Russian Championships 2017: Bye bye Penza

Russian Nationals is approaching fast and we have one huge change from the previous years, the competition will take place in Kazan instead of Penza. You might not think that this a monumental change, but unless they bring with them all of the posters from Penza, Baby Viktoria Komova pointing "a gun" at the contestants will be history. I don't know how I will survive that. That poster has been the backdrop of every Russian routine for half a decade and now it's gone. Russian national competitions just won't be the same without it.

I've been speculating the move to Kazan and naturally ignoring all realistic and logical reasons like money, logistics, training conditions... Because nothing in Russian gymnastics is "realistic" or "logical". My top two theories are both related to the Queen of Russian Gymnastics herself, My Tsaritsa Aliya, who has a Tatar father. For those unfamiliar with Russian geography, Kazan is the capital of The Republic of Tatarstan, a federal subject with a population of Tatar majority. So maybe the team administration hopes that by going to the land of Aliya's ancestors, they can summon some of her spirit and power into the current team. My other theory is about the 2013 Universiade. It was probably the most successful competition of the Rio quad for Team Russia, so maybe they think that Kazan brings good luck.

This will be a major adjustment, but I'm not completely hopeless about the move. Kazan does have some memorable moments. Mainly these pictures of the Queen when she was there the last time and had to be dragged out of a hospital bed to do press and win some medals.

Good times.

Baby Swan Graduates: Elizaveta Kochetkova

Liza is from Moscow and coached by E.P. Baidina and V.V. Gurov. Out of the four new seniors, she has had the most modest junior career. She was never in any major teams and competed internationally only in a few very small competitions, but is now training with the national team at Round Lake. She could make the reserve team and perhaps compete in some smaller meets, but she'd have to improve significantly to be a part of the main team.

To be honest, I never really paid much attention to her, but she finally managed to impress me at the Voronin Cup last December. She is a fairly good all arounder, but rather unsurprisingly for a Russian, best on uneven bars. She's tall and leggy and benefits from her naturally nice lines, but she also has good execution and quality of movement to back that up.

Happy New Year! - again

Happy New Year! Today is Chinese New Year and for me, a non-Chinese, that means binge watching the gymnasts of Team China celebrate. I will never get tired of it.

Join me and have fun!

There Will Be an Heir

It's the middle of the night and I just realized that it has been several days now since news broke out that My Tsaritsa is pregnant and I have completely failed to mention it in any way here. So let's mention it: She and her husband Aleksei are expecting their first child and it's official, her dad said she is due in July. They don't now if it's a boy or a girl, but I have this gut feeling that it's going to be a boy. Whether or not I'm right, this is a joyous occasion in Aliyastan, our Queen is gracing us with an heir. I'm pretty sure that Aliyastan's rule of succession is based on bitchface-offs, a sporting event where people compete on who can make it to the top of the podium with the weight of most gold medals around their neck and likability among the state's cat population instead of heredity, but how could Aliya's own child not win that throne? Please. Just think about it, Aliya's mentality and charisma, paired with Aleksei's conditioning. Wow.

Baby Swan Graduates: Ulyana Perebinosova

Ulya is originally from Kuznetsk, but she trains in Moscow and is coached by Marina Ulyankina, also the coach/former coach of gymnasts like Maria Paseka, Seda Tutkhalyan and Alla Sosnitskaya. She represents the Central Federal Okrug, even though neither Moscow nor Kuznetsk is a part of it, but the Russian teams rarely follow any logic anyway. She made a steady rise through the junior ranks and by 2016, she was expected to be one of the team's top senior all arounders in 2017. So naturally she disappeared completely and her status now is unknown. Before her untimely disappearance, she won gold together with her team at the Junior European Championships, and also took individual silver on bars and bronze on floor. At the Russian Nationals in 2016, she won gold on vault, silver on all around and beam, and bronze on bars.

She has many attributes in common with other Ulyankina's gymnasts and like them, she's not the typical Russian Swan. She isn't nearly as messy as them and she usually has nice, clean lines, but she doesn't have the elegance or finesse of some of her teammates, and hasn't shown much character yet. She's an all arounder with fairly equal ability on 3 pieces. She's best on bars, very promising on floor with nice dance and high, clean tumbling, and one of the few Russians with a DTY on vault, but it's still very inconsistent. Her beam is...ummm...special. Think of junior Maria Paseka.

this is me getting overly excited about a really small meet

The roster for WOGA Classic (on February 18th) was released and IT HAD RUSSIANS! Two and a half of them, to be exact. The two Baby Swans flying across the pond this time are Angelina Simakova and Ksenia Klimenko, who are both competing at the elite competition for juniors. The reason I got really excited is Klimenko, aka Ksyusha, who is currently my favorite Baby Swan. I've probably mentioned this about 100 times before, but she's gorgeous.

Just look at those lines.

