Nine gold, two silver and two bronze medals won by Russian gymnasts at the European Championships in Varna in the junior and senior categories are an outstanding result.

Although the competition ended with a slightly upsetting stroke: in the exercise with three hoops and four clubs, the Russian group players made a gross mistake.

The hoop rolled over the carpet, and, accordingly, the tempo of the performance was seriously disrupted.

As a result - only the fifth place, and the gold medals went to the Israelis.

Should I be upset about this?

Definitely not.

As Amina Zaripova noted on the eve of the competition, two new young athletes entered the Russian group this season, who need to be thoroughly run in, but the girls had too few starts this season - only two.

It turns out that for the Russian athletes performing in the group, the European Championship was obviously supposed to become a rehearsal rather than a self-sufficient tournament. Well, now there is enough time before the Olympic Games to bring the teamwork of the group team to the ideal, and the head coach of the Russian national team Irina Viner-Usmanova, may the fans of the Russian football team forgive me - not Stanislav Cherchesov. In the sense that he is able not only to set tasks that are unattainable at first glance, but also to achieve their one hundred percent implementation exactly where it is most needed. 

One victory at the European Championship was won on the final day by the Bulgarian gymnasts, who beat the Russian five with balls, and this was also fair. Firstly, the representatives of this country worked out their exercise completely flawlessly, and secondly, it would be completely indecent to leave the host country without a victory. In this regard, both in artistic gymnastics and in rhythmic gymnastics, there is a joking opinion that the drawing of awards in certain disciplines is a kind of compensation for those who lost in the previous days. Something like what happened in Varna, where Russia collected nine gold medals out of 12 possible in its basket.

The champion is always the target. While the former, at the cost of incredible efforts, grope for new styles, directions, and combine the most complex elements into bundles, those who go in the rearguard, in fact, repeat what others have done, choosing the best. In this regard, rhythmic gymnastics and synchronized swimming are extremely close: both there and there the coaches carry their cross, knowing that all their findings will be immediately borrowed, but there is neither time nor energy to get upset about this - they are all go to make an outstanding result. Everyone has long been accustomed to the fact that Russian athletes in these two sports take the lion's share of awards at major tournaments, and this continues from year to year for decades. But every time the next pupils of Viner-Usmanova are thriving on the pedestal, the question arises:"How do they do it?"

“I think it's all about the rhythm,” Mikhail Ugryumov, an outstanding and too early diving specialist, once told me. And he explained that for many years he has been trying to understand what is the key to the crushing success of gymnasts and synchronized swimmers. According to Ugryumov, the rhythm of building both the combinations themselves and the training process as a whole can be of great importance in this stability. Simply put, immersed in this process, the athlete is imbued with a state of rhythm to such an extent that the nerves, all kinds of distractions and even painful sensations, inevitable at such a high level of achievement, fade into the background.

It seems that Irina Viner-Usmanova, when describing certain performances of her wards, says the same thing: she likes to repeat that a gymnast during the competition should be continuously "in the stream", in a certain state of detachment from everything and at the same time complete inner composure.

Catching this state, keeping it, decomposing it into its components and making it its own trademark is probably the hardest and most incomprehensible thing in the coaching profession.

And not at all the ability to come up with and put this or that combination.

Well, we just have to admire more and more wards of Viner-Usmanova and her coaching staff, and ask the question for the thousandth time: “How?

How is this even possible? "

And every time I really want this magic to never end.