Stuttgart World Cup 2018: Melka's major upgrades

After the disastrous team qualifications I was pretty optimistic about Angelina Melnikova's individual all around competition, because it's not like she could do worse. And I'm happy to say that she didn't challenge me on that, she didn't do worse. Her lowest score was actually "only" 11.776. And that is to say, while she didn't screw up like the rest of her team, her performance wasn't that great either.

She placed 4th with 52.699, less than a point behind the winner Zhang Jin. The silver medalist was Elisabeth Seitz and Jordan Chiles won bronze. Melka's competition was riddled with her usual issues, but she technically only fell once.

Stuttgart World Cup 2018: doing team final the Romanian way

So... Russia competed at Stuttgart and promptly disqualified themselves out of the team final. They're testing my patience. Because they have no excuse. It was not a bad team. Viktoria Komova, Anastasia Ilyankova, Lilia Akhaimova, Maria Kharenkova and Viktoria Gorbatova. Almost all of them belong to the better half of athletes they have right now. How can you go to a meet with a team of this caliber and screw up so badly. How? HOW? I don't know if you noticed, but I'm a little bit mad right now. Yeah, the other teams had some Worlds level gymnasts, yeah, it's really early in the season, yeah, the Russians downgraded and are saving their strength for Nationals in order to hit the perfect combination of utter disaster and great potential they so value there. And to be honest, this competition had really strict scoring. But even with these things considered, it was pretty bad.