Brazil's head coach not too happy about the current situation

Ten years ago, Artistic Gymnastics was not a very well known sport in Brazil. The country's best athlete so far, Luísa Parente, had retired in 1995 and future stars Daniele Hypólito and Daiane dos Santos were still too inexperienced to show strong routines. Then, in 2001, Oleg Ostapenko and Irina Ilyaschenko came from Ukraine to Brazil in order to train the Women's national team. Things suddenly changed. Daniele Hypólito won a silver medal at the 2001 World Championships on floor, Daiane dos Santos became the World Champion on the same apparatus in 2003 and Jade Barbosa came close to being the All-Around champion at the 2007 World Championships, but still managed to earn a bronze medal.

Now Oleg Ostapenko is back to Ukraine and Irina Ilyaschenko is the new head coach of the Women's national team. And according to this article, she is not too thrilled about that. Irina's main concern is that the "permanent team" is not together as a team the whole year. From 2001 to 2008 all the girls trained and lived together at the city of Curitiba. This means that the girls had to move away from their home towns, all alone, in order to live with a dozen other girls they had never seen before. Of course this was a big problem for some of the girls: they missed their families, friends and hometown.

So, this year CBG decided to let the girls go back to their hometowns and train with the coach they choose, at the clubs they want to be. While not all the clubs have the best equipments and not all the coaches are as experienced as Irina, it seems like all the girls are happy with this situation. Except Irina. She says she wants the girls together again and does not feel confident enough to keep training the national team if they are not always close to her. The girls, on the other hand, say that being in different towns, in different clubs, help the sport because younger gymnasts have the opportunity to talk to them and train together with them. Also, other coaches get to help them in training and teach a new trick or two.

Still, Irina is threatening leaving her position as the head coach. I just hope that this does not become one of those huge problems. There have been already enough scandals concerning gymnastics in Brazil, so we do not need a new one.