After the Tokyo Olympics where he made all-around and parallel bars finals, Petro Pakhniuk said he really needed rest. He didn’t get much, however, and soon returned to competition in the Bundesliga and then at the World Championships where he competed on pommel horse and parallel bars. On parallel bars, he was one of the contenders for the final and a score similar to what he got at the Tokyo Olympics qualification would have easily put him into the final. However, an error meant he lost 0.4 in difficulty and ended up scoring much lower than he potentially could.
Pakhniuk said that after the Olympics, he’s been feeling very low, to the point he didn’t want to do gymnastics anymore and had an extremely hard time finding motivation, although this was something he tried to keep to himself. He credits his wife, an Azerbaijanian rhythmic gymnast Aynur Pakhniuk (nee Jabbarli) as his main supporter through the darkest times.
Pakhniuk says he was able to overcome the lack of motivation thanks to the words of his psychologist:
“I told him I had no desire to train anymore. He said, “Petya, only the strong ones can train without desire”. And this inspired me, I realized that I need to train even without desire”.
He now sees this ability to work when he does not enjoy gymnastics as a sign of strength and hopes the enjoyment will come back. However, he added that the ongoing conflict on the national team was one of the factors that made training and competing mentally challenging:
“Of course, it interferes [with training and competing], it’s a constant interference. I haven’t been training at the Olympic training center with the head coach, I’ve been training separately in another gym, also in Kyiv, so I’ve been left to my own devices.”
Despite this, Pakhniuk says he’s the only one bearing the responsibility for his results:
“In any circumstances, the competition depends only on me and it doesn’t matter who was interfering with you, tripped you or purposefully works against you. There are people behind me, my team, whom I have no right to let down, no matter what. So I take full responsibility for any of my failures or low scores.”
