Advanced: 2010 Rhythmic Gymnastics World Cup

This year the World Cup, the third most prestigious international meet for rhythmic gymnastics (besides the Olympics and the World Championships) is held in Montreal, Canada.

I checked the results on gymnasticsresults.com, a great site for quickly finding out how your favorite meets turned out. I was relieved because I initially thought Evgeniya Kanaeva [RUS] would sweep the Cup like she did at 2009 Worlds (and cheated Anna Bessonova [UKR] in the process).

The competition ends today, so the Ribbon event has not yet been posted, but the top three results for the other events are as follows:

Rope


Gold -- Melitina Staniouta
Silver -- Daria Dmitrieva
Bronze -- Evgeniya Kanaeva

Hoop


Gold -- Daria Kondakova
Silver -- Evgeniya Kanaeva
Bronze -- Melitina Staniouta

Ball


Gold -- Evgeniya Kanaeva
Silver -- Daria Dmitrieva
Bronze -- Melitina Staniouta

(Clubs was left out, as is traditional to leave one apparatus out)

You'll probably notice several names popping up again and again. Unfortunately, rhythmic gymnastics has yet to see the kind of diversity in who mounts the podium as artistic has, and Russia is still heavily favored. And especially Kanaeva.

Now, I have watched her perform, and I realize that as a die-hard Bessonova fan, I am very biased. But I watched her supposedly gold-medal routines from 2009 Worlds and the word that came to mind was...boring. Yes, she can do the required elite skills. Yes, she is quite pretty and graceful. But she seems to have an unfortunate addiction to slow, safe music involving lots of piano and pastel-colored costumes. It might complement what rhythmics is trying to achieve (beauty and aesthetics), but to me it just puts a routine on the road to being utterly boring.

All of that aside, hooray for USA's Julie Zetlin! America's most awesome rhythmic gymnast placed 5th in both ball and hoop despite obviously having some really stiff competition. I really like her ribbon routine and hope she'll do even better in that event.

UPDATE 2/1/10: The ribbon results are up, and Kanaeva took her second gold in this event. Julie Zetlin, sadly, placed 7th. Ah well, I'm sure you did great, Julie!

Congratulations to all of the athletes who competed and I'll see you all next time to talk about the uneven bars!