Freezing in Mallorca

The team is on their annual training vacation in Mallorca and unfortunately the weather as been very cold for this time of the year. Based on social media it looks like they have gotten a few days on the beach and pool, but the rest of the time has been spent shivering and training. And in case of Vika and Masha, all kinds of dangerous activities. I'll be happy if we get those two back unharmed. Queen Aliya stayed in Penza according to her individual training plan, but Lena made it to Mallorca and is training again, at least lightly.

Have fun, girls!

Baby Swan Graduates: Valeria Saifulina

Valeria Saifulina (Валерия Сайфулина), or Lera, is from St. Petersburg and coached by the famous Kiryashovs. In case you were wondering, that makes her a teammate of Elena Eremina and Tatiana Nabieva, so she's in good company. She even shares many of the same characteristics of their gymnastics. A famous coach comes with great opportunities in Russia, so her junior career has been busy. Her national medals include 2015 silver in all around and vault, and bronze on floor exercise, 2016 bronze on vault and bars, and 2017 gold on vault. She missed out on the Junior European Championships, but has competed regularly in the smaller competitions, such as Gymnix. Last year she competed at the European Youth Olympic Festival, where she won gold with her team and individual gold on vault. When she's not busy competing and training (and a lot of the times when she is), she makes appearances on the St. Peterburg girls' YouTube channel.

Baby Swan Graduates: Class of 2018

It's 2018 and some brand new former Baby Swans are braving the Russian senior team. This year we have technically six gymnasts that have been or are national team level (most of them have spent a decent amount of time injured during these past few years), but two of them I count as more promising ones and two more the most promising. We'll still go over each one of them individually to wish them the very best. May they all exceed expectations and survive the dangerous-for-little-Russians transition into senior.

With our well-wishes out of the way, here they are: Angelina Simakova, Varvara Zubova, Aleksandra Schekoldina, Viktoria Gorbatova and Viktoria Panchuk. We'll remember you in our prayers to GymGods!

Angelina Simakova and Varvara Zubova

Aleksandra Schekoldina and Valeria Saifulina

Viktoria Gorbatova and Viktoria Panchuk

More posts about these Baby Swan Graduates to follow.

And just because... Here's an ask that I received last year that made a reference to one of my Baby Swan Graduates posts from 2017. It unfortunately went unanswered like most of my asks last year, partly because I'm a bad person and partly because tumblr's asks were having this bug that made new asks invisible to me, but I'm really sorry for not answering and thank you so much for sending it to me. It made my day when I finally received it.

Yes, she really did it. I'm so proud.

Russian Junior Nationals 2017: The Invisible Competition

Junior Nationals was last weekend and I was hoping for some videos to appear before going over it, but there are still not that many and I'm not sure if any more will show up. The story of this blog, it seems. There aren't any pictures either, it's like the whole thing didn't even happen. I added some pics from Jesolo instead.

So there's not that much to write about, scores and "she usually looks beautiful on this apparatus" only go so far, but here's a quick recap anyway. As usual, the juniors are split in two groups based on Russia's national sports merits, MC (the older and more accomplished girls) and KMC (younger and less accomplished girls, mostly those born in 2004).

From front: Varvara Zubova, Ksenia Klimenko, Anastasia Agafonova and Valeria Saifulina. Look who's hiding again, what a surprise.

The Care and Keeping of Grips: Life at Round Lake

Lena posted a new vlog, this time she's showing us what a day at Round Lake is like. Surprisingly, there's actually conditioning. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of tape and no carbs.

The girls are working out in the smaller gym, this is the morning practice session with conditioning and strength training and no apparatus work. Lena is working on a layout full during their tumbling session on the springboard. It would be an amazing upgrade, but I'm not convinced that she has enough stamina to pull it off. She has a few years to work on it though, her camera is still in 2014.

You might notice that Melka is missing, so are both Masha's. Ulya makes a short appearance, but apparently still isn't training with the usual program. I wouldn't be too worried about Melka, maybe she's training in Voronezh. Kharenkova is injured and you never really know with Beefarm. She's supposed to compete at nationals, but she only returned to training a few months ago, so I don't see where's the rush. She's broken enough as it is without a hurried comeback.

Bonus: Watch the vlog carefully and you might catch a glimpse of Mihai Brestyan's Russian twin :P

it's a different team now

The Russians are on their annual training/recovery vacation and this year they are back in Mallorca after trying out Italy last year. Unfortunately it looks like the Spanish snoops are vacationing too, because we haven't seen any training footage yet. I was going through the gymnasts' social media though, and this group picture really hit me hard:

From left: Daria Spiridonova, Lilia Akhaimova, Elena Eremina, Maria Kharenkova, Valeria Saifulina, Angelina Melnikova, Angelina Simakova, Viktoria Gorbatova, Anastasia Ilyankova, Ulyana Perebinosova, Seda Tutkhalyan

This bunch of babies is the team. This. I knew Aliya, Masha, Afan and Vika are all taking a well-earned break/slow decent into retirement, but this team picture made me really see the situation as it is. Masha K. and Spiridoz are now the team leaders, their most experienced and accomplished gymnasts. Didn't they just turn senior? Seda and Melka are right behind with some major international experience and all around capability. Even they are "veterans" of the last quad come next year, even though we just saw them grow up. Lilia is technically the oldest gymnast of this bunch, but because she hasn't ever been on the main team, her face in the team picture seems even newer than Melka's.