Because of her young age (born in 2003), she hasn't competed internationally before, but it looks like that's about to change. Let's hope that someone in the audience appreciates true beauty and records and posts her routines on YouTube. So far it has been a pain to find quality footage of her.

Sima already has plenty of experience and plenty of typical Russian headcasing under her belt, but I'm really happy to see her too. She really underperformed at the Europeans, so hopefully she'll take this chance to really show what she can do. It's early in the season and she's a Russian junior, so probably not though...

The last half from my two and a half Russians is Irina Alexeeva. She's technically fully Russian, but since she has trained at WOGA since forever and is planning to switch nationalities, I'm only counting her as a half. She's the most advanced junior attending, so she's probably going to get quite a few gold medals.

Baby Swan Graduates: Anastasia Ilyankova

Nastia is from Leninsk-Kuznetsky, Siberia, and currently the only gymnast representing the region on the women's national team. Interestingly enough, Siberia produces a lot of men's national team members, but Nastia is the first woman in awhile. She is coached by S.V. Kiselev and N.V. Kiseleva. Nastia is a long time national team member with a lot of international experience to prove it. She has been on the Russian Gymnix team three times, and was part of their gold medal winning Junior European Team last year. When Melka turned senior last year, Nastia grabbed herself the newly free top junior spot, slightly edging out Elena Eremina for it. Her titles include 2016 Junior European Champion on uneven bars and balance beam, 2016 National Champion on all around, bars and floor, bronze medalist on vault. She also has a huge pile of assorted medals from competitions like Russian Hopes, EYOF, Gymnix, Voronin Cup etc.

I have very mixed feelings about Nastia, which is a pretty accurate description of her gymnastics. Mixed. She's just one of those gymnasts who seems to effortlessly switch between moments of true beauty and regular mediocrity, making me crazy in the process. She's also a confusing mix of a very typical Russian junior with nicely pointed fingers throughout an inconsistent performance, and someone who gets the job done, but doesn't care how. She has the basics of a gymnast with more than average finesse, plenty precision, elegant movement and nice lines, but the next moment she has knees and feet everywhere they shouldn't be and she stumbles through her routine like a rhino. Ugh. However, there's one exception: bars. She somehow manages to look only beautiful on bars, leaving her various form issues behind when she steps on that podium. I will never figure her out.

Baby Swan Graduates: Elena Eremina

Lena is a protegée of the one and only Tatiana Nabieva, and the most promising gymnast to come out of St. Petersburg since her. She is from the same gym and coached by the same coaches, Vera and Aleksander Kiryashov/a. She wasn't the most prominent junior of the team and was overshadowed of gymnasts like Melnikova and Simakova for most of her junior career, but she definitely made up for it during her last year as a senior, when she became the 2016 Junior European all around and team champion. She also won bronze on balance beam. Her other titles include 2015 EYOF team gold and vault bronze, and 2016 Russian National Championships balance beam gold, uneven bars and vault silver and all around bronze, and 2015 Nationals vault gold, balance beam silver and uneven bars bronze.

I took me quite some time to fall in love with Lena, but this year she definitely got me good. In good and bad, her gymnastics reminds me a lot of Tanya. They share a lot of the same skills and the same messy, but strangely fluent and occasionally even elegant execution. And while Lena's presence and character doesn't quite compare to Nabs (how could anything compare to her, really), she has that something, that makes me want to watch her.

Baby Swan Graduates: Class of 2017

It's time for the usually sad and only semi-relevant post-Olympic year, but we still have 4 new brave youngsters, (hopefully) ready to try to defy the odds of surviving Russian gymnastics. They have already proved to be extremely resilient (or lucky) by making it into senior level, so let's hope that they have a few good (dare I say, maybe even a tiny bit successful) years left.

You're probably already familiar with them, but here are the former Baby Swans who graduated into senior ranks at the start of this year: Elena Eremina, Anastasia Ilyankova, Ulyana Perebinosova and Elizaveta Kochetkova.

Don't they all look young and innocent? Enjoy it while it lasts. They'll soon make you crazy in one way or another, probably either by being a talented headcase, injured headcase or someone who can actually hit but is always injured.

This post is going to be divided into separate parts in case I get overly excited and poetic. Part 1 will be up soon, and it's going to focus on Lena.

Round Lake Update

There was a new interview with Valentina Rodionenko, published today, and it actually had a tiny bit of real insight instead of her usual ramblings.

First she discusses their outstanding success at the Olympics (okay...) with the interviewer and how she accurately predicted their good results (okay...). Then she goes all soft and mushy thanking everyone on the team about their hard work. This is the most human she has been since bursting into tears when she heard that the team could actually compete in Rio after the threat of a blanket ban. She also mentions that 2017 is a chance for the gymnasts to show their individual capabilities, but the goal of 2018 is clear, qualification for Tokyo. They're building the team with that in mind.

But then it gets more interesting.