Nikita Nagornyy left the European Championships very happy – he got two gold medals, he managed to have a very clean competition, and it was finally over, so he got to go home and get some rest:
“I feel great because this competition has finally come to an end. Why finally? Because I’m tired. I’m happy with my results, happy with how I did, there are still some things to work on, so we’ll be preparing for the World Championships.”
“I didn’t really have a goal to win two gold medals, I had slightly different goals for this competition: my first goal was to go out and do my routines without falls, to do well every day, and the medals are, I guess, the result of me achieving my goals.”
Nagornyy said that despite winning the all-around at Euros, he doesn’t see himself as the leader of the Russian team:
“We don’t have leaders on the Russian national team. You can feel like a leader in order to motivate yourself and achieve some goals. However, we weren’t raised like that to pound on your chest and say “I’m the leader and you are behind me”. Of course, everyone thinks they’re better than someone at something and worse at something else. Usually, those who consider themselves leaders, they’re the ones with more potential, because it’s our main motivation, I guess. I want to note that our whole team are leaders now, everyone’s improving greatly. You can even see it in the results of the World Championships when Artur Dalaloyan beat everyone in the all-around, this hasn’t happened [for Russia] in 20 years. We’ve won European Championships [in the all-around] but not Worlds.
“If you look at the results here, Artur and I both have a four-points lead over everyone in Europe. So, I don’t feel like a leader. I feel that we are the leaders in Europe right now, the Russian team is the leader.”
“Of course, our main goal for the season is the team – to show up as the team and to have the results that no one can beat. But it’s not a given, our main competitors are China and Japan, so we’ll try to give our maximum results and then we’ll have a chance to win Worlds and arrive at the Olympic Games more confident.”
For Nagornyy, the gold medal on parallel bars did not make the top three most memorable moments of Euros:
“For me, the first most memorable moment was the vault that I did in qualification. For the first time in my life, I did this vault as I was supposed to, so that I could just go out and do it easily. The second was, of course, the gold medal in the all-around. Even not the gold medal, but the all-around score that I got, 88.665, it’s a very good result. If you look at the results from Worlds, the highest score there was 87.6, so my score here was a point higher. And the third moment was, I guess, the rings final yesterday. My score itself, the execution – I really liked the fact that I was able to improve. I managed to add 0.3 to my highest execution score before that.”
Photo: E. Mikhaylova, Russian Artistic Gymnastics Federation
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