For Kuksenkov, the first major international competition since Rio was a success: he did his two events well in the team final and helped the Russian team to win gold. He talked to the media about what this victory means to him:
“I feel happy because we have become European Champions three times in a row (Sofian 2014, Bern 2016 and Glasgow 2018). It was our goal to win three times.”
Kuksenkov, like Belyavskiy, also commented on the issues with high bar. This apparatus was the undoing of many teams at the competition, and the silver winners, the British team suffered three falls on it in the final, while Russia managed to stay on (they had two falls in the qualification):
“When you win, it doesn’t matter how many points you win. Two or three tenths of a point [will determine whether] you have gold, silver or bronze medal. Today we made mistakes that we shouldn’t have made. The grip on the high bar was very bad and you will have seen a lot of mistakes on the high bar in this competition, because of the grip. This is sports, everything can happen. We used a little bit more chalk [in the final] because we knew after the podium session the grip was bad, and in the qualification, David Belyavskiy also made a mistake. A lot of gymnasts in this competition made mistakes on the high bar. We did what we needed to win.”
Kuksenkov said that after the team final, the gymnasts planned to finally do some sightseeing which they didn’t have time to do since arriving in Glasgow:
“We want to go to the city center because we haven’t had time to go there. All we have done is training, eating, training and eating. Now the competition has finished a little bit early we will go to the center.”
Source: CNS
Photo: Russian Artistic Gymnastics Federation
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