European Championships 2018: A disappointing start

Yesterday was the first day of competition at the European Championships and Team Russia won the subdivision lottery, but neglected to take advantage of it. I thought that the leo was pretty good, but that's unfortunately it. The rest was not. And I'm not that upset, yet. Because even Queen Aliya herself knew that qualifications are for non-important losers and putting any effort into them is unnecessary and very un-Russian. So yeah, whatever. I wished for something better and will settle for this right now. But if they continue with this shit during the team final, I'll be mad. And France will be very happy.

Russia started out on beam and it all went to hell pretty fast, as things can go on beam. Angelina Simakova started out by falling, Irina Alexeeva continued the trend and Angelina Melnikova managed not to fall, but scored barely any better than her teammates after stumbling through her routine. They scored three 12s and had to count them all with the weird new 5-3-3 format. And you'd think that three 12s on beam with the new scoring system is not that bad, but it is. The scoring in this competition has been very lenient on beam compared to the current trend, so the scores are just as bad as they look. And this is a second Euros in the row with no Russians at the beam final. It's like Aliya cursed them with that 2016 win.

Sima's consistency on floor didn't fail, but her low difficulty score of 4.9 (a full point less than Melka's) really worked against her and she barely hit 13s. Lilia Akhaimova went out of bouds and fell on her Dos Santos and counted a score in the 11s to the team's total. Ouch. She was obviously out of the event finals too with that score, so there goes that medal. It was Melka's job to save the team, but her routine was definitely not her best. Ironically, it was still the best floor routine of the day.

Vault was pretty mediocre, but still better than beam and floor and Lilia and Sima both managed to hit their Rudis with some issues. Melka came out with a mediocre DTY and Lopez akd made the vault finals ahead of Lilia. Sima was ninth, so she didn't even need to be 2-per-countried out, she just didn't qualify. Ugh.

They ended on bars, which should be good for Russia, but opted out of trying to save their day and instead continued their mediocrity. Ira and Melka apparently decided to compete who could 2-per-country themselves out of the finals and performed twi sloppy routines. Ira won by a hundreth and won't be in any finals. Ulyana Perebinosova had been waiting all day for her one routine that was also the last routine of the team's qualifications, but somehow handled the pressure and hit her routine. I'm trying to be proud, but she looked even sloppier than her teammates and pretty much every handstand was worthy of a 0.3 deduction, so I just can't be overjoyed. I really hope that she fixes everything up for the finals. Ira and Melka too. I just can't handle a sloppy bars rotation from Russia, they have a legacy to uphold. 

After the poor showing, Russia made it to team finals in second place with a score of 161.462. They're 2.601 points behind France, so all is not lost but they really need to hit during the finals if they want to win. Or hope for some major mistakes from France. Belgium was third, but pulled themselves out of the team final because of an injury to rest their gymnasts for the individual event finals, so the next teams behind Russia who are in contention for medals are Great Britain and the Netherlands, both less than 3 points behind them. It's going to be an interesting podium.

As for individual finals, Melka and Lilia will be at the vault finals and both in medal contention. One of them could get a bronze, but they'd need some mistakes from competitors for anything brighter and they're barery scoring more than the gymnasts behind them, so it's going to be a tricky final and the podium is not set. Melka and Ulya made the bars finals and both are in the medal contention, but again probably not for the brighter medals. Ulya is third behind Jonna Adlerteg and Nina Derwael, Melka is sixth, but not that much behind that she couldn't get herself a bronze with a clean routine. I think that the gold and silver are pretty set, so they're competing together for that third spot on the podium. Ulya would have to really, really clean her routine up for anything better. As I said earlier, no beam finals for anyone. The first Russian was Melka and she was rather enbarrassingly 16th. It's not like they couldn't do better, they just won't. Melka qualified first to the floor final and is miles ahead of everyone else in difficulty, so she just needs to hit to win and is their best hope for a medal. So it doesn't exactly look like the finals are going to be a medal fest for Russia, but they should be able to scrape together something and have a mildly successful Euros. 

I think this picture pretty much sums up this day:

I'm still in Cyprus, so I'll fix the layout later.

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Links:

The full results are HERE.

More pictures HERE.