At this year’s Islamic Solidarity Games, a multi-sport event held in Baku over the past week, the host team cleaned up, winning seven medals including the team and all-around gold in front of a super enthusiastic crowd.

None of the three gymnasts who represented Azerbaijan — Yuliya Inshina, Marina Nekrasova, and Ekaterina Tishkova — practice Islam or are from Azerbaijan, with all three Russian-born athletes who began competing for Azerbaijan last quad. But the Games don’t require participants to practice the Islamic faith; rather, the Games include member countries of the Islamic Solidarity Sports Foundation, an organization based in Saudi Arabia with the mission of increasing the cooperation between Islamic countries through sports.

The Azerbaijani team won the gold medal by over three points ahead of the team from Turkey, which won the silver medal and also did incredibly well on an individual level, while Indonesia won the bronze.

In addition to helping her team with a strong performance, 22-year-old Inshina won the all-around gold with a 49.400, her first international medal in nearly two years. Inshina, a 2011 worlds team member and 2012 Olympic alternate for Russia before she made the nationality change in 2013, had a strong performance everywhere but beam, but she was still able to top the podium by seven-tenths thanks to mistakes from the other competitors at the top of the field.

Inshina had a slip-up on her Yurchenko full in the vault final, finishing fourth there with a 12.95 average, and mistakes on bars also kept her a couple of tenths from the podium there as well, with her 11.7 good enough for fourth. She got her second individual medal of the meet on beam, where she had a mostly strong performance to win the bronze with a 12.25.

Her teammate Nekrasova narrowly missed out on an all-around medal after falling on bars, finishing fourth with a 48.400, a tenth back from the podium. Nekrasova otherwise looked clean and polished, though, and she had some excellent routines in event finals, winning the silver medal with two clean vaults averaging a 13.75, and she also won the silver medal with a strong performance on beam earning a 12.6.

Tishkova, 17, competed all events but vaults in qualifications, qualifying to the bars and floor finals. She had two great apparatus final routines, winning the bars silver with a 12.4 while then placing sixth on floor, earning a 12.3 for one of the tidiest routines of the day, though her difficulty held her back from a podium spot.

The team from Turkey could’ve put up a legitimate challenge to the host team, but a disastrous bars rotation that included falls from Ekin Morova as well as an incomplete from Göksu Üctas Sanli earning just a 1.4 meant they wouldn’t be able to catch up on their strong events.

Demet Mutlu, the 22-year-old member of multiple worlds teams for Turkey, had a great performance on bars, and though she did fall on beam, the rest of her routines were hit well enough to get her to a 48.700 all-around, good enough for the silver.

This year’s Turkish champion on vault and bars, Mutlu had a bad landing on one of her vaults in that final, placing fifth with a 12.875 average, but she came back to win the bars title with a 12.75 for a clean routine, and after falling in the beam final to place fifth, she ended her competition on a high note, winning the bronze medal on floor with a 12.7 for a solid set.

Aside from her bars and beam problems in the all-around competition, causing her to place fifth with a 44.850, Turkish national all-around champion Morova had a fairly good meet, hitting her vaults to finish sixth with a 12.6 average while also getting the bronze on bars with an 11.9. It wasn’t the best outing for the 17-year-old, but it was nice to see her come back from those early problem routines to end up getting an individual medal of her own.

Üctas Sänli, the 2012 Olympian who retired to get married and have a child before returning to the sport last summer at age 25, was fortunately not seriously affected by her bars mishap, coming back to win the beam title and the silver medal on floor. Both of her routines there were great, with a 12.75 for a mostly tidy and confident beam set, and a 13.05 just half a tenth away from gold on floor thanks to solid tumbling and clean leaps.

Rifda Irfanaluthfi led the largely inexperienced Indonesian team, showing four great routines in the combined all-around and team competition to win the bronze medal with a 48.500. This was Irfanaluthfi’s first international outing since worlds in 2015, where she narrowly missed an Olympic test event bid, and she didn’t disappoint, looking at her best on beam and floor to later on finish fourth on both, with scores of 12.1 and 12.65 just about a tenth away from the podium on each.

She did end up with one individual medal, the bronze on vault with a 13.025 average, and she placed fifth in the bars final after falling in that final, earning a 10.1. It wasn’t bad considering her lack of experience over the past couple of years, and she seems determined to come back to a high international level to get to the 2020 Games this quad, so I’m hoping she’s able to build on what she did here at this summer’s Southeast Asian Games in Malaysia.

One of her teammates Tazsa Devira finished sixth all-around with a 42.400, sixth on beam with a 10.85, and seventh on floor with an 11.9, while her other teammate Armartiani competed all events but bars in prelims, making the vault final where she finished seventh.

In addition to these three teams, we also had an individual competitor from Uzbekistan at this meet, the seven-time Olympian Oksana Chusovitina casually gracing us with her presence as she winds down her spring competitive season following three international vault medals at Gymnix and the Doha and Baku world cups.

Chusovitina competed on vault and floor, easily capturing the vault title even with downgrades, averaging a 14.25 to take the gold. She made the floor final as well, and had a solid routine, but her difficulty was too low to challenge for the podium, though her score of 12.55 was only a tenth and a half away from getting the bronze.

Full results from the Games are available here.

Article by Lauren Hopkins