Flip for Breakfast

“I’m explosive. Sometimes, I lose it, get fired up and raise my voice… Also, I grew up in Siberia and there people are very open – they say what they think. You can’t change me already but my pupils aren’t at fault either. If I yell at them in the heat of the moment, I always find it in my to apologise to the kid. And I never end the practice on a negative note, only on a positive one, that’s the law.”

To compensate, here are some of the fun facts about her:

She’s the resident “tastemaker”. She’s responsible for Liu Tingting’s new hairstyle. Ting2 was reluctant at first, but Yile cut her own hair to show her “big sis Ting” how it would look and convinced her to do it. 

She teaches the younger girls how to paint in her spare time and they have art sessions together. 

She drew the piggy on Sun Wei’s arm band and the Vegeta on Xiao Ruoteng’s arm band. Zou Jingyuan has one with peppa pig on it.

She recommends books and tv shows to her teammates. She got Tang Xijing hooked on Mo Dao Zu Shi (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) and the tv show based on it. (Tang is now a Xiao Zhan stan, let’s hope she wont be another DYL)

My issue is, ting2′s issue are not new. Even her mental issues are not new. She’s always had the exact same problems (block on dty, 540 on ub, going over time on bb etc) for two years. It’s not like she fell on a random turn on beam or suddenly landed on her head in a tumbling pass and everyone was like “how did she manage to do that?!”. No, people literally knew the exact skills she struggles with, have been begging for her coaches to reconstruct her routine to one she can do consistently, and those issues were never dealt with or her routine wasn’t modified in the span of two years. 

There are people watching training sessions in Stuttgart saying both Ting2 and Lsj struggled with UB, so I’m not making the argument that lsj should have went up on ub. I’m just questioning that given this information, should they not have had a plan B for ting2? 

Again, as much as I love ting2, she’s just not a mentally tough gymnast, nor one that can think quickly on her feet in high-stress situations. I don’t want to make excuses for her, because she lost a world medal for her younger teammates who all performed their best and might not get another chance, that will likely end up affects their futures like school placements. 

But here’s the thing, not everyone can be Aliya or Huang huidan, but imagine if a gymnast is already not mentally tough, struggles in training with a particular set, and then is told you are the captain of the team, you gotta go do that same set in tf since you managed to hit in quals by some stroke of luck. 

You would think if you don’t have a lot of options (the ones in the running with better ub than ting2 has worse bb or fx, better fx has less good ub/bb etc), you would create an environment to best succeed for your headcase of a gymnast.