You just knew that when Angelina Simakova had an unfortunate floor routine with two falls in the all-around final at Euros, that Valentina Rodionenko would have something to say. She expressed her unhappiness with Simakova to the media saying that Simakova might lose her spot on the national team due to this performance:

“Today’s women’s all-around final confirmed that we were not worrying for nothing. Simakova was not able to prove herself again and her career on the national team is now in great jeopardy”.

Of course, Simakova is coming to this competition just a few months after an injury and she’s extremely valuable to the team as someone who can consistently get 13+ scores on beam, so with a few more competitions under her belt, she will eventually become consistent in the all-around. She just needs to be given more opportunities like Angelina Melnikova was in 2017 and, hopefully, this will happen.

Angelina Melnikova has finally won a medal in the all-around – her first AA medal at a major international competition. However, Rodionenko was not happy with it either:

“Melnikova has upset us, too, we’re not figuring out what is going on with her. Yesterday, in qualification, she performed much better than today and today’s medal cannot be considered a success. Melnikova did badly on bars today, although she got a relatively high score. She again failed on beam and was careless on floor. All in all, Melnikova lost because of her weak beam. I’m surprised she was even able to stay in the top-three, usually, you can’t compete for a medal with the score of 12.800.”

Melnikova indeed has been having issues on beam for some time now but stating that she did so much better in the qualification would be not quite true. Her AA score in the qualification was only 0.1 higher than in the final. She actually raised her beam and vault scores in the final but got a lower score on bars. In any case, both Downie and De Jesus Dos Santos had problems in the qualification and stepped it up during the final, beating Melnikova’s QF score by a couple of tenths.

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