The Rhythmic Gymnastics World Championships in Kitakyushu ended on Sunday with the group finals.
The main intrigue concerned the performances of Russian girls.
Anastasia Bliznyuk, Polina Orlova, Angelina Shkatova, Alisa Tishchenko and Maria Tolkacheva have already won two victories in the all-around and in the team competition with the Averin sisters, and now they could win two more gold medals.
For their category, winning all competitions in one tournament is a completely unusual task.
All the gold in group exercises went to one country only at four world championships - in 1987 Bulgarian girls distinguished themselves, and in 1992, 2003 and 2007, Russian gymnasts were already invincible.
Since then, even two victories at a time have become a noticeable event for this sport.
The selection for the Sunday finals in Kitakyushu was the all-around results. In it, Irina Viner-Usmanova's wards scored the highest points in performance with balls, and with hoops and clubs, so the chance for a champion hat-trick was quite real. At the same time, it was worth remembering that in the current line-up the Russian team has been playing for a little more than a week. If it were not for the injury of Olga Karaseva, then it was she who would have participated in both runs, and Orlova and Tolkacheva would have continued to concentrate on only one of them.
The final day of the World Championship just began with the performance of the Russians with five balls.
Under the "Polovtsian Dances" by Alexander Borodin, they showed an amazing program with incredibly strict synchronicity.
Compared to her previous show, the gymnasts lost two tenths of points in the assessment for difficulty and passed a little in execution, but still got a solid 46,000 points for this exercise - no one else was close to this result in qualification.
Nobody got close to him this time either, although there were attempts to displace the Russians from the first place.
Chinese and Italian women relied on execution, but showed simpler programs, Japanese women had a high difficulty of subjects, but the second grade did not keep up with the first.
There were also protests that satisfied Italy and Japan, but they did not bring these teams medals more expensive than silver and bronze.
Orlova, Shkatova and Tishchenko became three-time world champions, Bliznyuk celebrated her sixth victory, and Tolkacheva confirmed her status as the best "group player" in history - she has already won 11 titles, the first of which she won back in 2014.
Many famous "personalities", such as Alina Kabaeva, Alexandra Timoshenko or Olga Kapranova, did not receive so many awards of the highest dignity.
Immediately after the final with balls, the competition began with three hoops and four clubs, where it was worth especially worrying about the Russians.
On Friday, they had a loss of an object, which did not allow them to noticeably break away from their rivals, primarily from Italian and Belarusian girls.
A catastrophe happened to the latter at the decisive moment - at the very end of the performance Anna Gaidukevich could not catch either the mace or the hoop. The national team of Belarus received high marks for the difficulty of the body, but otherwise their losses were too huge to avoid the last place. For the Italians, who went to the platform right in front of the Russians, everything went flawlessly. The bronze medalists of the Tokyo Olympics made a big leap up and scored 42.275 points - such an assessment was not yet among the wards of Viner-Usmanova.
It was possible to try to add by ourselves, provided that the run to the opera "Ruslan and Lyudmila" would be flawless, but this was not achieved.
Orlova once failed to catch the mace, and the reason for the fine appeared by itself.
The Russian national team earned 40,950 points and barely stayed in second place - only five hundredths managed to win over the Japanese team and one tenth over China.
In total, this medal became the 13th medal for Russian gymnasts at this world championship.