Time to reap the benefits of years of hard work. And by benefits, I mean cars, the Russian Olympic medalists get rewarded for their achievements big time (not as great as in Singapore though...). Everyone got knighted (not really) by Putin, some cash depending on their medal and brand new BMWs, X6 for Aliya (gold gets you a better model), X4s for the rest of the team. I can't even imagine tiny Princess Tut driving that giant thing, wow.
I wrote a nice post about the last two days of finals, but somehow it disappeared into thin air. So let's try again, I needed to rewatch the finals anyway. Aliya, Oleg and Aleksandrov behind the beam kept distracting me from what was happening on the beam.
I feel like I'm both emotionally and physically exhausted after so many days of gymnastics. But what a bittersweet AA final. I got my wish and Aliya medaled, which I'm incredibly happy about. But I'm also sad that she couldn't perform to her best and had a lackluster day at the Olympics, especially after her great performances in the team final. I guess she gave her best for the team, again. I still think that she earned that medal, she gave the others every opportunity to take advantage of her mistakes, but nobody could. It really wasn't the best day for anyone except Aly and Simone, who both delivered great performances.
Thank you bad qualifications, it always works for Team Russia! Bad qualifications=good team final.
After the surprise team silver for the Russian men yesterday, the women took another surprise silver. And I'm so happy. I don't even know what I'm most happy about.
Aliya, who went through hell to get to Rio gets rewarded for her work for Russian gymnastics
Princess Tut again comes through for her team when it's most needed and hits under pressure again and again
Gelya turns her tears of disappointment into tears of happiness
Masha, who had to nervously wait for her one vault for two hours, cliches the team silver with a great performance
Dasha... did okay I guess
Aliya and Masha are Olympic medalists, again, after 4 difficult years
I've seen Dasha, Seda and Gelya grow up from little gymnasts to Olympic silver medalists
Yeah, I can't write a very coherent post right now, I'm too emotional over this. And exhausted. The medals were literally decided during the last rotation and up until that I was a nervous wreck.
I'm watching the MAG team final and don't really understand anything that's going on, everybody is landing stuff with their chest at knee-level but calling it a good routine, Russia is leading, Ukraine is not even trying and Kohei just took off his shorts. Wild.
But I counted yesterday's execution averages from WAG qualifications to have a better look at the scores and compare them between subdivisions. Click on the images to make them larger.
If you look at the individual gymnasts' scores, you can see that they go up a bit almost every subdivision, but there's only just over a tenth between the best and worst subdivision. When it comes to the teams, the teams from subdivision 4 (NED and USA) head the rankings. USA was the only team that didn't have any falls, so it makes sense that they scored well, Netherlands had one fall. The Brits are last, mostly thanks to Fragapane who scored several 6s.
But I think China was definitely lowballed. They had good beam and bars rotations with no falls, but their execution is super low compared to others. Belgium too. The floor scores also definitely went up quite a bit between subdivisions.
Ugh. I didn't want or expect a good qualification from Russia, because that would have been trouble, but this? No, just no. Congratulations to Seda though, for being the most consistent member of the Russian team. Who saw that coming?
A Voronezh news agency RIA Voronezh interviewed Viktoria Komova (link). And it's heartbreaking, like every interview of Vika.
Viktoria Komova, a gymnast from Voronezh, two-time 2012 Olympic silver medalist, multiple World and European champion, will miss the Olympics because of an injury. Viktoria spoke with a RIA Voronezh correspondent about coming to terms with her circumstances, what treatments she's having and how she'll be rooting for her friends.
One of the best gymnasts in the world misses the main event of the quadrennium. How did you make the difficult decision not to go?
It was 4 weeks before the Olympics and I realized that I can't do anything. There was constant pain in my back and it blocked all emotions and feelings. I was so afraid of training, you never know what kind of strain you're going to be under, but I went on. I wanted to be honest, I went to the coaches and said that I didn't want to fail anyone or be deceitful, I had no right to go to the Olympics, perform poorly and let the team down. They asked if there really wasn't anything I could do. When I told everyone about it, I wasn't even crying, there were no more tears. I was just tired of the pain.
--They actually upgraded! And Melka is back to normal! And it wasn't a disaster! And the Mustafina is back!
I'm so happy about this. Buuuut... I'm also worried. It's too good. It's Russia, so they are supposed to look like a disaster, that's how we know they're going to do well. So many mixed feelings right now. At least Aliya managed to be shaky on beam. That needed to happen. Thank you my Queen. She was also not-so-good on floor. Oh, and Seda fell on beam. What a surprise.
If you didn't have time to read through my lengthy introduction to Queen Aliya and the history of her reign, shame on you. JK. This post should sum up nicely the most important points of that post and give you an idea of what to expect from her in Rio.
