Dalaloyan: We were booed in Glasgow

Artur Dalaloyan made two guest appearances on Sport24 Youtube channel. In the first one, he answered 24 short questions shortly before leaving for Worlds and in the second one he talked about his victory at Worlds, dealing with the newfound fame and preparing for the future competitions.

Q: Do you get offended when people call you Jacob? [as in Jacob from Twilight, people think that Dalaloyan resembles Taylor Lautner]

A: No, I don’t. I’d love to be Jacob, as famous and popular as he is. But I’m Artur.

Q: What was interesting to see in Scotland, in Glasgow?

A: Glasgow… I can say that it’s a pretty nasty city. And the British people are not very friendly. And the weather there is corresponding to this. We lived on the river shore, you couldn’t enjoy a walk there.

Q: What was your most expensive purchase?

A: My ride, a Mercedes.

Q: How much did it cost?

A: I bought it for exactly a million rubles.

Q: Conor or Khabib?

A: Conor.

Q: Imagine you saw your favorite football player Cristiano Ronaldo on the street — what would you say to him?

A: Honestly, I can’t even imagine such a situation ever happening. And if I saw him, I don’t think I’d dare to approach him and tell him how amazing he is – everyone already knows it and he knows it. I would just enjoy seeing him and that’s it. Perhaps, I’d tell my girlfriend about it before going to sleep.

Q: What did you give your girlfriend on your first date?

A: First date… Flowers – definitely. Without a gift. 100%  it was flowers.

Q: Have you ever met girls on Tinder?

A: When I was younger, yeah.

Q: Do you like going to clubs and dancing?

A: You know, I’ve forgotten all about clubs now because when you have a training schedule, preparations, constant goals, you don’t have time for clubs. Although I’d like to go sometimes.

Q: Do you think the fame got into your head?

A: Our sport isn’t popular enough for it to get into my head. Yes, with the people of my age, I have kind of a feeling that I, maybe, achieved a bit more than them. Perhaps, now I have a bit more aspirations, thoughts, and goals for the future.

Q: What was the weirdest comment you got on Instagram? “Artur, I want to take a picture with you and meet you, how do I find you?”

A: No, not even that. Sometimes there are way more inappropriate comments and even photos. I try not to look at those, I have a girlfriend after all. But, whether you want it or not, you might end up accidentally seeing it.

Q: Are you addicted to Instagram?

A: To some extent, yes. It’s additional interest to me, after all, because I understand that it can be useful somehow in the future. When you have a certain audience, people who support you and cheer on you… You get a certain responsibility. I guess that’s why I keep updating my Instagram because I see that the number of followers is growing, there are more and more of them. Hello, followers!

Q: Imagine you’re a screenplay writer and you’re making your own movie. What will it be about?

A: I think I would put most of the things I see in life into that movie: sport, love, drama, I’d mix it all together. I think it would be delicious, beautiful, romantic, confident, fiery, hot and athletic.

Q: Which Marvel character are you?

A: I guess I’m that grandpa that always appears in some funny moment and then disappears. [Stan Lee]

Q: Blondes or brunettes?

A: Blondes.

Q: Who’s the most stylish, memorable, spectacular girl on the planet?

A: I won’t answer this question because I’m afraid of my girlfriend.

Q: Do you play Counter-Strike?

A: No. I used to, until age 16 or so. But now I don’t even have a computer.

Q: You travel a lot, go to international competitions a lot. Which country is the best?

A: Spain. There will be a competition there that’s not so serious, so I can bring my family with me and just spend time with them, see them cheer on me. Because at a major competition, whether Euros or Worlds, you don’t really want your family to be in the stands and cheer on you because you see them worry and start to worry too. This can be unsettling.

Q: What was the tastiest dish you ate in Spain?

A: Pasta in cream sauce with large tiger prawns.

Q: I heard that you had discipline issues when you were 13. What was the worst thing you did?

A: I had a party in my room at the training center, I invited not only the men’s team but also the girls.

Q: What were you drinking there?

A: I don’t even want to tell because people will get drunk from just reading the description.

Q: What’s your favorite alcoholic drink?

A: Dry red wine.

Q: When you were still in school, what did you do to pick up girls?

A: I can’t really say that I had to do anything, the girls approached me. I think I was the smallest in my class but I got all the valentines.

Q: What distracts a full-time athlete at the age of 14 or 15?

A: The peers, the classmates who aren’t athletes, they always hand out or go out. They have lots of free time, they go to the movies or the mall, or something incomprehensible. It distracts and attracts you. Like, it’s not even very interesting but it somehow attracts you. They can drink and smoke and you want it, too. Especially, when you’re a kid, you want to rebel.

Q: And then there are girls.

A: Yes, especially the girls, all these temptations.

Q:  Were you able to avoid it?

