A Day at Round Lake with Vika and Dasha

Team Russia's main sponsor, VTB, has published a little feature on Viktoria Komova and Daria Spiridonova and their lives at the team's home base of Round Lake. It's probably the first of many this year (time for Rio, baby) and I'm already loving it, because I take any insight into their lives that I can get. Even if it is just a few meaningless words and a bunch of pictures that look like stock photos out of a school book for health studies. Or maybe Ikea catalogue?

Click here for the article and pictures.

And click read more for my bad translations and unnecessary commentary.

Nobody Retired, but Maybe Valentina Herself Should

As I suspected, Valentina is talking shit again. We already knew Nabieva wasn't retired, but now both Grishina and Kramarenko have denied their retirement too. Kramarenko isn't sure if she's able to fully come back from an injury that happened last summer, but she is training.

Valentina however is of retirement age and clearly all kinds of crazy, so let's hope she takes her own advice and retires.

Heartbreaking Retirements - Or Just the Usual Nonsense from Valentina

According to tass.ru, Valentina Rodionenko announced the retirements of three of Russia's former national team members, Anastasia Grishina, Tatiana Nabieva and Ekaterina Kramarenko. Even though the retirements wouldn't be that surprising, you should take this news with a grain of salt. Valentina has a habit of making announcements that don't make sense or are plainly untrue.

And sometimes I actually feel like she uses publicity as psychological warfare, warfare against her own team at that. She's a bit like genuinely delusional dictator who sees enemies everywhere and uses propaganda and mind games to keep everybody under control.

Anyway, at least Nabieva has already denied being retired. And even back when she did retire, she still went to Worlds.... ;)

The Official Russian National Team 2016 feat. The Japanese Visitors

The official national team for 2016 was announced and it didn't make much sense as usual. Actually, it did make much more sense than last year, which doesn't say much.

But we have another news. The Japanese women's team is training at Round Lake. The Russians often have training "vacations" with other teams, but rarely get visitors (the Bulgarian team visited last year). I'm pretty sure Valentina Rodionenko once said that they don't want to give away their super secret training tactics. I'm really hard trying not to be mean and say it, but I'm going to say it anyway: Maybe they could give their conditioning program to the Americans?

But I like this Japanese and Russians combo. If we go into math, two times positive makes positive: prettyxpretty=more pretty. And two times negative makes also positive: inconsistentxinconsistent=consistent. So according to my calculations, we will get good results from this training camp.

The complete list of gymnasts on the national team this year is after the jump.

Anastasia Grishina Might Not Be Grishina Anymore

All Children, except one, grow up. - J.M. Barrie

And now it's Anastasia Grishina's turn. A few days ago the soon-to-be-20-year-old surprised everybody when pictures of what looks like a wedding turned up. To my knowledge she hasn't confirmed anything, but it certainly seems like she got married. Wasn't she a teeny tiny junior with incredibly beautiful gymnastics just two minutes ago?

I don't actually have anything to say about this, but I just felt like I should mention it. I wish all the happiness to her and her new husband, they look like a lovely couple. But I still need her to come back and save Russia.

The Babies Are All Grown Up (part 2): Natasha (?!?) and Juice

It's Friday night, which means I'm sipping wine. But as promised, I have an introductory (is that a word?) post for the two other notable Russian babies-turned-seniors, Natalia Kapitonova and Ekaterina Sokova. These two could be called underdogs, but both have already made a name for themselves.

The Babies Are All Grown Up (part 1): Melka and Dasha 2.0

The year just changed, 2016 arrived and do you know what that means? 176th age crisis for me? Most definitely. But even though my ever increasing years on this earth was the first thing on my mind, you were probably thinking about the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. If you weren't you're a bad gymfan and I and the gymgods condemn you! Watch Nadia's perfect 10 uneven bars routine 10 times to be forgiven.

But this post is about the 2nd thought you should be having after thinking about the Olympics: we have brand new seniors! Another batch of pretty Russian babies is all grown up, the 2000 model to be specific. I'm going to introduce you to (or rather remind you of) the most important ones, Angelina Melnikova, Daria Skrypnik, Natalia Kapitonova and Ekaterina Sokova.

Part 1 will focus on Angelina Melnikova and Daria Skrypnik.

Welcome home Team Russia!

So weirdly enough, it took me until today to realize that the Olympic year is upon us. I knew it from the moment that the clock struck 0:00, but I didn't really feel it. Until now. It was this image that made the the realization sink in:

The Russian gymnasts are back at their home base of Round Lake. It's their first camp of 2016, and the Olympics are coming, for real. For real. This honestly made me so excited. On a scale of 1-10, how stalkery would it be of me to travel to Round Lake and just stand in front of that gate with a mad smile on my face imagining the training going on behind it? Because I really feel like doing that.

Another thing that got me really excited? Aliya (who has been doing physio in Moscow and Penza) is back home too. It's on. 

She captioned this with 

"Год новый, а место все тоже✌🏻️ привет Второй дом, или первый! Скорее всего первый🙈"

It means something like "New year, but a place all too familiar. Hello second home, or perhaps the first. Likely the first."

Welcome home My Tsaritsa!

More curiosity bordering on insanity from Aliya's ask....pls don't drown in her eyes!

And yes, I'm insanely curious for reading through her ask.fm and compiling this clusterfuck of facts for you. But it was a request, I swear. I could never ignore a sincere request from another super fan.

Also, think about this, she's answered 1975 questions in just a few weeks! How determined is she to finish what she started? This time what she started by creating that account. Next time what she started by continuing gymnastics into the Rio quad. Maybe?

This post will also provide some evidence that Aliya is a Slytherin.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! To celebrate the occasion, meet my two wintery Queens.

According to Russian tradition, Father Frost (Дед Мороз/Ded Moroz in Russian) brings presents for New Year. He's a bit like Santa Claus, and to the Russians who celebrate Christmas in January 7th, New Year is the most important holiday of the season.

My favorite wintery character however is Snow Queen. I loved the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen when I was a child. They were often quite brutal and lacked happy endings, but it made them even more memorable to a child and incredibly fascinating. One of my favorites was the tale of The Snow Queen, the mystic and seemingly evil queen of everything that I loved: ice, snow and cold winters.

The Russians love this tale too and have made several movie adaptations of it, so I thought it fitting to use my bad photoshop skills to combine my two Queens, Aliya Mustafina and the Snow Queen (Снежная королева/Snezhnaya Koroleva in Russian). You can watch an old Soviet animation of the story on Youtube, it has English subtitles ;)

If the second picture looks vaguely familiar, it's because of another famous Snow Queen you might recognize, the White Witch of Narnia. The books of C.S Lewis' about the world of Narnia were also my childhood favorites, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was definitely my favorite of the series because of its winter theme and fascinating queen.

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The two pictures were originally published last winter on my tumblr.