Ukraine Wants to Be in the Running Even without Podkopayeva and Sharipov

The European championship in gymnastics ended last Sunday in St. Petersburg. In the individual male competition Roman Zozulia of Zaporizhzhia came in fourth place and Oleksandr Beresh of Kherson was fifth. They hardly caused difficulty for the new 18 year old star of Russian national team Aleksei Bondarenko, who won the gold. The Ukrainian duo seemed to fight more with the consequences of injuries.

In the team competition Ukraine came in fifth.

Last year experts predicted the Ukrainian male gymnastics team would weaken because 1996 Olympic champion Rustam Sharipov moved from Kharkiv to Australia. However, he recently returned and chances are high that he will be able to get back in form very quickly.

Ukrainian juniors are bringing few medals back from St. Petersburg. Andriy Mykhailychenko of Zaporizhzhia placed third in individual male competition. Andriy Lipsky of Kharkiv won the silver medal in free-style exercises. The point here is that no other CIS country except Russia and Ukraine made it into the top three.

In the women’s program Ukraine enjoyed greater success. The tournament team consisted of Viktoriya Karpenko of Kherson, Inha Shkarupa of Ternopil, Kirovohrad natives Olha Teslenko and Natalia Sirenko, as well as Halyna Tyryk of Lviv who took the bronze after Romania and Russia. Karpenko took the silver on the beams and Teslenko on the unparallel bars. Ukrainian junior females immediately won four gold medals. Our junior team outdistanced their Rumanian cohorts by almost three points, leaving them in second place. Participating were Ohla Rozshchupkina of Zaporizhzhia, Tetiana Yarosh of Kirovohrad, Olena Ryzhkova of Dnipropetrovsk, Natalia Sirobaba of Cherkasy, and Natalia Horodny of Lviv. In addition, Yarosh took two firsts, one on the beams and another in free-style, while Rozshchupkina won on the bars and took her silver with a first in one event. On the whole our fairer sex’s performance in St. Petersburg shows that hard on the heels of Liliya Podkopayeva is a whole bevy of talented athletes.