Viral Infections and City of Jesolo Trophy 2017

It's only appropriate that right when the Russians make their grand return to Jesolo, Flo blocks everything. Gone are the days when Italian Gymnastics Federation streamed everything for everyone and we had hours and hours of footage from the meet. Ugh.

1. USA 2. Brazil 3. Russia

But first... The Russians didn't have the best time leading up to this competition. In another WTF RUSSIA?!? moment less than two weeks ago, their training base Round Lake was closed and the athletes evacuated after a rotavirus epidemic hit the base. Apparently during the same morning, around 50 athletes from several different sports (the training base has several national teams training there) fell ill with vomiting, fever and diarrhea. Because the athletes were from different sports and training halls, they suspected that the food in the dining hall was contaminated. I guess it could be a swimming pool too. There are some conflicting reports about whether or not any of the gymnasts were sick too (because when are there not conflicting reports about team Russia?), but they were evacuated along everyone else on the base to some old camp grounds, obviously not good for training. I don't know whether or not to laugh or cry. V-Rod tried some stupid bullshit about everyone traveling to different countries and catching the virus there, but obviously when there's so many people falling ill exactly at the same time, the source is somewhere on the base. She probably herself infected everyone on purpose to make them lose weight. But the training halls were inspected and disinfected and they resumed training fast.


The final team for Jesolo ended up being Natalia Kapitonova, Angelina Melnikova, Elena Eremina and Daria Spiridonova (seriously?).

Melka and Lena both had their fair share of mistakes, but were overall okay. Melka hit vault, beam and floor during the team competition and had some weird non-jaeger mistakes on bars. She qualified for 3 finals and unfortunately fell on beam, but won bronze on vault and floor. Yes, vault and floor. Italy is a strange country. Lena hit floor and vault during the team competition, fell on beam and got a crazy score on bars. 14.850. I don't know what the judges were watching... Or drinking. The finals were even crazier and she actually won gold. On bars! But then fell on floor.

Kapi has been amazingly consistent and great all spring and she really could have sealed the deal for Euros and taken a few medals while at it, but didn't. I was really expecting a good meet from her, but she returned to her previous unimpressive ways falling on her best events bars and floor and acting all shaky on beam. She didn't even make any finals, so no medals.

And Spiri. She survived beam and floor with her usual near-disaster dismounts and terrible scores, hit vault and actually managed to hit bars this time. Too bad her hit bars scored 0.650 less than Lena's. Why is she on this team again? She made the UB final thanks to whatever Melka though she was doing on bars that day, but didn't hit and finished second to last. Aaaaand...she will still probably make Euros.

Russia won bronze in the team competition, only 0.050 behind Brazil, USA was naturally 1st.

European Championships are only 3 weeks away and I'm trying to figure out how to schedule my work around them. I really want to watch everything live.

But so far it looks like this Jesolo team is the team for Euros too. Seda Tutkhalyan is at Round Lake, but her status is pretty much unknown. There must be some reason that they're not sending her to any competitions, right? I thought that they didn't send her to Stuttgart because she was a lock and they wanted to test Lena, Spiri and Kapi, but not taking her to Jesolo either is a bad sign. Apparently she had an allergic reaction to something, but that wouldn't take her out for such a long time. I'm worried. She even did a "chubby bunny" video with the ever-injured group, Anastasia Ilyankova and Ulyana Perebinosova. Please don't join them Seda.

The junior team for Jesolo was Ksenia Klimenko, Valeria Saifulina, Varvara Zubova and Anastasia Agafonova. They got bronze just like the seniors in the team competition, but didn't win any other medals. ZubZub seems to be stagnating badly, I don't really think that she'll have much of a senior career at this point. I'd be happy if she proved me wrong though, so don't give up lil' Zubs. She showed a great onodi beam mount in training, but unfortunately didn't hit it in competition. Lera looked like she usually looks (messy...), but had a nice floor routine. Agafonova seemed to be doing okay based on scores and liveblogs, but there aren't any videos of her, because she's a vampire. What else would explain that someone is so beautiful, but is never captured on camera? Flo probably has something to do with this meet, but what about the other meets? A vampire, clearly. Ksyusha was unsurprisingly the best Baby Swan of the meet, getting good scores and making several finals. She didn't win any individual medals, but there wasn't a 2-per-country rule, so the American juniors pretty much dominated the finals.

1. USA 2. Italy 3. Russia

I hope you saw more of the competition than me, Flo wan't really asking that high of a price for it, if I remember correctly. But videos are probably a lost cause, their copyright department is ridiculous.

A little fun fact to end this post: Russia actually scored better on floor in the senior team competition than the Americans.