So, to sum up:
Queen Aliya is a BAMF
She's the Queen of Russian gymnastics
And the Queen of elevator selfies
She also the Queen of handstands
Let's face it, she's the Queen of everything
She has too many nicknames to list, so you can just call her the Queen
She tore her ACL in 2011, but came back in 2012 and won the most medals out of any gymnast in London, she's the reigning Olympic Champion on the uneven bars
She also established herself as the Queen of tie-breaks, #don't tie with Aliya
And she had eye-makeup that inspired 1000 YouTube tutorials
Her uneven bars routine in 2012 was so cool that everybody is still doing it
She has a Worlds medal on every apparatus, 11 all together
Once she became the World Champion on her worst apparatus, just to mix things up
She re-invents herself faster than Madonna, whenever an injury prevents her from doing something, she quickly has a new thing she's the best at
She kept Russian gymnastics relevant for years all by herself
She performs best under pressure, when she knows she has to fight and she will steal your medals when you least expect it
She has a bad knee, bad ankle, bad back, bad shoulder and bad wrist, but she will still steal your medals
She has more elegance in her fingertips than you anywhere
Even her mistakes look elegant
You know what, she doesn't make mistakes, only choreography changes
She has two and a half skills named after her in the Code of Points
She can kill you with just her stare, Beware the Stare!
That's Aliya Mustafina. Learn it and appreciate it.
This introduction is going to be different from the rest because My Tsaritsa deserves it, and it's impossible to explain Queen Aliya in only a few paragraphs. So I ended up dividing her introduction to two separate posts, the first one (this one, to be exact) is going to be about her career before the Olympics, and the second one (to be published later today or tomorrow) will focus on what she has in store for Rio. ----- Aliya Mustafina. My Tsaritsa. Queen Aliya. Musty. Conqueror of the Podium. When I was little, my mother used to say that a loved child has many names, and it certainly applies to Aliya. She is the team captain in Rio and a London veteran. A London Olympic Champion. She's also my favorite gymnast of all time. And she's awesome. And I've been sitting here for an hour trying to figure out how to sum up her awesomeness and it has proven to be impossible. It's too much, she's too awesome. She's the ultimate BAMF. Thank you and goodbye.
Aliya was born in 1994 in Yegorievsk, Russia (Moscow Oblast) to a Tatar father and Russian mother. She was introduced to gymnastics by her Olympic wrestler father, who believed that children needed to do sports, because it was healthy. She was a determined and independent child, who navigated the Moscow metro transit system at a very young age to take her and her little sister Nailya to gym. Her father has often told the story of how she cut her finger and and was told to keep it elevated to help with bleeding and swelling; Aliya went to bed and fell asleep and still managed to keep her finger up throughout the night. She was that determined and disciplined, even as a child.
Several Russian news channels brought us some training footage today, nothing terribly interesting (except that Masha is vaulting!), if not for this golden moment that deserves to be archived in the Aliya Mustafina Collection of Awesomeness. And if that archive doesn't exist, it should.
WTF is she even doing, I LOVE HER. Her face when she takes off her hat. And her attack on that poor mic. Apparently there was a bug on it. Gotta keep the Zika away.
I've been trying to write Meet the Team: Aliya Mustafina for three days now and it's so difficult. No matter what I write, I feel like I can't adequately describe how amazing she is and why. Maybe tomorrow is my lucky day. I'm also considering splitting it in two parts, Part 1 would be her long career history and Part 2 would be what we can expect from her in Rio.
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The team had some time off yesterday and went sightseeing. It's probably frustrating to get to visit all of these amazing countries and cities and spend most of your time sweating in a training hall and stressing about whether your back can take a few more weeks of torture. So it's nice that they at least had a day to do something else. They took the opportunity to visit Christ the Redeemer and take a stroll on the beach.
Dasha posted a short video of their trip, looks like Aliya has the panda with her in Rio <3
It's technically winter in Rio (yes, the Summer Olympics takes place during winter), but both the water and air temperatures stay above 20 °C. How nice. It's actually summer in here, but much colder. I need to move to closer to the equator.
We haven't had much news about the training, but maybe it's better that way, because whenever there's news about Team Russia, it's always bad. The doctors are evaluating Beefarm today and we should know by Wednesday whether or not she can compete. Fingers crossed. Kapi is their first alternate, but I was trying to imagine her in the team and I couldn't figure out a place for her. Masha would only do vault and Kapi has a FTY, so she obviously can't replace Masha there. Melka, Seda and Aliya have DTYs so they could just go as a 4-member team without Kapi. Perhaps if they want to take some of the load off from Melka and save her and her bad hamstrings for the all around, they could put Kapi on floor instead of her. They'd lose a few tenths though. Kapi also has a more difficult bar routine, but I would rather rely on Melka, she's more consistent and has much more experience. And the only way they could use Kapi in qualification on bars would be at the expense of Seda's all around, I'm not sure if I'm okay with that. And let's face it, Kapi is terrible on beam, so even injured Melka would be better there.
I found this news clip, but they show only conditioning and beam choreography from the girls. What's interesting though, is that Dasha is shown on floor and beam, so they are probably not going to risk 3-up-3-count in qualification and use Dasha instead.
