Angelina Melnikova had a great season in 2019 and expected the Olympic year to be great as well. She talked to Match TV about adjusting to the new reality after the pandemic led to canceled competitions and training put on hold.
Initially, the news about the Olympics’ postponement was a shock to her:
“It was really hard to accept the postponement news. The whole team believed until the very end that… ok, Russian Championships, European Championships, but the Olympics surely wouldn’t be postponed because it’s such a big event. When we learned about the postponement, we were shocked. For a minute, I felt completely devastated. I was really sad, I thought: “Why this year? Why when I…?”
She was almost a lock for this year’s Olympic team a lot can happen in a year and now she also has to compete with 2005-born gymnasts, among them the junior AA World Champion Viktoria Listunova. Melnikova is trying to reframe the delay in a positive light:
“At the moment, my only goal is the Olympic Games. There will be another selection and there could really be different girls going, not the ones planned for this year’s Olympics. And that, by the way, is the saddest thing because thinking, let’s say, that I could go to the Olympics this year, or, rather, that I was already going, I was already on the team, but next year, I simply can just not make it… I think it’s like something was taken from you, honestly. But you can find positives in it – that you’ll have more time to prepare, you’ll just be a year older, you’ll think differently. And all the negatives slowly turned into positives.”
The break in training that came afterwards seemed scary at first:
“I didn’t train for two months and ten days, it’s the longest break in my career. Of course, I did some general conditioning at home but trust me, it’s not the same at all. Gymnastics requires coordination and you lose that coordination. Regular exercising is not the same. I thought that I’d come to the training camp, to the gym for the first time [after the break] and that I’d be completely disoriented. I was afraid I’d lose some skills.”
She has a lot of experience overcoming fear in gymnastics, though:
“Gymnastics is the scariest sport. We flip over our heads, you need strength, beautiful movements, and even math and physics. There has always been fear of doing new elements. But the point is that you overcome that fear. If I were afraid of doing a back salto at ten years old, I wouldn’t be able to do it now.”
When the gymnasts returned to Round Lake at the end of May, they were under strict quarantine rules at first. However, the rules have gotten much less strict since then:
“We are tested for COVID-19 and then we are allowed to go out [of the room] and the training center is locked down for our safety. When we first came, we wore gloves and masks all the time and observed distancing rules. Now it’s more or less fine. We walk around freely and there are two people living in the room, while before that we all lived alone.”
Melnikova talked about her first Olympics and how she didn’t know until the very end whether she would be on the team because of her injury:
“I was completely inexperienced, you could say. I had only competed once at a senior [international] competition before that. I even feel goosebumps now [thinking of Rio]. A week before leaving for the Olympic Games, we had a verification, and I pulled a hamstring. I pulled it really hard and for the whole week, I basically couldn’t lift the leg 90 degrees up, I was in a lot of pain. I just cried every night, I went to sleep every night with the thought, “please, can my leg get just a bit better, can it not hurt so much?” And on the last day, the papers saying that I was on the team were submitted because the head coach came to the last practice and watched me train. I tried to do the maximum and, as a result, I was put on the team. I think that my risk of not making the team was about 70% because I spent a long time out of training.”
Melnikova went through a difficult season in 2017 when things weren’t quite working as planned:
“2017 was one of the hardest years in my career. I had problems in the gym, with the coach, and so on. Everything piled up, and when everything piles up at once, a million problems, you don’t know what to do. All the older girls took a break. Some – to have kids, some – just to get rest. So, we basically were left as older girls and, of course, there was certain pressure on us.”
In 2018, things got a bit better but she was unable to win an individual medal at the World Championships in Doha:
“I trained really hard for that World Championships, I worked a lot, and I really hoped that I would be able to show my work and to be on the medal podium but that didn’t happen. It was very upsetting and, of course, I spent a long time recovering after that but I didn’t lose my motivation.”
Things started coming together for her in 2019 and she believes that growing up allowed her to become more confident in her gymnastics:
“2019 has been the brightest year of my career. The most demanding, the most challenging, I don’t know how to call it. It was just fantastic. I think the team medal and the individual medal weigh the same. The team medal [is important] because a whole pile of responsibility falls on you and when you went through that, when you overcame all those challenges and all that responsibility and did your job as you needed to, it’s like gold for you. I grew up and started to understand what I want and what my values are. My identity formed and I understood well what I needed and didn’t need and started prioritizing my goals better. Thanks to this, my career took off and this gave me more confidence.”
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