On Monday, Dalaloyan’s Instagram post led many to believe he announced his retirement and the news circulated widely in the Russian media. We later learned that Dalaloyan meant to explain his absence at the national team camp – he left Round Lake one day after his arrival. Dalaloyan’s personal coach Aleksandr Kalinin further elaborated on the current training situation in a comment to TASS:
“We’re continuing training at the Dynamo gymnastics center which is near Sokol subway station [in Moscow], everything’s fine. We train six days a week, two practices a day on four of them. The schedule is almost the same as at the national team training center at Round Lake.”
On Monday, it became known that Dalaloyan was unhappy with the lockdown rules at Round Lake. With three young children at home, he did not feel like staying at the training center for several weeks in a row in a period with no upcoming competitions made sense. Some athletes previously got permissions to go home at night or on weekends despite the pandemic restrictions but this was prohibited because of the omicron wave and because Round Lake serves as one of the Winter Olympics training centers. Kalinin said that the news about the lockdown surprised Dalaloyan:
“It’s just that originally there was an agreement that Artur would be able to leave the center at night but it was forbidden at the last moment because of the difficult COVID situation. And so he wrote it [the Instagram post]. The next national team training camp will start on February 20th and Artur plans to participate in it. The preparations for the Russian Championships will start, the athlete is preparing new routines for this competition.”
The MAG Russian Championships will take place in Kazan on April 11-17.
