Russian artistic gymnastics team is flying to Tokyo tonight. Pre-pandemic they had an arrangement to come for a training camp in advance but in the end, the team management decided it was safer to stay at Round Lake and only come once the Olympic village is open.
Rodionenko told R-Sport:
“All the verifications are over, we’re starting to get ready for travel. Tomorrow, we are leaving the training center for the airport at 20:30. I don’t know yet whether we’ll be quarantined on arrival, I hope that won’t happen but it’s hard to make predictions. We’ll arrive in Tokyo at 16:45 local time, there will be testing afterwards and we’ll get to the Olympic Village at eight or nine in the evening. Athletes will rest and will start training the next day, the first training session is at eight in the morning. Everything is according to the schedule we got. We’ll have two practices a day – in two different gyms. And the podium training will be before the qualifications.”
Rodionenko assured the media that Artur Dalaloyan who suffered an Achilles tear back in April is recovering well and will be fully ready to compete on four events:
“Artur is fine, he did dismounts on four events, landed, and he’s not event limping, everything’s fine. How did the injury happen? Perhaps, due to being tired or, perhaps, muscles… No one can predict this. It happened and that was it. I guess it’s inevitable with such difficult elements and such training loads. If someone manages to avoid it – good, but look, there are injuries everywhere. Jumpers in track and field suffer from Achilles issues, so, things happen.”
“It’s a pity it happened right before the Olympics but I think everything will be fine. Artur will fight. In October, there will be individual World Championships, also in Japan. We think that at Worlds, he’ll already do all-around. His mind is set on it as well.”
Valeri Alfosov, the MAG national team head coach, told Elena Vaytsekhovskaya that the team suffered a series of blows in addition to Dalaloyan’s injury and, perhaps, the postponement put them at a disadvantage:
“If the Games were postponed by a month or two, we would figure out how to hold on to the level of readiness we’d already gotten to. But when it was announced that the competition would take place in a year in the best case scenario, I said right away that many countries might have completely different teams. Which is exactly what happened. For instance, in our case, Stretovich didn’t manage to recover in time. But I hope that we’ll still be among the team that will seriously fight [for medals] in Tokyo.”
He mentioned that David Belyavskiy had an ankle injury between Euros and Russian Cup (that is why Belyavskiy didn’t do AA in Novosibirsk) and Ivan Stretovich was unable to fully recover after his wrist surgery. The surgery was for an old injury and Stretovich opted to do it once he realized the Olympics were postponed and he couldn’t go on for another year without addressing the issue.
Support Gymnovosti on Patreon from only $1 a month and help us bring to you even more awesome gymnastics coverage!
