At the World Championships, Oleg Verniaiev hopes to help the Ukrainian men’s team qualify to the Olympics. So, he’s going to give it his all despite having two surgeries earlier this year and not quite being ready.
He looked pretty good in podium training and said he expected it to go worse:
“Generally, I expected worse, because of the level of my readiness. I’m not completely ready, there are tons of problems, tons of stuff that bothers me. My physical shape is not as it used to be, I don’t have such endurance anymore. You know how much I used to compete and I could do it all. Now I need to save myself because I’m only training three-four months a year. Last year, I was recovering from the injury for six months and then had three-four months of proper training. It derails my training, I’m not at the same shape physically, so I’ll have to figure something out. But I’ll compete in the all-around, there isn’t much choice. I need to do it for the team and for myself.”
He said a short vacation after the European Games seriously affected his training:
“I was really well prepared for the European Games but then I had a vacation because things were a bit hard for me mentally and this vacation got derailed my training in terms of physical readiness. So, I spent a long time recovering and I’m only now getting back in shape. I’m only approaching the shape I should be in at the start of the preparation for such a competition. So, we’ll see how well I’ll do. I never guess because sometimes, I’m not ready and do well and sometimes, I’m ready and don’t do well. It’s gymnastics, it’s sports, anything can happen.”
At the same time, he feels he desperately needed a vacation in order to protect his mental health:
“The last time I had a vacation after Rio, I went on a beach vacation and the whole time I was just lying on a couch, in a hammock, or on the sand, and didn’t do anything. After the European Games, I went to visit my friends in Baku and just relaxed. I saw the city, relaxed, drank tea, ate food. You get a break from the apparatuses, the gym, gymnastics, injuries, you just get away.”
Verniaiev says that the Ukrainian team still lacks the required training conditions as the gym is small and there are limited opportunities to train difficult elements into the foam pit:
“Our gym is not bad, it’s better than it was five or six years ago. We got the Spieth apparatuses. Generally, everything more or less ok, but there’s no foam pit. Or, rather, we have a foam pit, but it’s always covered with mats. We don’t have a high bar over hard landing surface, only over the pit, so the pit is covered by mats. So, when you go to a competition, we’re not even talking about sticking the landing, but about mental readiness. When you land on your stomach on the mats over the pit, it’s soft, it’s ok. But here – boom, it knocks the wind out of you. All this affects the preparation a lot.”
“It would be perfect if someone built a new gym for us. And built it properly, not like someone somewhere wants to see it, but in a way that would be comfortable for us as professionals. We don’t have rings or bars over the pit, so it’s hard to train dismounts. In fact, we don’t have a high bar over the pit because the pit is covered by mats. That is, we don’t have it either over the pit or over hard surface. There are lots of issues, our gym is far from a proper one. But it’s still better than it was even just before Rio. After Rio, the Olympic committee got us a couple of apparatuses.”
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