A: I managed to get through it somehow and not to quit the sport.

Q: In artistic gymnastics, you can’t be third, fifth or seventh because it won’t bring you anything, you have to be the champion. You are the champion. Did you realize that you could’ve failed? Were you afraid of it?

A: I don’t know. When I turned 18, I made the senior national team. I already knew my goals and my plans for the future well. I realized that I missed a lot of school because of the sport and that getting an education and another profession wouldn’t be for me. My only choice would be to work in the gym and ensure that my life would be provided for and that I would have some savings for the future.

Q: So, you’d started planning a lot back then already?

A: Yes, of course. I already realized that my life is the sport.

Q: You made the national team 3-4 years ago when the Russian gymnastics was slowly rising from the crisis. At that moment, the girls did better than the guys, there were a lot of chances that you wouldn’t make it. What did you say to yourself?

A: My policy is that I don’t need to worry too much, to make up problems, to create them out of nowhere, because we’re people, just like the Japanese and the Chinese and we can easily compete with them. The most important thing is to put your soul into your work, to invest a lot of energy. I live and trained with the thought “if I’ll do it, then, I’ll be able to do everything well in competition”.  In training, I was working on my goals and plans. Sometimes, I tried to go ahead of the guys in order to preserve my self-confidence. I didn’t even think that I might have been unable to do it. Well, of course, you always leave a small chance that you might get unlucky in something.

Q: And did you ever got unlucky?

A: Like, really unlucky? No. I don’t remember ever getting really unlucky. In each case, I can give you the arguments, analyze everything, and I’ll get to the conclusion that I made a mistake somewhere. That’s not lack of luck.

Q: I think that in that sense it’s easy for the coaches to work with you because you’ll keep working until you did everything.

A: Yes. I do even more than I’m told to do, I always try to do more. That’s how my inner confidence grows.

Q:  The more you win, the more confident you are?

A: The more you win over yourself. Like, if the coach tells you to do this, this and that, and you’re like “ok, I’ll go out there a do it”. And the coach doesn’t know that I can do more, he thinks that I just did what he asked me to and that was it, but I’m doing more.

Q: So, you’re a real workaholic?

A: Well, kind of…

Q: Different athletes have different personalities. Recently, Yana Egorian, the two-time Olympic champion in fencing, gave us an interview and she said: “My coaches dared me”. But you’re completely different, you put a goal for yourself and deliberately move towards it.

A: No, I also have that, thanks to our coaches, especially our head coach Valeri Alfosov. He likes stuff like that, so, when an athlete is not feeling it, when everything in the gym depresses you and you don’t have the energy, this person can fire you up. He can find the right approach to any athlete, how to fire them up, how to dare them. This really helps me.

Q: Can your team now fight for a lot of gold medals at the Olympic Games?

A: Yes. Our team has definitely upped the level, we achieved a very good result. But I think that the most important thing is to get through this preparation, this year and a half until the Olympics without accumulating injuries. Because yeah, we have to keep working well and intensely but we need to keep it intact.

Q: To keep your muscles or your mental game?

A: The mental game isn’t going anywhere but the health for an athlete is the main thing, it’s the factor responsible for everything. If something hurts or you got injured because of your foolishness since all the injuries happen due to foolishness. That’s a very important point – don’t do anything foolish. You have to come to every practice completely prepared.

Q: But it’s too boring without any foolishness.

A: Then you have to plan some time during which you can get silly but in such a way that it wouldn’t affect your training.

Q: What kind of vacations you prefer?

A: I really like something calm and quiet – nature, sea – all this is great. Actually, I used to be a very active person before but somehow now I want some calmness more.

Q: But since your main goal is the Olympics, the next year and a half will be anything but calm.

A: Yes. Rught now, after the Worlds and before the New Year, we have some lighter training schedule, and in December I’ll be on vacation.

Q: What is your favorite event? 

A: I don’t know. This year, bars are a gold mine for me because I get a medal on bars at every competition, this makes me very happy. I like high bar because it’s a spectacular event with all the releases.

Q: It’s scary to watch. And you probably can’t avoid falls while training.

A: Of course. No practice is without falls. You’ll definitely fall on something.

Q: But you have to stay healthy somehow.

A: Yes, but we have mats and foam pits for that in training, you can fall safely. We only start training on competition apparatuses when we are completely ready to do our routines on them when we are ready both mentally and physically. It happens about a week or two before the competition.

Q: Have you ever been very nervous during a competition?

A: I used to be very nervous and shaking at every competition.

Q: When did it stop, after what competition?

A: I think it depends more not on the competitions you had but on age and experience. When you generally rethink your life a bit, you start taking things easier. This is an acquired skill. Somehow, at some moment, I convinced myself that it’s generally useful in life, some sort of calm demeanor, an ability to restrain yourself. Before, I didn’t think about it, I was just training and competing and trying to be on fire. But this didn’t end well, as a rule.

