Gerasimova: I’m angry at myself because I need to compete with a cooler head and work even harder

At the Russian Championships this year, Elena Gerasimova finished fourth and was then named to the nominative team for the European Championships. Gerasimova was part of the gold-winning junior Worlds team in Gyor where she also won gold on beam and bronze on floor, but in the all-around, she is somewhat weaker than the other two outstanding Russian new seniors Vladislava Urazova and Viktoriia Listunova. Gerasimova’s strongest argument for making the teams is her beam – not only she has high difficulty on the event, she mostly manages to stay on the beam. However, her first senior international competition didn’t go so well, she was starting on beam in the very first subdivision and fell twice. The series of errors continued on floor and she was able to recover only on bars and vault. Unfortunately, due to the persistent streaming issues, spectators mostly were not able to see her routines and only the video of the floor routine surfaced so far.

In an interview to MatchTV, Gerasimova said that competing at her first senior Euros made her too nervous.

Q: Two falls on beam…

A: Beam is such a treacherous event for us that it’s very hard to stay on it. You have to approach the performance with a cool head. It’s my first time competing at such a big senior competition and I can get nervous and really shaken. I need to learn how to perform from these mistakes in order not to make them at future competitions. It’s huge experience and I hope this will all get processed in my head in order not to repeat these mistakes.

Q: You fell forward a bit on one of your passes on floor. Were you still nervous?

A: I have a new floor routine, it’s my first time doing it at an international competition. I wanted to do it better but it didn’t quite go as planned. I need to work on it more.

Q: The two last events – vault and bars – seemed more confident.

A: Since by that time I’d already blown the first two events, I needed to get myself together and get into it. I couldn’t compete like that, I needed to get myself together and do it, and, I think, I managed it more or less.

Q: Are you angry about the qualification results or today’s routines will allow you to get into the competition mode?

A: I’m really angry. First of all, I’m angry at myself because I need to compete with a cooler head and work even harder at practices. It’s all a lesson and an experience.

Gerasimova was unable to qualify to any individual finals at this competition.

Photo: Elena Mikhaylova, Russian Artistic Gymnastics Federation

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