Russian men were in third place after two subdivisions, behind China and Japan, and Nikita Nagorny hopes the team will do better in the final:
“I don’t think our team competed well today but we tried really hard. There’s still a lot for us to do. We will need to perform better in the final.”
After the first subdivision, Nagorny was leading the all-around qualification (Hashimoto Daiki went ahead of him in the second subdivision), but all his thoughts right now are only about the team final on Monday:
“I’m not thinking about being the current leader. You told me this and I didn’t even know. Let’s get through the team final first and then we’ll see. Overall, I’m in a good mood. We released the emotions that cause jitters, we know more or less where we will compete. We’ll wait until the rest of the competitors finish and they get together, talk, and draw conclusions. Tomorrow, we’ll warm up and will be ready to fight again. All our events [for the team] are fine. We just need to fix some small issues, they’re fixable, so don’t worry. But I can’t tell you what they are, it has to stay within the team.”
Nagorny says the empty stands in the arena didn’t affect him at all:
“How to compete with empty stands? I didn’t notice the difference at all. Perhaps, it’s not right for me to say that. I have great respect for anyone who comes to watch artistic gymnastics and it’s very important for us. But during the qualification, I didn’t notice the difference, because we are all in our heads, our emotions are restrained, we try to work on our performances in our heads. That puts us under a lot of pressure, so that’s why I don’t pay attention to the spectators. I only noticed the empty stands when I entered the arena and was like: “Huh, what’s that?” and then it all goes into the background.”
The Russian team skipped the opening ceremony, since they had to compete the very next day and watched parts of it online:
“We only saw the fireworks online because we don’t have TVs [in our apartment]. We gathered downstairs and watched it but we needed to prepare [for the competition], so we were asleep by 9 pm.”
Photo: Russian Artistic Gymnastics Federation
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