Angelina Melnikova finished the competition at the European Games as the most decorated artistic gymnast, with two gold and two silver medals. However, if you thought this would be enough for Valentina Rodionenko, you were wrong. Rodionenko commented on the competition, saying that she was quite unhappy with the results of Melnikova and Lankin (who won silver on vault) while praising her new favorites, the junior WAG team, on their performance at Worlds:
“Let’s start with Minsk – are we happy? No. Not everything happened according to the plan on the men’s side. We’re going to figure out what happened to Lankin who was absolutely supposed to win floor with his routine. He failed on rings, on vault. These are his signature events which he was supposed to win at European competitions. Poliashov did what he needed to, he became third in the all-around, it’s a person who can fight for making the Olympic team.”
“We’re really unhappy with the women’s side despite the gold medal in the all-around. The score of 54 does not fit anywhere. With such a score, you’ll place below the 10th place at the World Championships. The performance of Shchekoldina was a bit heart-warming: fifth in the all-around, for the first time at such a senior international competition.”
“At the World Championships, everyone was amazed with our girls team and I’ll tell you: in the whole Russian history, we’ve never had girls like that. They charmed everyone there. The judges were all from FIG, the whole international gymnastics management was there. And if you compare what [scores] our champions got there and what Melnikova got at the European Games. It’s incomparable. [The juniors] only lost the vault. There was even a joke from the FIG: perhaps, we need to book an extra checked bag for you, you have so many medals! That was amazing. At the same time, the guys were disappointing, only one medal on high bar. They ended up being completely unprepared for this competition mentally. They were shaking. We saw this age category internationally for the first time, it was a very necessary and useful competition, we saw the trends.”
Rodionenko also announced that on July 9th the Russian team will go for a 20-day training camp in Japan to see the facilities they are going to use next year in preparation for the Olympics:
“We’re having a camp at the training center where we will be preparing for the Olympic Games next year. The goal is to check whether it is as good as the Japanese are telling us, to see all the conditions, how the acclimatisation will go, how the body adapts to those conditions. The camp will last 20 days. Usually, a week is enough for us but we want to try a long camp in order to figure out for how many days we need to be there before the Games.”
“Andrey Fyodorovich (Rodionenko) visited it. We’ll see how and what will be there, if they have everything for proper training, since we can’t do without the foam pits. We’ll figure out how useful a training camp there will be. For women, the young girls who are eligible for the Olympics will also go. Aliya is going to the camp, too. She doesn’t have any pain, we talked to her, she feels great.”
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