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.

VAULT:

She has a FTY. I failed to find any footage that wasn't years old, but based on scores, her vaulting isn't the best. She has nice form but lacks power and has to pike it down quite a bit in this old clip.

UNEVEN BARS:

She has nice form and lines, and she's relatively clean with some small errors here and there. I absolutely love her flighty bhardwaj, one of the best at the moment, but she has a very Russian terrible giant half, and she must be the only Russian alive who has a less than perfect jaeger and can't do a D-dismount. Who let that happen??? Now that she's training with the national team, I expect great improvement though.

BALANCE BEAM:

She makes a great first impression on beam with her dead straight knees and clean jumps, but the overall impression suffers from her loose ankles, shakiness and lack of confidence. She has potential, but there's a lot of work to do and she hasn't upgraded or even improved that much on beam during the past few years.

FLOOR EXERCISE:

Floor is where she really grabbed my attention last year. She can move and perform and really show her best work (she actually reminds me of Shelgie), and her routine isn't bad either. And I absolutely love her opening whip to triple. We should have more of those.