My Favorite Routines from This Quadrennium (II)

Since the uneven bars is obviously the team's best apparatus, this post is going to be a longer one.

UNEVEN BARS

My favorite has to obviously be Queen of the Uneven Bars Aliya Mustafina just being herself  and taking what's hers, the Olympic gold to be precise. She successfully defended her gold on the same apparatus from London, which is an incredibly difficult feat in gymnastics. She also won Russia's only gold in gymnastics, just like she did in London. After struggling with injuries and low difficulty all quad and being counted out from the race to the Olympic gold, she brought her best to Rio, because that's what mattered. She actually ended up having the highest difficulty score out of all the contestants in the final, and since her execution is always impeccable, there was no stopping her. 

I actually liked this routine from the team final a bit better than her routine from the event final. And ironically, the view on this is much better than the official footage (why do the professional directors so often place the camera at such a bad angle?). Just look at those lines. And that pak is to die for...

And look at her in 2013, showing up to World Championships with a new routine complete with a shap 1/1. She unfortunately missed a connection in the UB finals and had to settle for bronze, but she hit her routine during the AA and it was pretty great. And it was 6.8, a difficulty she wasn't capable of matching until the Olympics.

It wouldn't be a post about the Russian bars without Viktoria Komova and her gold winning performance at the 2015 World Championships. I cannot tell you how much I love this routine (oops, I guess I did). That swing, those lines, the releases, the inbars, that landing, all so incredibly beautiful. There's no one else capable of this kind of execution, and the more I watch the final, the more I think that she's on her own level and should have had the gold all to herself. This final was infamous because of the number 15.366, a score the judges gave to 4 (!) gymnasts, who got/had to share the gold. This was the only major competition Vika competed in all quad, which makes her win a bittersweet moment. Especially since this is her second Worlds gold, both on the uneven bars, this one 4 years after the first one. 2011 and 2015 are the only years amidst her injuries that she has made it to Worlds.

*takes a moment to cry for vika*

Daria Spiridonova emerged as the only Russian from her generation of gymnasts to consistently win medals at the highest level, all on her best event, uneven bars. Her greatest victory was the 2015 Worlds gold that she shared with 3 other gymnasts, Vika included. I however picked this routine from the European Championships earlier that year, because I like it just a tiny bit more. It represents her beautiful style very well, everything looks light and easy and polished (except for the dismount that I hate), and earned a gold medal too.

This is Spiridoz only a year earlier at her first major international competition. She got the 2014 European bronze medal with this routine, but compared to the gymnasts she is now, she looks very amateurish and sloppy. I had no idea at the time that she would improve so much and become such a success story.

And here's the other Dasha, Daria Skrypnik and her gold medal winning routine from the 2014 junior Europeans, definitely one of the highlights of this quad. She was only 13 at the time and with her long legs glued together and knees always extended to the max, she reminded me of the young Vika. Such an amazing combination of execution and difficulty from a junior, with a bit of polish this would have been highly competitive even on a senior level. Actually, she was only a tenth behind Spiridoz' senior bronze, so yeah, I had high hopes for her. So it's only natural that her senior career would come with its fair share of disappointments and inconsistency. To be fair, she has only been a senior for 9 months, so there's still maybe hope.

This routine is from the 2015 Russian Cup and it's Dasha's best routine of the quad, at least for me. It isn't her most difficult routine ("only" 6.6), but look at the opening combination that keeps going forever and those picture perfect handstands (before the terribly Russian giant half). I could watch this forever. And she was still a junior. Please get it together Dasha, I need you to grab some senior medals.

And here's someone else who I desperately want to grab some senior medals, Anastasia Ilyankova, who turns senior next year. I absolutely love this routine for two reasons. One, those super high releases, especially the hindorff. Two, the very non-Russian routine composition. Don't get me wrong, I love Russian bars, but it's really refreshing to see a routine with some different skills for a change, especially since half the gymnasts at UB event finals this quad did nearly the same routine. And look at her form, beautiful. This routine unfortunately hasn't scored as well as the traditional Russian ones, but I still hope she keeps it.

Seda Tutkhalyan is another non-Russian bar worker and she even kept surprising us with unexpected upgrades. She actually went from 5.8 difficulty in 2014 to 6.5 in 2016, and hit her 2/2 routines at the Olympics, getting the same scores as Spiridoz and Melka. Who saw that coming? Aliya could certainly teach her a thing or two 100 things about handstands, but otherwise this is very good.

We already saw Maria Paseka highlight my vault round-up, but as a gymnast, she is a rarity: a vaulter whose second best apparatus is uneven bars. She even won 2013 European bronze and 2015 Universiade bronze on bars. But just look at this routine, amazing. Not only is her set of skills good, but the fact that she can execute this kind of routine, a never ending connection basically, this well, is a testament to how good she is. Can't really complain about that dismount either.

I really hope that we get Elena Eremina doing the nabieva on bars next quad, but this quad we still had the one and only Tatiana Nabieva herself, unfortunately not doing the nabieva. She was still great though, especially for someone who was technically retired.

Natalia Kapitonova delivered many admirable routines, but her best yet, a gold medal winning 6.7 difficulty routine at the 2016 Russian Cup was nowhere to be found. So I went for the second best, her old routine from the 2016 Russian Nationals. I don't know, she's just beautiful to watch and does pretty much everything right, but watching her doesn't really excite me. Maybe next year.

And lastly, remember when Alla Sosnitskaya won gold on bars at the 2015 Russian Cup? It was the same meet where Spiridoz won AA gold because junior Melka's scores didn't count. It was a crazy year. But let's give some credit to Alla nevertheless, she went from 5.8 D-score in 2015 to 6.4 in 2015, impressive. The judges who gave this 14.900 were clearly blind, but as I said, it was a crazy year.
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I didn't put any of their routines here, but Masha K., Melka and Shelgie all made some great improvements on bars this quad, their routines just that weren't that memorable. I do remember being very impressed with Masha at 2015 Euros QF though. And we'll definitely see all of them in the next part on beam.

And I lied, Alla wasn't the last. I feel like ending this post with a random not-that-memorable routine from Aliya just so we could conclude that "not-that-memorable" for Aliya is still pretty damn special compared to anyone else. Enjoy the beauty of Aliya's bars.