This week, Oleg Verniaiev will compete at his first major international competition of the season. He missed most of the season due to recovering from two surgeries he had in January. Verniaiev competed at a Bundesliga meet and at Szombathely Challenge Cup last month. In Szombathely, he did five events and skipped rings but he will compete in the all-around this week.
Verniaiev talked to xSport.ua about coming back.
Q: Many athletes that are coming back after a long break say they feel like they’re competing for the first time. Did you feel something like that when you competed in Bundesliga and then at the World Cup in Szombathely?
A: In Germany, I was calm. And I can’t say that I was very nervous in Hungary either. Everything worked out somehow. Thank God. I was a bit nervous on the pommel horse but I didn’t feel any nervousness on the other events. Surprisingly, I was completely confident. I’m saying “surprisingly” because in reality there was no reason for such confidence, I’m not in my peak shape yet.
Q: Did you miss the competitions?
A: Yes, I’m so excited, I want to go out and compete again so much. I got this mood again that I used to have all the time and not the mood that I had after the Rio Olympics. Back then I lost the desire to compete and it affected me. I guess the nine months during which I couldn’t do anything made a difference. You’re watching how someone else is winning and you feel like you’re missing something and realize – you want to work!
Q: In Szombathely, you competed on all events except for rings. Why did you decide to skip them and what can you tell about the routines you did? Were you able to recover all of the routines you had before the injury?
A: At that time, I haven’t been training rings yet and I need to recover them in the time that’s left before Worlds. In addition, recently I almost broke a finger in training, it was all swollen, so, as usual, I’m having adventures. My floor routine was almost the same as my old one, I only downgraded it a bit but won a medal due to consistency. I’ve fully restored my pommel horse routine. I didn’t do the most difficult routines at the World Cup, I downgraded because it was better to lose a bit in difficulty and to win in execution. In Szombathely, I did my two vaults for the first time since the 2017 Worlds. Regarding the parallel bars, my routine in the final wasn’t clean but it was the routine I won silver with a year ago in Canada. The high bar wasn’t yet completely restored in Szombathely, I had low difficulty, I’ll need to work on it a lot.
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