Deep enough to drown in?

I should probably start with this: if anyone is sick and tired of reading about the highs and lows of the USA Olympic team selection, I do understand your pain and you should probably look away now. Perhaps look this way and forget all about the bitching and whining and indulge in some classic beauty and artistic interpretation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XInPlh-3a58.

(Sorry, that was mean).

To get back on track, I know this topic is being absolutely done to death at the moment, but it keeps playing on my mind. The more I ponder on it, the more I come to think that the events we will see pan out will have repercussions the world over, and that the current US situation should be watched closely and inform those at the top about key decisions to be made for the future of our favourite sport.

For those that might have been hiding under a rock recently, the situation is this...

The new Olympic format permits 5 member teams in a 5-3-3 format. There are 5 members to each team. Three gymnasts work on each apparatus in the team final, with all scores being counted towards the team totals that decide the first gold medals we will see in London.

As anyone can see, there is not a lot of room on that team. This size itself is not particularly shocking in a team final situation (in Beijing the USA basically had a 5 member team because Sam Peszeck didn’t work beyond qualifications). The problem is that with the focus on team gold, event specialists from powerhouse countries risk getting shut out in the cold. Right now, there are several girls starting to sink in the depth of the USA gymnastics programme.

My problem with this tiny team format is this: it creates a huge bias towards AA and multiple specialist gymnastics in comparison to those that shine on a single event. Sure, it makes perfect sense on paper, but there is no concrete reason to validate this bias. Gold medals are gold medals, be it with the team, in the AA, or in an event final. Yet this system causes specialists from deep programmes to be greatly undervalued in comparison to the all around contributors.

This train of thought has been recently validated by USA team coordinator Marta Karyoli. In a recent interview, the ever opinion-splitting Marta stated that her Olympic team will consist of “3 all arounders and 2 bars specialists”. Cue wild speculation. The USA, as is often the case, is super strong on the power events and somewhat lacking in the bars department. Now we are not talking Romania bad: Jordyn Wieber made the world bars final in 2011 and puts up some not-too-terrible numbers, Rebecca Bross is a great bars worker and then there is the prospect of the much anticipated return of current Olympic AA champ Nastia Liukin. But compared to other events, most notably the vault (where America may now feasibly have more 6.5 vaults than the rest of the world put together) the high number flashers are thin on the ground.

Marta: we would all love to know what she is thinking

So what does this mean? It means, most likely, that a solid but often sloppy AAer like Aly Raisman or a back-in-the-gym for five minutes Nastia Liukin has a greater shot at London than the highest scoring gymnast this quad Mckayla Maroney (don’t mistake this for me getting at Nastia or Aly, it is the principle that is important not the names themselves).

Now let’s compare the situation of an American specialist to a non powerhouse specialist. Beth Tweddle has been walking on to GBR world teams for approaching 10 years now, and not without cause: she is a fantastic gymnast. However, she gets an advantage because her country is not awash with home ground competitors. For those who don’t live in the UK (and google analytics tell me the vast majority of the readers of this blog are not...) gymnastics is not a big deal in the UK. It is barely on the radar of most people. To Brits, the sight of the Olympic Trials packing out giant stadiums is a strange one, because here the average person won’t know a thing about the sport. The day Beth won the floor gold in 2009, she had a small 1 paragraph mention in the back of the newspaper I read over breakfast the next morning. To most UK crowds, gymnastics is something they pop in on every four years, and pop straight back out of.

The same can be said for Oksana Chusovitina: if she can keep her vaults to the same standard they have been since Beijing, her spot at the games is as good as set in stone.

...and this leads us nicely to the impact of the US selection process on the rest of the world. For some reason it hadn’t clicked with me that every vault world champion this quad has been American. Kayla Williams, Alicia Sacramone, Mckayla Maroney. They have dominated recently and continue to do so. However, with every American gymnast and her dog doing an Amanar now, the second vault is meaningless and so it is feasible that no American makes the vault final this time around. Unless Cheng Fei makes a spectacular return, would this be like handing a gold medal to Chusovitina?

To conclude, I am struggling to find ways to defend this 5 team system. Why? Because I don’t think it is benefitting the athletes nearly as much as it needs to. Through no fault of their own, fantastic event specialists have to divert attention away from their signatures and plough it into their weaker pieces to have a chance of factoring in. 

Pictures: http://www4.images.coolspotters.com/photos/765471/team-usa-adidas-pink-competition-leotard-profile.jpg, http://eventfulstays.com/image/north-greenwich-arena-hosts-basketball-finals.441x330.jpg, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/07/22/martha.jpg, http://images.wikia.com/olympic/images/9/92/Oksana_Chusovitina.jpg

Beth Tweddle: the upgrade machine

What an insane 48 hours this has been for the sport. In the past few days excitement levels have really begun to escalate and we are getting a taste of what a ridiculously exciting Olympic year this is going to be.

In the space of a weekend we have seen that USA now have a minimum of 4 Amanar vaults. We have seen Gabrielle Douglas beat Jordyn Wieber at the American Cup, cementing her status as a serious contender for the Olympic team (and in doing so edging team-mates Sacramone and Maroney's chances ever more into the shadows - and for that matter Raisman's chances of being second in command in an All Around situation). We have seen Iordache of Romania hit a beam say way into the fifteens showing the world that the Romanians are NOT out of the picture on an individual level despite the loss of Porgras and reported re-injury of Izbasa.

