News and Updates from Round Lake: Valentina Might Be High but Vika Is Still Alive and Aliya Is Finally Giving up Circus

I started off my weekend by walking home from work (I didn't have money for the bus because I spent it on a pastry to get through the day), taking a shortcut across the ice (I live on an island and work in the mainland) and tripping on someone's unmarked fishing hole and breaking the screen of my iPod in the process. I guess I should be glad I didn't fall in and drown/die of hypothermia. But I wasn't because my iPod is my most important possession.

So my weekend didn't look so great at first but The Wicked Witch of Round Lake aka Valentina Rodionenko decided to cheer me with some updates. Now Valentina likes to remind everyone of her existence every now and then by giving out (un)important news or false information and I'm hoping this falls under the former category, because it means that Vika has survived the winter (so far) and Aliya is slowly starting to wake up from her hibernation.

She's also sharing some information about the competitions to come this year, team selection for the Olympics and their best medal hopes.

Ksenia Afanasyeva has been having some problems with her ankle (again. what is with those russian glass ankles?), but has been attended by the German Miracle Doctors and she's pushing through it like the pro she is.

Aliya Mustafina has started a new phase in her recovery and is now able to put more load on her knee. I'm assuming this means that she's been cleared to finally tumble and vault. Her knee hurts but it's nothing out of the ordinary. However, they want to give her some time to get used to working with full load, so she's only performing on balance beam and uneven bars during the Russian Championships 4-10 April. I definitely wasn't expecting her to be ready for competition so soon (even though Valentina seemed to think so) so it's nice to know that we'll get to see a bit of her. It's still early though so I'm half expecting her to cancel before the competition...

...or announce that she has run away from the Round Lake and joined the circus.

According to Valentina, Maria Paseka is hard at work training for vault gold and the Russian girls are competing for uneven bars gold with Viktoria Komova and Daria Spiridonova in excellent shape. She seems to be very optimistic even saying, that the team competition between USA and Russia will be fierce. Apparently she has forgotten that China has beaten Russia every year this quad. Valentina thinks that everyone is highly motivated and the team is stronger than is has ever been after the fall of the Soviet Union. I disagree, maybe they are quite strong compared to the last few years, but so is the competition. She does however admit that the situation on balance beam will be unpredictable. But then again, "unpredictable" is definitely better than those predictable falls in Glasgow team final.

And talking about unpredictable, our two beautiful disasters on balance beam, Seda Tutkhalyan and Maria Kharenkova will compete at the World Cups in Stuttgart and Glasgow, respectively. The new seniors Angelina Melnikova and Natalia Kapitonova will compete at the Test Event in Rio de Janeiro.

As for the Olympic team, the final verification will be, as always, Russian Cup. But Valentina thinks they should have the team selected by European Championships, with Nationals working as qualification for Euros. The other meets, World Cups and the Test Event will be fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things.