The reigning World champion Artur Dalaloyan came to the all-around final at the European Championships as one of the clear favorites for the gold. However, both he and his teammate Nikita Nagornyy hit all six of their routines. Nagornyy had a difficulty advantage over a point and was a bit cleaner on some of the events which eventually decided the outcome. Dalaloyan was still extremely happy with the results and with his newfound consistency:
“I can tell that you that I’m always striving for the first place but it’s much more important how much work you’ve invested in this medal. I can say that for today, this medal is more dear to me than gold because I did AA for two days without mistakes and added new elements. I tried new routines, I tried a new vault with a 6.0 difficulty, it’s an unreal difficulty, possibly the highest right now in MAG but it was unsuccessful. I landed it but they did not credit the full difficulty and there were many mistakes. Plus, in this competition, I’ve successfully done a new dismount on parallel bars which will now be named after me. I’m incredibly happy and I can’t say that I’m unsatisfied with anything.”
On Saturday and Sunday, Dalaloyan will compete in the apparatus finals and hopes to medal there as well:
“I haven’t had time to think about the apparatus finals yet because I was focused on the all-around. Generally, I can fight for a medal on all the events, I know that for sure, and I’ll try and do my routines calmly like today.”
Dalaloyan was extremely happy for his friend and teammate Nikita Nagornyy and tried to reflect on where Nikita was better on that day:
“Nikita got the biggest advantage today in pommel horse and this is my weakest apparatus. However, during the last half a year, I made enormous progress on pommel horse. My score is now higher by more than half a point and the most important thing is that I hit it for two days without mistakes. Also vault, where I made a mistake and I think I made a mistake from having too much confidence. On parallel bars, Nikita was cleaner than I was and, of course, on high bar, he got a really high score, but he’s not better than me on high bar in
Photo: E. Mikhaylova, Russian Artistic Gymnastics Federation
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