Russian National WAG Championships

It is a full competition where the regional teams participate and individuals get a chance to test themselves and their early preparation for the coming competitive season.  This year the top women will be competing for places on the European Championships teams (junior and senior) for Sofia, Bulgaria, later in the spring.  It is expected that we will see Viktoria Komova for the first time in many months - which must be the most anticipated comeback for years.  Aliya Mustafina is also hoped to make a show, as well as Anastasia Grishina and Maria Paseka.  There has been an announcement that Ksenia Afanasyeva will compete vault, and I would also be surprised if we didn't see Maria Kharenkova again, and get a chance to see Evgenia Shelgunova.  The graceful Anna Rodionova should be in the running, too.

So that's basically our Olympic team from 2012 along with other newbies who might be in with a shot at the first big competition of the year - it will be interesting to see who is on form, but also I think how far the gymnasts have improved, if at all, since their last big outing - the Olympics.  Worlds this autumn will be the mid-cycle competition and at the same stage of the team's development as in 2010, which as you will no doubt remember was the year the Russians won Worlds and when Aliya Mustafina first came to prominence at senior world level.

I came across the following fantastic collection of videos (no commentary!) of WAG qualifications in London this morning.  As a team, I think we were seeing the girls at their best, if not flawless in their execution.  Whatever happened between the calm of quals and the rather harrowed presentation in team finals?  What in particular happened to Grishina?  Here, she looks sleep deprived but puts in a fantastic showing in bars, beam and floor.  It is hard to say that the team would not have done much better with a well rested, positive Grishina delivering her best on all these apparatus in the final.  Perhaps we will never know what the battle was all about, but I would love to be able to rewind history and see the team compete again, with Grishina instead of Mustafina on beam - and Komova instead of Mustafina on floor.  Perhaps no change in the final result would be the outcome - but you never know.

History hasn't recorded how good this team looked in quals - excess expenditure of nervous energy seemed to take its toll however.  Perhaps tension between the coaches finally became too much for 'Nastia' whose training arrangements, as described by head coach Alexandrov in his interview with this blog, had become a battleground.  In the end, coach Alexandrov was to say that Grishina was not ready mentally for such a big competition - the team would have been better off with European Champion Anna Dementyeva.  But Anna was sent home at an early stage of the training camp by Valentina Rodionenko - and that is another story.  

Have the Russians got any better since 2012?  Are their routines ready for the new Code?  We will have to wait and see.  If there is any news of live streaming or of videos I will post here right away.

London 2012 WAG qualifications - Russia - FX