News from the Russian front:
Holding court with Russia's Sport-Express during an open-to-the-press training session at Round Lake this week (I wonder if there will be video?) Russian head coach Alexander Alexandrov pondered whether it was the right thing to let Aliya Mustafina perform the Amanar vault that destroyed her left ACL and ruined the rest of her 2011 season (and maybe her shot at Olympic all-around gold; we'll see).
"In hindsight, you can wonder whether or not she should have vaulted a simpler double twisting Yurchenko in the all-around — even with that, Mustafina would have won without any problem," Alexandrov said. "But we prepared a more complex vault for her – with rotation of 540 degrees. And so we did not consider any reserve variants for the final."
In hindsight, you do wonder. The question of whether or not Mustafina should have watered back that night in Berlin -- she was leading the competition by an insane margin of something like 3.5 points -- may be one that haunts Mustafina, Alexandrov and gymnastics fans for years, one of those great imponderables like (and here's where we get geeky) "What if the Soviets had competed at the 1984 Olympics?" or "What if Paul Hamm hadn't broken his hand on that back toss on p-bars in 2008?"
As it is, Mustafina did not land the vault poorly, Alexandrov noted.
"When an athlete is performing extremely complex skills, naturally the risk of injury is greater. That's on the one hand. On the other hand, there was no hint at all in Aliya's warm-up to make us doubt she could do the new vault. If anything in warm-up had not come together, I would have never allowed her to take the risk. She did a DTY in qualifications and that was enough to make the vault final. In the all-around, we planned to try the harder vault in order to have her feel more confident in event finals.
During warm-up Aliya did everything well. [The event organizers] warned us ahead of time that the meet would not go as fast as normal: competitions are often held up now because there are more adverts on television. Before, each girl's routine, including calculating the score, took from five to six minutes, but now you have to wait three times as long. I don't want to say that that is the reason for the injury, but I can't rule out that it played a role – her muscles could have cooled down.In fact, there were no mistakes in the vault itself. Aliya made it around and landed, like we say, 'stretched out'. It's just that one leg touched the mat first. And all the weight went on it. Plus the inertia from the rotation."
Anyhow, Mustafina has certainly now got a much harder journey ahead of her. Although she had surgery in Munich in May to repair the ACL, she will not be allowed to do any pounding on it before the knee is completely recovered.
"First the leg has to be brought back into shape and the muscle functions need to be recovered," Alexandrov said. "That is pretty dreary work."
Other nuggets of information:
- Alexandrov confirmed that he only considers European champion Anna Dementyeva to be competitive "on the European level." That sells Demy a bit short, doesn't it? She was, after all, in the World beam final in 2010, and has improved on all events since then.
- 2009 European champion Ksenia Semyonova, the only member of the Worlds-winning squad not to train at Round Lake, is hopeful for the 2011 World team. Not that the Russians have that much depth -- apart from the core that includes the 2010 World team, there seem to be only a few gymnasts with the necessary level of difficulty.
- The Russians are training on the same Gymnova equipment that will be used at the Olympics. On the whole, the girls like the floor, and are adjusting to the springboards.
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