Q: The Olympics are ahead, this is the most important thing. Right now you’ll relax on a beach for a bit and after that, you’ll have to go through a year and a half of hard and ruthless work. Does this scare you at all?

A: No, it doesn’t. I’ve been through this a thousand times already, I’ve prepared for competitions a thousand times.

Q: Are there any people on the team that have a different attitude?

A: Of course. Every person is different, they have their view of the world.

Q: I think that in this situation, you are meant to be the team leader. Not even in terms of the results but because you react to different situations so calmly.

A: I can’t say that I react calmly in any situation. Sometimes I kind of blow up completely, get mad and say all sorts of things and that’s not good.

Q: Recently, the World Championships have finished in Doha. Qatar is quite an exotic place.

A: Exotic in the sense of competition organization?

Q: Yes. How did the public treat you?

A: Well, gymnastics isn’t very popular in Qatar. The people came, especially during the finals. On the last day, the arena was practically full. But I’m not sure that the people who sat in those seats actually understood what was happening. They, perhaps, kind of heard that there are the Artistic Gymnastics World Championships, so they came to watch it. But I’m not sure they actually realized what was going on.

Q: Where’s the most knowledgeable public?

A: Well, in Great Britain, for example, where we competed at the European Championships this summer. They have a pretty knowledgeable crowd there, gymnastics is quite popular there. There were a lot of people on each day of the competition. Although, our team wasn’t treated so well for some reason.

Q: How did they show it?

A: Well, you know, the competition is going on and you feel some sort of support or something else…

Q: Were they booing you?

A: Yes, they booed us. I don’t know why, for what, what did we do to them but this happened. When the British gymnasts competed, there was so much noise, it was just impossible. But I can say that the British are ahead of the whole world when it comes to organizing competitions, they always make a great show.

Q: What kind of show can you make during a gymnastics competition?

A: There’s a proper announcer that can invite a gymnast to the place from which they announce. For example, they invited a gymnast, a few kids from the crowd, turned on the music, some popular dance, and they needed to dance. It’s so cool, it really ignited the public, everyone was screaming. But we weren’t invited to do that, we were booed.

Q: The Olympics will take place in Japan. The Japanese gymnasts will definitely prepare, gymnastics is the pride of the nation there.

A: Yes, gymnastics is very popular in Japan. I’ve already been there, I even went there this year for a World Cup.

Q: I think they probably treat our gymnasts well there.

A: Yes, I can say that the Japanese like the Russians. I didn’t see them treating the Chinese as great as us, though.

Q: Who are our main competitors right now?

A: At the moment, it’s Japan and China. I can set America aside for the moment because their men’s team got much weaker, their whole team was renewed. For now, they mostly have young gymnasts who either don’t have enough difficulty or enough experience. But I can’t say that they won’t be able to upgrade in time. For now, I can only set them aside but there’s still a year and a half.

Q: Is it even important for you who are your main competitors? Do you watch them, do you follow what they’re doing?

A: Of course, we discuss this as a team, calculate some things, who can get what score, who can cover for whom, all these moments. Personally, I prefer not to see my scores of that of my competitors during a competition, I just go out there and do what I know how to do. I’ve been preparing for the Worlds for a month, we worked, and worked, and worked. And that’s it, you go out there and do your job, this is the most important thing and everything will depend on it.

Q: You have an interesting combination of cities in your personal life. You were born in Moldavia, you have Armenian heritage and now you live in Moscow. Where do you spend most time now?

A: I’ve been living in Moscow since I was six years old. My father is Armenian. By the way, I’ve never been to Armenia. Father left us when I was about 9 or 10 years old, since then I haven’t seen him, we’re not in touch at all.

Q: I think you’ll be received very well in Armenia.

A: Yes, that’s true because, after the Worlds, there were lots of congratulations from Armenia, from Moldavia, everyone’s inviting me. It’s absolutely incredible. I can’t even respond to everything. It’s amazing, I’m grateful for that, I appreciate it but I can’t really go to all the places.

Q: Don’t you say to them: “guys, don’t bother me right now, I have the Olympics in 1,5 years”?

A: I have time for all that for now. I don’t have much energy left, though. But I gave myself a certain period of time for all this: interviews, communications, talking to the media. But at some moment, let’s say, in January (our training camps starts on January 5th), I can definitely say that I’ll put it all aside, I’ll set goals for myself in the gym and I’ll be working.

Q: Do you not think about personal life at all right now?

A: Why not, my personal life is going great, I live with my girlfriend. She’s not a gymnast, she used to be a ballroom dancer.

Q: But it must be hard for her with you being at training camps all the time.

A: Well, no one said to her that it would be easy.

Photo: UEG