The sporting feat of Russian gymnasts at the World Championship

In the nomination for the best athlete of the year

In two months the traditional ceremony of sports results will take place, and, honestly, already now one can place bets on one of the most unpredictable choices in the nomination “Best Athlete of the Year.” Because behind each medal of the current year in the piggy bank of Tatarstan residents is its own story, about which sports biopics have recently been filmed. A brief summary of ours could look as follows. The athlete was disqualified for three months for contrived reasons, which threatened to miss the European Championship. Earlier he lost the bronze of the Olympics in Beijing and the gold of the World Championship in Singapore with his last jump. But he did not break, came to Paris and won the silver of the championship. All this is about the diver Nikita Shleikher.

Andrey Minakov frankly did not have a good season, because of which words were spoken about the end of his career. He did not make it into the final of the European Championship in the individual distance and into the evening final of the relay, where his teammates won silver while contending for gold. On the last day of the starts he watched his partners lose the lead in the combined relay, but swam his third leg in such a way that Yegor Kornev only had to “hold on” to the finish, which brought the gold medal to yet another nominee.

The water polo player Roman Shepelev had a disqualification in the company of a group of juniors at the start of his career. He failed to convert the decisive penalty in the match whose victory would have taken us to the Olympics in Beijing. Already this winter there was a disappointment at the World Cup, watched by the whole country. But Minakov won the silver of the World Championship as part of the country's water polo team, of which he was captain at the debut World Championship in beach water polo.

The Tatarstan fighter Niyaz Bilalov's career is already coming to an end, but in it there was not a single medal of World and European Championships. Already this season he once again stopped a step away from the podium of the European Championship. And now a defeat in the quarterfinal to the Georgian wrestler Ilya Sulamanidze sent him onto the slippery path of consolation bouts. But he managed to overcome the Ukrainian and the far more titled compatriot Arman Adamyan — and won the bronze of the World Championship.

Championships non-stop

The fifth on our list, but quite possibly the first of those listed, is the gymnast Daniel Marinov. The sports history of the discipline, which turns 130 this year, starting from the starts of the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens, knows many curiosities. If one were to collect them in one big book, one would get the most fascinating reading, but the fact remains a fact: in recent years it has been possible to introduce a certain order of holding and alternating competitions, establishing mutual understanding between the confederations. True, the coronavirus made a noticeable dissonance in the alternation of championships, and sports historians by the 150th anniversary will read with surprise, for example, about the holding of two Asian water polo championships at once that took place in 2025. And the favorites, the Japanese, sent the players of the youth team to the second of the championships. This is non-evaluative information, which we simply accept as a fact. And through its prism let us consider the current starts of the World Championship in Rotterdam, which took place two months after the European Championship in Zagreb.

Until now the World Championships held in odd years were clearly separated in terms of dates from the European Championships, when competitions were held in even years. But in 2022, in the period of the beginning of the Russian suspension from international starts, the European Championship in Munich and the World Championship in Liverpool were held sequentially, giving their participants the necessary experience in terms of maintaining peak form over a two-month period. Only a doctor-physiologist can explain how similar is possible, but any person who goes in for sport will say how dangerous is the period of being at peak form. A person resembles a sharply sharpened pencil lead: press a little — you will break it, catching any viruses like a magnet. So Daniel Marinov did not avoid the like, catching a cold. He himself in his comments recalled that he had already had a similar experience, starting after he had lain in bed for five or six days before the start of the competitions due to back problems.

How to lose European gold and win world silver

The experience of overcoming health problems was there; the experience of participating in the most important start two months after another most important start was not. The English could fully share it, having won the team competitions of the European Championship in August, ahead of our team. Alas, there happened the error of Mukhamadzhon Yakubov on the vault, connected with the springboard for push-off, which was placed by mistake. As a result the Russians yielded to the English quite a little based on the results of the team all-around, which in the light of the world start, where the number of favorites increased many times over at the expense of the teams of China, the USA and Japan, looked like a sentence.

But then happened what in sayings is commonly called: every cloud has a silver lining. To the national team members Marinov, Arseny Dukhno, Ilya Zaika and Savely Siedin was joined by Sergei Naidin, who at his 25 is the most experienced in the current national team roster. He was not given a visa for the European Championship in Croatia, which he had to miss, and Yakubov was not given a visa for Holland, and he had to be replaced. A personal bronze on his signature horizontal bar, a silver in the team, where only the performances on the floor exercises left questions.

All the same our team silver from the World Championship is more valuable than the team silver of the European Championship. Especially against the background of the nervous hassle with visas and problems with departure from the airport, which dragged on for seven hours. We got around the Chinese, brought three points to the English, taking revenge for Europe. The Americans, the future hosts of the Olympics, were not in our system of coordinates as competitors at all. True, one does not need to be a futurologist to foresee how “American gymnastics will prettify itself at the home Olympics," but let us leave this topic for the future.

No questions for the judging

At present it is necessary to state that there cannot be a single question for the judges about their work in Rotterdam. How did the Russian athletes begin this season? Puzzled by the marks at the Olympics for the figure skater Petr Gumennik and, to a lesser extent, for Adeliya Petrosyan. Yes, with all the assumptions that figure skating is a far more evaluative sport with reference to “artistry," “presentation," “skating," than artistic gymnastics, where the execution of the element is the priority. But the experience of the past reminded that Svetlana Khorkina at the Olympics in Sydney 2000 had her vault go wrong not by her own will, but by the negligence of the organizers, who set the horse lower than the necessary height. And Alexei Nemov at the Olympics in Athens 2004 calmed the humming stands, dissatisfied with the mark given to him, for several minutes.

Rotterdam 2026 began very badly, with the non-issuance of visas to the leading trio of the women's team: Anna Kalmykova, Victoria Listunova and Angelina Melnikova, because of which the women's team remained without medals, not having received the Olympic quota yet. This is important from the point of view that any, let us call it so, disputable mark influences the concentration of the athlete, instills uncertainty such that the most experienced psychologist will need their own psychologist to return to a normal state. But the work of the judging corps at the World Championship was such that one did not have to ask the eternal question — and who are the judges; one simply states: they are great.

By the way, the return of the Russian gymnasts to the international arena coincided with the return of the Israelis, who were not given a visa to Indonesia, because of which they missed last year's World Championship, and upon their return to the podium their leader Artem Dolgopyat won bronze in the floor exercises.

It is very symbolic that, as for many years before, gymnastics lovers watched the reports from Rotterdam to the announcing of Lidia Ivanova, assisted by Emin Garibov. Lidia Gavrilovna, whom one so wants to congratulate on the upcoming 90th anniversary, was part of the USSR national team of the fifties, whose fate should become a reference point for the current national team members, whatever sport they go in for. The generation where Olympic champions became Viktor Chukarin — a front-line soldier who survived captivity, Grant Shaginyan — who recovered after a wound, the front-line soldiers Vladimir Belyakov and Iosif Berdiev. Who knows history — foresees the future.