Artur Dalaloyan competed at the Tokyo Olympics only a few months after his Achilles surgery and still in a lot of pain. Despite this, he said several times that he intends to go to the World Championships this October and start attending national team camps already in August. However, this week, Dalaloyan told Sport24 his participation at Worlds will depend on whether the doctors will clear him.
Q: Have you resumed training?
A: Yes, I started going to the gym already this week. I’m recovering slowly, without working on the apparatuses for now, because I need to prepare myself in terms of conditioning first.
Q: Are you going to the World Championships?
A: I can’t answer this question yet because it all depends on my health. When I get a check-up, when the doctors tell me, “Yes, you are fully ready, you’re healthy”, then I’ll decide.
An additional obstacle is that Olympic medalists have a meeting with Vladimir Putin in September and need to be in strict quarantine for a week before that meeting. Dalaloyan said that if he wants to go to Worlds, ideally, he would need to be medically cleared before the quarantine starts:
“For now, nothing is clear regarding my participation at the World Championships. Everything depends on the medical-check up. I hope I’ll be able to do it before we are quarantined ahead of meeting the President. There are a lot of things happening after the Olympics, all athletes are in demand. I hope that I’ll get the check-up soon, in September the latest.”
Photo: Russian Artistic Gymnastics Federation
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