European Championships 2017: Podium training non-disaster

The podium training today was extremely short on disasters, I'm not sure how to feel about it. Russia is supposed to be awful in podium training, be generally lazy and sloppy with no full routines and something like 5 falls for each gymnast on every apparatus, but maybe the newbies haven't gotten the memo. Then again, Beefarm didn't feel like looking like shit either, and she's a hardcore veteran.

Meet the Team: European Championships 2017

The 2017 European Artistic Gymnastics Championships will take place in Cluj, Romania between April 19 and 23. There is no team competition this year and the gymnasts will compete for individual medals only. The federations are allowed to send 4 gymnasts and the team for Russia is Angelina Melnikova, Natalia Kapitonova, Elena Eremina and Maria Paseka. This team is very young and inexperienced with Maria Paseka being the only veteran, and two of the gymnasts having never competed in any major competitions at the senior level. It's going to be interesting to see how they do, and if any new stars will rise.

I thought I'd really quickly introduce the Russian team to those of you not as familiar with them as us gymternet regulars.

Russian Junior Nationals 2017: The Invisible Competition

Junior Nationals was last weekend and I was hoping for some videos to appear before going over it, but there are still not that many and I'm not sure if any more will show up. The story of this blog, it seems. There aren't any pictures either, it's like the whole thing didn't even happen. I added some pics from Jesolo instead.

So there's not that much to write about, scores and "she usually looks beautiful on this apparatus" only go so far, but here's a quick recap anyway. As usual, the juniors are split in two groups based on Russia's national sports merits, MC (the older and more accomplished girls) and KMC (younger and less accomplished girls, mostly those born in 2004).

From front: Varvara Zubova, Ksenia Klimenko, Anastasia Agafonova and Valeria Saifulina. Look who's hiding again, what a surprise.

Round Lake Update with Grebs and the Euros team

The main news this time is, that Evgeny Grebenkin announced the Russian team for European Championships. I'm going to have to take a guess, that he locked up V-Rod in a closet in order to get to say anything to the media, let alone do something as Valentina as announce teams. Crazy. I'm also going to take a guess that V-Rod already has taken action about this, scratched her way out of that closet and given 100 possibly semi-offensive and probably conflicting interviews to make up for Grebs' one, but I'm not going to even bother to check. Whatever.

The (current, nothing is ever final with Russia) team consists of the main suspects, Angelina Melnikova, Elena Eremina and Natalia Kapitonova, but saw the surprise return of Maria Paseka. Masha hasn't competed since the Olympics. She took a break because of back problems and because after completing two Olympic cycles, she really earned it. But she returned to training in December and was supposed to compete at nationals, but didn't. This is one of those cases when I'm not going to really believe that she's competing until I see her marching to the arena with the audience cheering and music playing, but I'm not opposed to her selection either. Even if she's semi-back, she should be able to medal easily. I just really don't want to see another Moscow 2013 from her. It was dreadful and heartbreaking to watch and please, no more. So I really, really hope that she's ready this time. We haven't really seen anything from her apart from some training footage of a bad DTY.

The selection of Kapi, Melka and Lena makes perfect sense and I'm happy that for once the veterans are (nearly) gone and we're seeing a young team of 2000-2001-born girls. It should give them some motivation and the opportunity to rise to the occasion and prove that Russia is not just Aliya Mustafina. That they can achieve something without her and don't need her, Ksenia Afanasyeva and to some extent Viktoria Komova to carry their entire team and earn all of their medals. Of course there's a 90% chance that they will only prove that Russia is yet again nothing without the veterans, but let's stay optimistic.

Viral Infections and City of Jesolo Trophy 2017

It's only appropriate that right when the Russians make their grand return to Jesolo, Flo blocks everything. Gone are the days when Italian Gymnastics Federation streamed everything for everyone and we had hours and hours of footage from the meet. Ugh.

1. USA 2. Brazil 3. Russia

But first... The Russians didn't have the best time leading up to this competition. In another WTF RUSSIA?!? moment less than two weeks ago, their training base Round Lake was closed and the athletes evacuated after a rotavirus epidemic hit the base. Apparently during the same morning, around 50 athletes from several different sports (the training base has several national teams training there) fell ill with vomiting, fever and diarrhea. Because the athletes were from different sports and training halls, they suspected that the food in the dining hall was contaminated. I guess it could be a swimming pool too. There are some conflicting reports about whether or not any of the gymnasts were sick too (because when are there not conflicting reports about team Russia?), but they were evacuated along everyone else on the base to some old camp grounds, obviously not good for training. I don't know whether or not to laugh or cry. V-Rod tried some stupid bullshit about everyone traveling to different countries and catching the virus there, but obviously when there's so many people falling ill exactly at the same time, the source is somewhere on the base. She probably herself infected everyone on purpose to make them lose weight. But the training halls were inspected and disinfected and they resumed training fast.