And if you thought like me at first that the rest this picture is filled with tiny juniors, no, it's not. This group (save for Lera, Vika and Sima) is THE SENIOR TEAM. It just feels so weird. The post-Olympic "where is everybody?" slump has officially begun for me. Don't get me wrong, I love all of these gymnasts and the super young "veterans" have a very special place in my heart, plus I'm really excited that Nastia, Lena and Ulya will join the senior team, but I need to adjust to the new makeup and look of the Russian nuclear team...

Looks like Kapi and Shelgie stayed home, I don't think either one of them is retiring though. And Polina might continue her B-team career. Alla is probably a lost cause by now. 

I needed some cheering up after my gloomy realizations because of this picture, and Seda was up for the job. Just look at her in Mallorca, posing with Miley Cyrus :) Who knew they were friends.

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I'm working on a series of posts dedicated to my favorite routines from this quad, probably with a side of some other good things that happened, like leotards, pictures, memorable moments and stuff. We'll see what I come up with.

Baby Russians at Gymnix and my shower thoughts (nothing creepy I swear)

So I was going to write about the Russian babies at Gymnix sooner and I failed. Surprise. I got caught up playing RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. And I actually went to school yesterday but my failure was mostly caused by gaming as usual.

So Gymnix? It didn't go so well, but it wasn't a disaster either. The Americans dominated as I suspected, but my little swans managed to grab a few medals, team silver most importantly. The Canadians won bronze in front of a home audience.

(Is it just me or do the Russians look a bit cranky there? Practicing that Russian bitchface I'm sure. Can't move to senior level without it. But I'd be cranky too if I was wearing a leo with weird boob tentacles.)

The Americans also swept the all around podium even with their best gymnast, Jordan Chiles, having an incredibly rough day and finishing way down the standings. Anastasia Ilyankova scored highest out of the Russians, but came in 4th after a low score on uneven bars, her best event. Event finals ended with gold for Nastia on uneven bars, and silver for Varvara Zubova on beam (yay!).

This week in Russian gymnastics

I've had a busy week filled with working on my final thesis and procrastinating. Mostly procrastinating, because whenever I should be doing something important I remember that I have Cities: Skylines. I start playing and notice that the city I built and played for hours and hours has been broken because of a new update. I use mods on plenty of games, but that shitty game is the only one that always, ALWAYS breaks. And then I have to start all over again. It's so frustrating. What was I talking about again?

Oh right, gymnastics. I was trying to explain why I didn't post anything about gymnastics this week. But nothing too important really happened, just a lot of little things so I'm just going to scramble together all the news here in one post. We have lots of great instagram action from Round Lake, Shelgie being Shelgie and Valentina not knowing what's going on. So just the usual.

Let's start with the most important: Rio. Rio Test Event to be precise. Actually, there's no test event for the Russians, because they are not going.

Russian Team for Gymnix

It has been 8 years (two whole quads) since Nailya Mustafina went to Canada and had one of the best competitions of her short lived career there. It was way back when the two Mustafina sisters were just tiny Russian baby swans taking over the world together.

8 years later and it's time for new Russian babies to take that important step on their way to becoming A) a star (someone like Khorkina, Aliya, Afan) B) Russian regulation hot mess (everyone else on the senior team) or C) one of those amazing Russian juniors who never make it to seniors (Nailya). Let's hope this year's Gymnix team belongs to the category A. Or at least B. Although, there's a 99% chance that they'll end up in C...

But I love Gymnix. It's one of those really rare competitions where we can see (always plenty of videos) gymnasts from youth to junior national team level competing together and the Russians actually attend every year. This year's Gymnix will be held 3-6 March with Anastasia Ilyankova (b. 2001), Ulyana Perebinosova (b. 2001), Valeria Saifulina (b. 2002) and Varvara Zubova (b. 2002) attending. These are not their top juniors (except for Ilyankova, this is actually her 3rd Gymnix), but this is another reason why I love Gymnix, we get to see gymnasts we don't usually see so much of.

I'm going to post more when we get to see some videos, but here's quickly a few things that I'm looking forward to:

• Ilyankova's amazing bars. She's seriously amazing on this apparatus and her routine isn't the usual cookie cutter Russian style.
• Ilyankova's everything else. She's a headcase, but what else is new. I'm hoping she gets her shit at least somewhat together for this competition, she's going to be senior next year so I'd love to see some improvements.
• Perebinosova's floor. She's actually quite clean there, and charming too. So she has potential, I'm hoping she can harness that.
• Perebinosova's bars. Like Ilyankova, she has an interesting routine (Ezhova!), but unlike Ilyankova, it's really, really rough. I'm hoping she has cleaned it up. 
• Definitely not Perebinosova's beam. I don't want to die from anxiety attack.
• Saifulina's floor and beam. She really has lovely lines and presentation, especially on beam.
• Zubova's everything. I've been stanning her since forever, she has way too much charisma for such a tiny thing. I even love her name so much, she really needs to become a star. And she does gainers. And stays on the beam, with nice routine too. Go win everything girl. We can always hope for a miracle on bars, right?

Here's the list of competitors:

Olivia Cimpian, yay! Just please don't embarrass my baby Russians by being more elegant than them. And yeah, Team USA is going to crush everyone. They rarely even come to Gymnix, what's up with that...