In Doha, Artur Dalaloyan became the first World AA champion from Russia since 1999. Back then, Nikolai Kryukov won the title. Kryukov later became a coach and is currently coaching the junior national team, so he coached Dalaloyan as a junior. He talked to R-Sport and Team Russia about Dalaloyan’s success and his own legacy in gymnastics:
A: 19 years later Russia finally has another World all-around champion, I’m really happy for Artur Dalaloyan. Of course, I hoped that the next gold [after mine] would be won faster, every year I waited for a new start to take their place in the all-around. Artur’s victory is deserved, we currently have three all-arounders who can compete at the highest level – Dalaloyan, Nikita Nagornyy, and David Belyavskiy, they are the core of our national team.
Q: Did you watch the competition live?
A: No, I didn’t, I was in the gym, the guys were watching and telling me how it was going. I don’t like to watch, I’m afraid that my worries will pass on the guys I’m cheering for.
Q: Do you remember how you felt 19 years ago in Tianjin?
A: Of course, I do. It was a strange feeling. Happiness and exhaustion. A feeling of done duty, elevated mood, and serious exhaustion from the preparation for that championships.
Q: Back then, you weren’t the main favorite either, it was completely unexpected for you.
A: Absolutely true. I had my back injured right before the World Championships. Leonid Arkayev, the head coach, even deliberated whether to take me to the championships because I couldn’t work at my full strength, couldn’t do my full routines. But he took me and the doctor relieved my pain already in China. And everything worked out.
Q: Did you work with Artur at your gym, Dynamo?
A: We just crossed paths there. When Artur started training, I was still competing and his personal coach, Aleksandr Kalinin, sometimes asked me if I saw any mistakes, asked for advice, whether everything was going right. When I became the junior national team head coach, Dalaloyan made the team of gymnasts born in 1996. Dmitrii Lankin and Nikita Nagornyy are a year younger, so they arrived a year after him. Together with Dalaloyan, Ivan Stretovich, Valentin Starikov, Ivan Tikhonov and Kyrill Potapov made the team, it was quite a decent team. At the 2013 European Youth Olympic Festival in Utrecht, the guys took second place as a team but won several event medals.
Q: Dalaloyan admitted that he had discipline issues as a junior. Did he run away from the training camp?
A: He was just lazy and didn’t believe in himself. And I tried to get him back on the right path. Once, after a competition in Japan, he started complaining that the parallel bars didn’t hold him, even though now he won gold on the event at the European Championships and bronze at the World Championships. I had to persuade him: “Artur, look at the guys you will compete with in the future. They’re made of flesh and blood as well, they’re just more persistent. Learn and don’t tell yourself that you can’t do something”. But he couldn’t believe in himself then. And now he was able to win. I think that perhaps he will remember that moment when he sees me after coming back home.
Q: After the victory in Qatar, people started comparing Dalaloyan to Nemov. Do you think they are really similar in terms of their gymnastics?
A: No. I definitely can’t say that they have the same technique. And I can’t really compare Dalaloyan to anyone. Every person is different. I guess the journalists compared him to Nemov because they wanted to make a comparison. And who would be a better person to compare to than our star, the four-time Olympic champion? After all, the rest have much fewer titles. But Artur has a big future ahead of him.
Q: Looking at your achievements, I noticed that you won national titles on every event but rings. Was that your weakest event?
A: Yes, same as for Nemov. We weren’t made for crosses and everything. We were able to do it but didn’t stand out. The swinging elements were good but the strength elements weren’t our strong suit.
Q: And Artur’s Achilles heel is pommel horse, right?
A: The circles are a bit hard for him. But only one event is a bit weak, the rest are at a high level.
Q: Is the current generation of gymnasts comparable to the generation Russia had two decades ago?
A: Let’s not get ahead of us, we’ll live and see. Some already planned the next decade, how we’ll win lots of medals, although you have to go through a lot even for a single medal.
Q: Ok, let’s talk about one medal, team gold that Russia wasn’t able to win since your success in Atlanta-1996. What are the chances to repeat that success in Tokyo-2020, after our team lost to China by only 0.049 at this year’s Worlds?
A: Thanks to that result, the guys realized that the victory in two years is absolutely realistic. With that belief, they need to keep working. And we’ll hope that our country will get a team gold again.
Photo: RIA Novosti
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