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.

Baby Swan Graduates: Ulyana Perebinosova

Ulya is originally from Kuznetsk, but she trains in Moscow and is coached by Marina Ulyankina, also the coach/former coach of gymnasts like Maria Paseka, Seda Tutkhalyan and Alla Sosnitskaya. She represents the Central Federal Okrug, even though neither Moscow nor Kuznetsk is a part of it, but the Russian teams rarely follow any logic anyway. She made a steady rise through the junior ranks and by 2016, she was expected to be one of the team's top senior all arounders in 2017. So naturally she disappeared completely and her status now is unknown. Before her untimely disappearance, she won gold together with her team at the Junior European Championships, and also took individual silver on bars and bronze on floor. At the Russian Nationals in 2016, she won gold on vault, silver on all around and beam, and bronze on bars.

She has many attributes in common with other Ulyankina's gymnasts and like them, she's not the typical Russian Swan. She isn't nearly as messy as them and she usually has nice, clean lines, but she doesn't have the elegance or finesse of some of her teammates, and hasn't shown much character yet. She's an all arounder with fairly equal ability on 3 pieces. She's best on bars, very promising on floor with nice dance and high, clean tumbling, and one of the few Russians with a DTY on vault, but it's still very inconsistent. Her beam is...ummm...special. Think of junior Maria Paseka.

Baby Swan Graduates: Anastasia Ilyankova

Nastia is from Leninsk-Kuznetsky, Siberia, and currently the only gymnast representing the region on the women's national team. Interestingly enough, Siberia produces a lot of men's national team members, but Nastia is the first woman in awhile. She is coached by S.V. Kiselev and N.V. Kiseleva. Nastia is a long time national team member with a lot of international experience to prove it. She has been on the Russian Gymnix team three times, and was part of their gold medal winning Junior European Team last year. When Melka turned senior last year, Nastia grabbed herself the newly free top junior spot, slightly edging out Elena Eremina for it. Her titles include 2016 Junior European Champion on uneven bars and balance beam, 2016 National Champion on all around, bars and floor, bronze medalist on vault. She also has a huge pile of assorted medals from competitions like Russian Hopes, EYOF, Gymnix, Voronin Cup etc.

I have very mixed feelings about Nastia, which is a pretty accurate description of her gymnastics. Mixed. She's just one of those gymnasts who seems to effortlessly switch between moments of true beauty and regular mediocrity, making me crazy in the process. She's also a confusing mix of a very typical Russian junior with nicely pointed fingers throughout an inconsistent performance, and someone who gets the job done, but doesn't care how. She has the basics of a gymnast with more than average finesse, plenty precision, elegant movement and nice lines, but the next moment she has knees and feet everywhere they shouldn't be and she stumbles through her routine like a rhino. Ugh. However, there's one exception: bars. She somehow manages to look only beautiful on bars, leaving her various form issues behind when she steps on that podium. I will never figure her out.

Baby Swan Graduates: Elena Eremina

Lena is a protegée of the one and only Tatiana Nabieva, and the most promising gymnast to come out of St. Petersburg since her. She is from the same gym and coached by the same coaches, Vera and Aleksander Kiryashov/a. She wasn't the most prominent junior of the team and was overshadowed of gymnasts like Melnikova and Simakova for most of her junior career, but she definitely made up for it during her last year as a senior, when she became the 2016 Junior European all around and team champion. She also won bronze on balance beam. Her other titles include 2015 EYOF team gold and vault bronze, and 2016 Russian National Championships balance beam gold, uneven bars and vault silver and all around bronze, and 2015 Nationals vault gold, balance beam silver and uneven bars bronze.

I took me quite some time to fall in love with Lena, but this year she definitely got me good. In good and bad, her gymnastics reminds me a lot of Tanya. They share a lot of the same skills and the same messy, but strangely fluent and occasionally even elegant execution. And while Lena's presence and character doesn't quite compare to Nabs (how could anything compare to her, really), she has that something, that makes me want to watch her.

Baby Swan Graduates: Class of 2017

It's time for the usually sad and only semi-relevant post-Olympic year, but we still have 4 new brave youngsters, (hopefully) ready to try to defy the odds of surviving Russian gymnastics. They have already proved to be extremely resilient (or lucky) by making it into senior level, so let's hope that they have a few good (dare I say, maybe even a tiny bit successful) years left.

You're probably already familiar with them, but here are the former Baby Swans who graduated into senior ranks at the start of this year: Elena Eremina, Anastasia Ilyankova, Ulyana Perebinosova and Elizaveta Kochetkova.

Don't they all look young and innocent? Enjoy it while it lasts. They'll soon make you crazy in one way or another, probably either by being a talented headcase, injured headcase or someone who can actually hit but is always injured.

This post is going to be divided into separate parts in case I get overly excited and poetic. Part 1 will be up soon, and it's going to focus on Lena.