thought this was eteri tutberidze for a second and almost lost my damn mind ☠️☠️☠️☠️

Like if you’re a #aliya mustafina fan, reblog if you’re a #russian fan.

a minor detail that i find wildly (maybe disproportionately based on my own baggage idk) upsetting is that kara literally did stand up to him and say explicitly "this isnt helpful and i dont respond well to this approach/coaching style" and she was just..... totally steamrolled in response...? fuck

pouring one out for the homies (gutsufan, gutsufan2, nastiafan101, yarotska101, piibunina)

Can’t watch the livestream anyways bc I’m at work, but man I miss watching competitions live with the epic highs and lows of the Russians competing

anywhere heres a Funnie Screenshot from the show The Americans taken out of context that i feel has incredible gymnastics reaction meme potential

Every time I remember watching the Tokyo 2020/2021 TF and seeing Russia win gold in real time I gain another year of life<3

Simone Biles, 2023 Xfinity U.S. Championships Day 1

Not to be controversial but without Russians I have very little interest in elite💔 at least before 2021 the USA normally won because they were genuinely the best team but now they’re going to win by being mid + Simone + the best team is banned. Boooooring

Said it before several times and I’ll say it again now for the anniversary: some of these heaux will never understand the absolute ecstasy of watching Russian team olympic gold happen in real time. They were not here for the epic highs and lows of the decade preceding that moment (mostly lows let’s be honest). Some of us invested our time and emotional energy into that flop ass national team that couldn’t cobble together a floor rotation if their goddamn lives were at stake. For 10 years. When they won junior worlds we were all like okay yeah whatever it’s junior worlds they’ll be retired before the end of next year probably 🙄. And then the p*ndemic. But no. They did it. They actually did it. They fucking won. It was a fever dream. Best day of my entire wretchèd life.

Happy birthday Ágnes Keleti, the oldest living Olympic Champion turned 102.

Tessa Virtue & Scott Moir’s Senior Free Dance Programs 

Amira 💙

Let’s talk about German gymnastics…

The above picture is Pauline Schäfer-Betz (25–who has the amazing middle name of Sieglinde), Kim Bui (33), and Elisabeth Seitz (28).  Between them they have been on 8 Olympic teams and Bui was an alternate for the 2008 team.  Every so often someone in the gymternet (even the actual Gymter.net) will wring their hands and worry about the fact that Germany is leaning on these older athletes and be concerned that there aren’t people to replace them when they retire.

This is a cultural misreading of German gymnastics philosophy.

But to explain why let’s first start with these three amazing women.   Schäfer-Betz was the 2017 World Champion on balance beam, and took a silver medal on beam at the 2021 World Championships, and bronze at the 2015 World Championships making her one of the most decorated beamers currently competing not named Simone Biles.  She also is one of my favorite floor workers of all time.   Schäfer is known for having lower difficult but winning with extremely clean execution (though she has a criminally under valued beam skill named after her that will looks impossible when you see it).  @darthmelyanna calls it witchcraft which is rather fitting when you watch her beam choreography.

Eli Seitz has made 3 straight uneven bars finals (6th in London, 4th in Rio, 5th in Tokyo), having won a world medal on the bars in 2018 and came in 9th in the Tokyo Olympic all around.  Here are her Olympic bars routines:  2012, 2016, 2020(1).

Kim Bui’s gymnastics resume isn’t quite as storied though she is a regular AA and event finalist at Europeans, Worlds, and Olympics and provides solid team scores.  Here are her events from 2021 Europeans.  To me she lovely to watch because of how much joy she brings to every performance, but the remarkable thing to know about Bui besides that she’s a high level international gymnast at 33 years old is that she has a masters degree in biomedical engineering and spends half her day in a laboratory doing cancer research.  In case you were feeling accomplished about yourself today.  Except Bui would tell you that you are doing great because she’s that kind of person.

These are not women who are “holding on”, they are still highly competitive athletes at the top of their game who are also leaders beyond their sport.  In 2021 these three women began a movement in German gymnastics to show that gymnasts didn’t have to wear leotards but had other options if they didn’t feel comfortable.  In their statements to the press they talked about not liking the kinds of pictures they found of themselves after competitions and the way people talked about their bodies rather than their sport.

Because gymnastics fans are used to seeing a name for a quad or two the fact that they see these three women consistently from Germany makes a lot of people reflexively assume that there aren’t those younger gymnasts that would replace them.  The reality is that they are a core of a team that often includes younger gymnasts (who often also medal with non-Schäfer/Seitz/Bui Germans taking medals in 2016 and 2017.  A lot of the handwringing compares the Germans to the Romanians who kept sending older great athletes to competitions while burning through young ones.  I think this is a misunderstanding of the German program which emphasizes wanting longer sustainable careers rather than immediate medals.  Seitz went to 12 straight world or Olympic games before finally taking a break for the 2021 Worlds (which was only months after the Olympics).  Bui has had ACL injuries and come back better than she was before.  

Gymnastics as a modern sport was born in Germany as both military training and philosophy for a whole and healthy life.  The modern German program has jettisoned some of the… more problematic… elements of turner philosophy and embraced a modern one which I think they see Kim Bui and her scientist/world class athlete life as the example of.  They are proud of their young talents but they want their young talents to be around for a very long time.  

And I think a good example of this is going on this week at the European Youth Olympic Festival.  A large multisport competition for juniors.  Helen Kevric, who might be the single most exciting junior gymnast competing right now who will turn senior just in time for Paris, won the all around title and lead the German team to silver ahead of much more “traditional” gymnastics powers.  She has 3 days straight of finals this week and on the first rather than throwing all the difficulty she was capable of which likely could have given Germany a gold medal she instead was allowed to throw slightly less difficulty to save her body not just for the next few days but for the next few years.  The Germans took a silver today not because they lucked into it or because they weren’t good enough, but because sanity tells them that a single European Youth Olympic Festival gold is not worth unnecessary risk to a young athlete.  Something that would be unthinkable in almost any other country.

Do not mistake people prioritizing sustainable careers for decline.  I try not to get my heart set on juniors.  So many of them never make it to the senior ranks or burn out early.  I’m still holding by breath to see Kevric in Paris because she’s a stunning gymnast.  But I am more confident that I will see her there than a junior from any other country.  And I hope that in eight years I’ll still be writing about how amazing Helen Kevric is.

god i wish i could relive the 2021 olympics the schadenfreude of russia winning the artistic gymnastics team event and simultaneously the schadenfreude of russia losing the rhythmic gymnastics team and aa events. incomparable

the russian team react to angelina melnikova securing their historic gold medal in the 2020 olympics

+ the american silver medalists congratulating them:

a) since just after rio 2016 and,

b) yes, and now i have a whole ass B.A. in russian after gymnastics reignited my interest in the language lol

Ok I’m curious, either reblog or reply, but if you are a gymnastics fan, a) how long have you been a self-identified fan of gymnastics?, and b)can you read cyrillic (even just recognizing names and nothing about russian grammar or anything)?