Valentina Rodionenko kept praising the Russian team to the media, first saying that no falls on beam is a big achievement and the telling RIA Novosti that the gymnasts accomplished practically everything they were supposed to at this competition:
“I want to say that out of everything we planned here, almost everything was achieved. We will analyze now. Of course, there are certain moments that we would like to correct during the preparation for Worlds but, in general, these girls did what they had to do. The competition format here was a bit difficult, unusual, in the sense that the team final ended late and there was no rest day between the event finals, so today Melnikova had to compete on three events after no rest, that’s difficult”.
“It’s al good, we are happy. The girls deservedly won the team competition, they competed without mistakes. We’d like to have more medals in the event finals, but we got what we were prepared for”.
Vera Kiryashova, the personal coach of Lilia Akhaimova, came to Euros as a judge. She said to Irina Stepantseva of MK that one of the goals for the Russian team this season is to improve on vault as currently, it’s not the strongest event for the team:
“Simakova has a difficult vault, but the execution isn’t always good yet, although she was controlling it in the team final. Akhaimova only recently started doing hard landings, only two days before leaving for Glasgow. Everything was still raw but the vault was desperately needed – you saw how everyone’s vaulting now, right? We’re still behind on this event, but we managed to catch up with the main teams in difficulty. We didn’t catch up with the Americans, they’re still far ahead of us, but we already can compete with the European teams, we just need to clean up the execution”.
Photo: Russian Artistic Gymnastics Federation
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