Gennady Sartynsky, the head coach of Ukrainian MAG, gave an interview to xSpot.ua before the World Championships and talked about the team’s preparation for the competition and the plans for the next season.
About the national team gymnasts competing at the Kiev Cup last week:
“We decided to test ourselves at the Kiev Cup before the World Championships. Before that, we only had one competition, a World Cup event, but we haven’t tried everything there. That’s why we needed another competition in order to test how the guys can get themselves together and compete. Overall, everything went fine”.
About Oleg Verniaiev’s recovery:
“Oleg is still recovering from his surgeries, day by day he’s adding things to his routines. Right now he competed on rings for the first time, for the all-around. Later we’ll pay more attention to his best events – parallel bars, pommel horse and vault, the ones where he can make the finals. And we’ll try to show something in the all-around”.
About Verniaiev’s first competition at Szombathely World Cup:
“Before competing at World Cup, he only trained for a month, he did vault for the first time already at the competition. And he won medals right away. That’s why I think his comeback is successful. Some people are training for years and can’t win a medal. In addition, the competition was strong there, especially on pommel horse which Oleg won. On pommel horse, the competitors included an Olympic medalist, two medalists from last year’s Worlds and a very strong Japanese gymnast”.
About the upcoming World Championships:
“At Worlds, the following gymnasts will compete: Verniaiev, Radivilov, Hryko, Pahniuk, Vasylenko, and Hrynevych. The team looks good but Petya Pahniuk is injured right now and won’t be doing all six events. Igor Radivilov normally does only rings and vault but he’ll do floor at Worlds, we asked him. If Pahniuk did all six events, we’d have a very strong team. But, at first, he had a leg injury, then three weeks ago he got another injury in training and he’ll miss all the leg events. But these are the ones we’re having problems right now on the team. In order to fight for high placements in the results table as a team, we need to have strong gymnasts on every event”.
About other competitors and qualifying to the Olympics:
“Kohei Uchimura will compete at Worlds but he also had an injury so it’s not clear whether he’ll compete all-around. The first three teams will qualify to the Olympics. The other nine team spots will be decided at the next World Championships. For us, the most important thing is to have Oleg fully recovered and to test the young ones. We’ll fight for the Olympic qualification next year”.
About Nazar Chepurnoy’s performance at the Youth Olympic Games:
“I’d give Chepurnoy’s performance at the Youth Olympics a solid C. He wasn’t able to show what we planned for him and what he did in training. The long flight, the psychological reasons, somehow things didn’t go well for him. He downgraded his difficulty by 1.5 points and the execution wasn’t the best. In the all-around final, he competed a bit better but there were issues on high bar and, as a result, he lost to the third place only by a point”.
“A gymnast can be the world champion in training but then he goes to competitions and doesn’t make even the top-10. Or, on the contrary, there are people who don’t show anything special in training but when they go out there and salute, they’re completely changed. Oleg is kind of like that”.
About the rise of women’s gymnastics in Ukraine:
“We now have two girls – Varinska and Bachynska – who are very promising. If Bachynska will go to senior competitions next year, she’ll really strengthen the team. The girl is very hard-working, right now our head coach, Oleg Ostapenko, has started working with her”.
“I’m always asked: “How are our girls? Will they be able to show something?” And I always reply that the girls can get into shape and show results really fast. They only need 3-4 years and they’ll get to the high level. But the boys need decades. That’s the whole difference. The girls, however, retire as fast as they rise”.
About the training conditions at the national training center:
” We keep training at the Olympic training center, men and women together. Although there’s a new plan now to build a new training complex with a pool and a gymnastics gym… The money is already being allocated, so let’s hope that this center will be ready in two-three years. It’s in Koncha-Zaspa as well, the territory has been allocated already. There are three gyms planned there. one for the archers, one for the ball sports and one for gymnastics, and an additional dormitory”.
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