Angelina Melnikova came to the World Championships at the end of a very good season. She won silver on bars and bronze on floor and in the all-around at the European Championships and then won two gold and two silver medals at the European Games. She and her coaches seem to pace her well this season (despite Valentina Rodionenko saying she was unhappy with Melnikova’s scores in Minsk and claiming that she does not want to work hard).
Yesterday, Melnikova finished fourth in the all-around in the qualification and qualified two floor and bars finals (scoring higher than one of the Russian bars specialists, Anastasia Agafonova):
“I feel really good, I’m really happy with my work, but, as always, I wish I did better.”
Her floor routine scored 14.1 despite the fact that her bun came undone in the middle of her floor routine:
“Actually, even before going out on the floor, I touched my bun and thought – should I redo it or not? And I was like: ok, I won’t redo it. So, I’m doing the second tumbling pass and feel like my bun has come undone. I know how much this can bother you and the second part of the floor routine, I just kept thinking about this, about the braid possibly hitting me in the eye or somewhere else, but, thankfully, this didn’t happen and I did everything well. Actually, this is the first time this happened to me in competition. Of course, in practice, I would have stopped, redone it and continued, but here I couldn’t stop, I just wanted it not to hit me in the eye, that’s it.”
She switched to a new floor routine earlier this season and was happy with how excited the crowd was about the routine:
“I have a new floor routine, Ksyusha Afanasyeva, World champion on floor, choreographed it for me. I competed with it in Minsk, but I didn’t receive such applause in Minsk like I did here. So, I’m very happy the spectators liked it and everyone appreciated my routine.”
Melnikova is starring in the Olympic Channel’s documentary series All-Around and hopes the series will help promote gymnastics:
“I think the viewers really like watching the show. For me, it’s also interesting to watch how the mentality is different in our countries, how differently we train. I also think the show inspires people, motivates them to do gymnastics.”
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