Milad Karimi has extra motivation to perform well at Worlds – the team will get to go to a Liverpool game if they compete well on Sunday:
“We really want to go to a game, there will be a game now. If we compete well in the qualification, we will go to see football”.
Karimi who made event finals at the 2020 Olympics and 2021 Worlds hopes that his new routines will also be medal-worthy. He is also excited about some Covid restrictions being lifted and being able to compete with spectators:
“What I missed most of all, the most important thing – it was spectators. Because when you compete and see who you are competing for, it’s a nice feeling, it’s a great deal of support for the athletes.”
“Things are slowly going back [to the pre-pandemic times], you can feel that. At some competitions, there are even banquets. During the Covid restrictions, all athletes just went home after competitions. We were just in Paris and all the athletes gathered together, it even felt a bit weird.”
In 2021, Karimi trained full time in Ukraine, at the Olympic training center in Koncha-Zaspa. The center has better equipment than gyms in Kazakhstan, he had strong training partners that challenged him, and he was close to his fiancée Diana Varinska. The plan was to keep training in Ukraine but the war made it impossible. Karimi returned to Kazakhstan and has been training with the national team. Fortunately, the team’s gym has been upgraded:
“We have been preparing [for Worlds] at our training center at our native city Almaty. Generally, our gym is well-equipped now and the training went full steam ahead.”
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