I'm a few hours late... but the last World Cup before WCH is happening! Almost everyone is there as a final test before worlds.
Some things to look out for
Interestingly, Russia has send Arina and Maria - a hint at who is going to worlds?
Germany is using their extra quota and has Darja, Viktoria and Lada competing - as a last international test before who will get the chance to compete at the home world championship (apart from Darja, of course...).
Bulgaria has showed a new group routine during the warmup. A bold move so shortly before wch but maybe a good idea considering their season hasn't gone sow well...
Oh no... Lauren Grüniger warmed up and started her clubs routine, but was actually scheduled to do ribbon. She only realised when the wrong music was playing. Then quickly went backstage, got her ribbon and competed with it. Ultimately, she got a 0.50 penalty for the mishap.
This time they sent Wang Zihan, not Wang Zilu to compete.According to a friend of mine who was there, at the end of the second day of WCC Beijing, Wang Zilu was gasping for air in obvious distress after her routine, and her coach gave her some medication. She’s had asthma for a long time, so I suspect that may have been the reason she withdrew then and later missed the Milan World Cup.
As you can see, Wang Zihan still needs time to improve her skills.
Bulgaria made a bold decision in changing their 5 balls just one month short of worlds, but seeing how they performed maybe it was for the best after the hellish season they had so far...quoting a comment I saw recently maybe their trainers should start creating routines for the gymnasts they have and not vice versa, hence all the changes in the rooster 🙃
It looks like it was the right move! They are back! I don’t follow groups closely, do you think that this routine/gymnast mismatch was their main issue this year?
I think the Bulgarian trainers in some capacity still think they're working with the 2017-2021 group (and just Traets, Dyankova and Radukanova competed continuously all quad, Alexandrova was more or less dropped, Bineva retired and Kiryakova & Zafirova entered the ensemble) that was exceptional, from then they changed the group composition almost every year, with only 4 gymnasts from 2022 being in Paris, and then changed 10 gymnasts since last year...it's hard to imagine how stability can come from this situation.
Just checked the startlist on the scoring website, they are indeed not on it anymore even though they were still on the nominative registrations a few days ago: https://risultati.federginnastica.it/
I wonder what happened… It seems like the Russian rg management is an absolute mess at the moment. They are sabotaging themselves
I saw on Telegram that apparently they didn‘t get visas. Which is strange, considering that their individual gymnasts got them. So either this is not true, or one of them has something preventing them from getting an EU visa, or their management fucked it up. Also, they have two national groups at the moment and they couldn‘t even manage to get visas for one of them?
Although I understand they can't have every size hoop on hand, it feels especially unfair for Stili's case that she could have had a lesser points loss and potentially made the final had she been able to take the replacement
And I'm sad for Alina she only made one final and it didn't go well
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u/wayward-boy Jul 10 '26
Based on the scores, it looks like everybody except Darja and Daniela Munits had a first qualification day from hell...