Comebacks This Weekend!
First, Chellsie Memmel competed at a small meet. Her routines weren’t fantastic, but they were decent. She hasn’t been training for long, so that’s expected. She admitted that she is just starting out and not training as much as Marta would like her to. I’m impressed with her steadiness on beam. She has a lot of skills back, she just needs to get some of her higher rated ones. Her vault was an average yurchenko full. Her bars, for some reason, weren’t posted, but in an interview, she does recognize that bars are where she can contribute. She also mentions that she is training a double twisting yurchenko. She did not compete floor.
Embedding from gymnasike isn’t working for some reason, but here are the videos.
Kristina Goryunova also returned from a year long break due to a suspension for doping. I was actually somewhat surprised, because I had thought that not being able to make the olympic team would push her into retirement. Even making it into international competition again will be tough because the coaches didn’t seem to like her much before she got suspended. The 2008 olympic alternate did not look to be in the best shape of her life, but has retained some of her skills. Her double layout looked good day one, but the
Goryunova's Hair
rest of her floor routine is not what it used to be. She used to change her composition around all of the time, but in mid 2009 she was competing two huge passes: two whips to a full in and a 1 1/2 through to 3/1 combination. You can see that routine here. On bars, it looked like she was working toward the weiler 1/2 maloney combination, but it looked extremely messy compared to Wiebers. I don’t usually mention this kind of thing, but what was going on with her hair? She is 18 years old. The half pigtail thing is not cute anymore.
Vault 1
Vault 2
Bars
Beam
Floor
Between the Olympics on Youtube