Juniors European Championships 2014
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* Saturday, June 14:  after clubs and ribbon
 * Final Standing, Teams
1. Russian Federation 96.815
2. Belarus                  94.715
3. Azerbaidschan       94,364

4. Bulgaria                 91,348
5. Ukraine                  89,182
6. Italy                       89,123
    ► Detailed Team Results
  > Juniors, individual (all-around)
 * Final-Qualification:
   > Hoop;    > Ball;    > clubs;    > ribbon

Finally the hosts from Azerbaijan had their first medal:
Zuleykha Ismailova and Zhala Piriyeva coped bravely with the heated atmosphere in the “Mili Gimnastika Arena” and won bronze with 94.364 points. Of course the gymnasts, coaches and the crowd in the arena were overjoyed!

The team of Bulgaria got placed in the fourth position due to several mistakes of one of their competitors in the clubs routine, where she had to step out of the carpet twice.
On fifth position came the girls from Ukraine and the sixth placed country was Italy. Speaking about the evolution of rhythmic gymnastics, from year to year it’s more evident that only a few countries can cope with the demands of the Code of Points. These countries are mostly those who have their gymnasts in national training centres with special schooling programmes, so they can dedicate many more hours to training than the rest and, of course, get good results with that. Depending on what importance the government of a country gives to the successes of its sportsmen, and to rhythmic gymnastics in particular, the National Federations receive more money and support.

Rhythmic gymnastics, a sport that looks so easy and is one of the hardest to train, so it’s very difficult to get good results for smaller federations or countries where the sport is not that popular than in Eastern European countries. There were made already some changes to the Code of Points, so, since this year, it’s allowed to use music with vocals in one of the four routines, but it seems not to be a real improvement as the choices of the music pieces are not always appropriate to the age of the gymnasts, especially seen in the junior competition, where one can hear such themes as “It’s raining men” and “Tango for Roxanne” (obviously not suitable for these ages) or Barbra Streissand’s “Memories” interpreted by a 13 or 14-year old girl, which clearly can’t provide the needed emotional charge that the music requires.
Also a big problem is that some coaches don’t know the language of the song, so there is more than one routine with inappropriate lyrics for rhythmic gymnastics and the age of the girl.

At the last day, on Sunday,  junior individual apparatus finals will take place in the morning. In comparison to the senior apparatus final only one gymnast per country is allowed to compete. This makes the chances higher for other countries step on the podium.
* E. Teijeira for GYMmedia INTERNATIONAL