Aliya Mustafina is a two-time Olympics champion on uneven bars but, strangely, enough, she’s never won gold on this event at Worlds. She won silver on bars at her first Worlds in 2010 and then a bronze in 2013. She is still working on restoring her bars routine and currently, her difficulty is only 5.8 – quite respectable but not enough to medal as the bars field is probably the deepest of all four events right now. Today, in the bars final, she finished fifth, missing out on the medals by less than 0.2. She said to R-Sport that fighting for a medal on bars was not her goal at this competition but she plans on upgrading on the event soon:
“I’m really happy [with today’s performance]. Actually, I was able to do everything I wanted. I managed to perform a clean routine, I probably did it even cleaner than all the previous days. I understood perfectly that I had the lowest difficulty [in the final], so I didn’t even think about the medal podium, I realized I would not get up there. I set another goal for myself and I achieved it. If I have one more month to prepare, I would fight for medals here. There wasn’t enough time to upgrade on bars”.
“The most important thing that the championships showed was that I still can do it. The old shape is coming back, the pre-giving-birth Aliya is coming back. And this gives me confidence and I understand that I can, that it’s all not so difficult. I’ll try not to lose the shape now and I’ll be upgrading all the routines on that basis”.
Valentina Rodionenko commented that Mustafina’s main goal was to help the team qualify to Tokyo while the individual medals were less important:
“Aliya did a good job. We needed her for the team because she’s the core of the team. And we became second. To qualify to the Olympics was the main goal. The medals on individual events were not as important for us. Today she also performed great, she could’ve even won a medal with that difficulty but made a small mistake. She’s not made of iron, it’s her third day of competition, there is a lot of pressure. Everything will be fine”.
Photo: Russian Artistic Gymnastics Federation
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