The point she appears to be making, badly and with a fair portion of delusion, is that an athlete of Simone’s quality is a complete game changer. For this reason, she’s completely different to the likes of Melnikova, who is good but not great and whose US equivalent is someone like Hurd or McCallum. Basically, having Simone skews everything, in a way that is not true of Listunova, and that isn’t really a reflection of anything about the programme she’s competing for other than luck. Certainly USAG have done nothing to deserve her.
However, she’s wrong to claim Russia would easily beat the US minus Simone. It would actually be a pretty even match, there being nothing much to choose between the chasing pack Americans and the current Russian stalwarts, and would come down to who hit best on the day. Like in 2012…
Also, Valentina is really not the person to be making this point considering she mismanaged the late 00s/early 2010s generation so badly. Russia had the goods to win the team title in London, and in the 2013-16 quad they got big scores and did very well on the rare occasion they actually turned up. They could’ve won several more titles than they did, and while no Russian athlete could’ve challenged Simone in the AA, they had the talent to push the team a lot closer at least in 2014 and 2015. But the programme was incredibly badly run. Which is why the person who was incredibly badly running it might want to sit this one out.