While the women’s team final was a bit nervy today with all teams making mistakes and Russia having to count a fall, the medal podium ended up as expected. USA won by about 9 points and the question was only by how many points they would win, not if they would win. Russia was clearly the second strongest team of the day and China grabbed bronze after a very successful vault rotation (they struggled on bars and beam, surprisingly).
For Aliya Mustafina, this was the first international competition since Rio. In those two years she got married, had a baby, returned to training, got divorced, won a few medals at the Russian Championships, had a knee injury, came back from the knee injury and now she’s the team captain and World silver medalist again. Originally, Mustafina was supposed to only compete bars and beam as she is still recovering from her injury. However, after Angelina Simakova injured her ankle, Mustafina was called up to compete floor in qualifications and continued in today’s team final.
She said to R-Sport that she intentionally did simple routines but tried to execute them as precisely as possible:
“I can’t say that any event was especially hard for me. I was preparing simple routine but I tried to execute them cleanly. So, it wasn’t a super difficult task for me. I remembered everything, today I more or less came to my senses, but on the first day, after the qualification, I had so many emotions I couldn’t calm down for a long time! I really missed those emotions, when it’s hard and you’re shaking and need to get yourself together”.
She said that her plan is to restore all-around soon:
“I didn’t do vault here, I didn’t prepare it at all. In the future, of course, I will compete all-around. I guess I don’t know how to do gymnastics otherwise. I don’t know if you can call [returning after giving birth] a heroic feat. Yes, it was not easy but it was a planned preparation, just slightly sped up. Today, floor was the easiest for me. I didn’t prepare to compete on floor here but at Round Lake I was training floor anyway, I was going through it every day. Generally, I also worked a lot on beam and bars, so everything went calmly. Regarding the penalty on beam, I went overtime, by one second. I’m most happy with my bars routine because I was able to do it the second time in a row, and pretty cleanly, too”.
Mustafina added that she feels strong enough to continue to Tokyo-2020:
“Of course, the quad goes from one Olympics to another and the most important goal was to qualify to the Games in order to calmly prepare and move towards the Olympics in the next couple of years. I feel strong and after these Worlds, I realized I can do anything”.
Photo: Russian Artistic Gymnastics Federation
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