Round Lake Update

Spring is here! It's still occasionally snowing where I live, but whatever. I hate spring so I don't know why I'm excited, but for some reason I'm just ready to leave winter behind for awhile at least.

There hasn't been much going on in the world of Russian gymnastics during the past few weeks, but the next ones should be very busy. A team of Ulyana Perebinosova, Eleonora Afanasyeva, Anastasia Ilyankova, Angelina Melnikova, Daria Belousova, Elena Gerasimova, Vladislava Urazova and Ksenia Klimenko is already in Italy for Trofeo Citta' di Jesolo and Nationals will be held right after they return. We also heard that Aliya Mustafina should compete at the Osijek World Cup at the end of May. All hail the Queen. Both Aliya and Valetina Rodionenko have agreed that she's motivated and in a competitive mindset.

The federation released some promotional training footage and interviews for Nationals, nothing terribly interesting.

And the team had guests. The Finnish national team spent 10 days at Round Lake training with the Russians.

From both the video and picture we can make some assumptions about the state of the team. Daria Spiridonova is still training, and Maria Paseka is back. I think V-Rod also casually mentioned Beefarm maybe being ready for Worlds while announcing her return to training? Ugh. Aleksandra Schekoldina is missing, a bad sign considering the earlier news about a possible injury. And Seda Tutkhalyan is still missing. I don't think we've seen her at Round Lake since her injury last spring, and based on the training footage she has posted, she should have returned by now if she was serious. I'll wait for Nationals to see if she shows up, but we might have lost her forever and I don't know how to deal with that possibility. I really had a soft spot for that messy headcase.

Elena Eremina is well into recovery from her back surgery and back in the gym. She also posted this image, that has me all kinds of puzzled.

First of all, how's that back? Second of all, where are you? It looks like either a very crappy hotel room, or very crappy hospital. The teeny tiny beds with wheels could be hospital beds, but wow. What is this dystopian place?