 ml of sanitizer per day.
