The team and all around events finished today and Melka continued her near perfect performances to grab the top spot on the podium. She actually dominated the competition with her two-day score points ahead the silver and bronze medalists, Seda Tutkhalyan (yay!) and Maria Kharenkova respectively. Her vault was the usual, off to the side, but beam and bars were as great as day one. On floor she didn't quite make all of her turns and connections and had to settle for lower difficulty (down to 5.8), but there were no other notable issues. Like Melka, Masha also had an amazing competition, 8 routines with no big errors. And this is Russians we are talking about! What is going on?
Seda counted two falls and a few other bigger mistakes, but she's Seda and I love her anyway. And she actually performed another fabulous beam routine, no wobbles whatsoever, that's 3-for-3 this year. She landed really low on her new dismount, but managed to save it. Both of her falls were on uneven bars, but I'm not too worried about that, since she has added two big upgrades this year, a bhardwaj and a church (her D-score went from 5.8 to 6.2). She has always before been consistent on bars, so I'm sure she'll be fine after getting comfortable with the new routine. She also has the most non-russian routine in the team. It's nice to see some change from all of those stalder pirouettes. What I'm worried about is vault. She has before had no issues (save for wild legs and too much power), but struggled many times this year. That's a weird development and I don't like it.
The two Dashas had a better day today than day 1, Spiridoz hit uneven bars without problems and Skrypnik hit everything. Maybe getting off meldonium really works for this team.
Evgenia Shelgunova had a nice day, but the execution scores were much harder today and her little form errors really pile up in the deductions. It's a waste really, because she actually has enough difficulty to be a great all arounder, and she seems like a really hard worker. And I'm still really impressed by her beam routine.
Aliya did another great UB set, almost identical to yesterday and continued to struggle on beam. She did manage to count her flight series at least. What went really wrong however, was Seda and Daria falling too many times. Queen Aliya basically arrived to Penza straight from hospital bed to compete for the Moscow team, and only got silver for her efforts because of her aforementioned teammates. Shame on you for denying the Queen her gold medal...
Valentina Rodionenko said in an interview earlier that Aliya's doctors were none too impressed hearing that she competed. It seemed to cause a lot of irritation in the gymternet, but I'm not really too worried. These last two years Aliya has been very selective about her competitions and taken a break every time she needed one. She's not the girl who did an amanar and injured her knee in a competition she could have won with a FTY anymore. She's clearly grown and realistic about what she can and can't do, and she knows her body. I don't think she would have competed if she didn't feel okay about it, especially in a rather insignificant (in her case) competition.
Congratulations to all the girls, they really impressed me (even if my expectations were low)!
LINKS:
You can watch today's competition here.
The individual routines (not yet up as I'm posting this) will most likely show up here or here.
The complete results are here.
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