This weekend has also seen the English Championships take place. This competition doesn't usually give us information impacting the world stage in the same way as the above, but it does mean we get to have a good look at British favourite Beth Tweddle.

I am going to allow myself a bit of fawning here. Beth is just great. Not only has she carried on into her THIRD Olympic title in the face of adversity. Not only did she face heartbreak at the last Olympics. Not only if she incredibly likely to go again, but she is in a better position on her signature apparatus than ever before. AND she CONTINUES to upgrade.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ogTGKIp8iU

We have seen her throw the Fabrichnova before. She has brought it out of the bag in podium training a few times, giving the impression that she might throw it in a pressured situation. I think she probably would have gone for it in 2010 if He Kexin hadn't come off the bars, so easing the pressure for Beth. But here is a video from the English champs of Beth dismounting with a double twisting double tuck. We will have to wait for higher quality videos, but it doesn't look half bad, does it?

Now noone is saying this routine isn't without its problems. She could get slammed on a few of those handstands, for instance. But it is by far the most original and difficult bars routine in the world right now, and she looks set to enter the Olympics with the hardest bars set for the second Olympics in a row: that feat alone deserves a medal. If she hits the Ono-Markelov-Gienger combination as well as the Toe on 1/1-Tweddle-Ezhova-Van Leeuwen (she doesn't compete the toe on 1/1 here, but the rest of that combination is looking great) then she could be looking at a start value approaching 7.3.

This is fantastic news. There is the possibility of course that Beth does not necessarily plan to throw this dismount regularly and that she was just giving it a go. She did say during the commentary at the test event that she had no planned upgrades to her routines in the run up to London. But then again she also said she would quit after Beijing so who knows!

Beth is such a commendable athlete and she never stops stunning her audience with her ability to  improve her routines at this stage in her career. I just PRAY that she hit in QFs (finals too, of course, but one step at a time). 

Just imagine the drama: the unlikely champion turned specialist turned home crowd favourite. I can't even bear to think what NBC will do with it. 

In anticipation of the Triple Twisting Yurchenko

It is waiting, crouching in the grass ready to pounce: we can say with relative certainty that we will see a triple twisting yurchenko some time in the near future, it is just a question of WHEN.

For years we have heard rumours and speculated about those who could be capable of performing this vault, but something in the air suggests that the TTY is closer than ever.

Vault has changed its personality in recent years. In the two quads leading up to 2008, it was generally considered the lowest scoring event and an area of fairly little ingenuity: all around gymnasts on the whole tended to “get through” vault and then slam high scores on other events. Whilst this was less true after the advent of the open ended code, it was still possible to make ones name as an all arounder without being strong on the apparatus. After all, the current all around champion won her crown with a Yurchenko 1.5, a vault most associated with the Atlanta Olympics from 12 years previously.

A beautiful vault, but with the scoring potential of vault returned to the rafters, it seems likely that the next AA champ will have a top shelf vault.

But the time of vault as a stringent scorer has ended, and it is now feasible for AA hopes to be spearheaded on this apparatus. Whilst I disagree with any kind of scoring imbalance, I can’t help but feel fond of this concept: it reminds me of 1992, and other times when golden hopes were made or broken in a crisp, exciting couple of seconds.

Although there could be many competitors currently hiding in the shadows that could potenatially be training a TTY, the most obvious and worthy assumption lies with the current world champion: the fantastic Mckayla Maroney, who combines power and execution like few ever have before. She currently holds the accolade of the highest world level score on vault this quad: a 16.033. A score which is also the third highest on any discipline. 

This could scarcely be improved

Now, let us indulge in some even wilder speculating. With a triple twisting Yurchenko of execution even approaching that with which she performs her Amanar, she would be the overwhelming frontrunner for the London vault title (she is anyway, in my opinion). But that’s not all: this earthquake of a vault could even transform Maroney, almost overnight, into an All Around threat.

Here is what I mean:

The above takes her qualification scores from bars and beam, her team final score for floor and the execution score of her team final Amanar, the latter of which was used to generate an actual score based on the 7.2 difficulty value of the triple twisting yurchenko.

As can be seen, she is already nipping at Raisman’s heels. She is this close to the second American even with an overtimed and messy beam routine.

Further, I think that Maroney has fantastic upgrade potential. She has brilliant execution and technique on all four events, and her bars routine has very little in it. On floor, she has some great skills combined with brilliant dance and even a few relatively small tweaks could make it a lot better (I am thinking a somersault or jump out of the opening 3.5 pass and maybe even a full or half twist in the double tuck). It should be fairly safe to assume that she will make some improvements across these apparatus, if only to just make herself that bit more indispensible to the US team.

Of course, the above speculative scores are dependent on a lot of things that probably will not come to pass. The closeness assumes Maroney having the best day of her career, and managing to maintain the same insanely huge E score with that extra half twist. That and the assumption that Raisman isn’t upgrading, which we know she is (for those that don’t know - it seems she is trying a layout punch following the double Arabian and a tuck punch after the Dos Santos - super cool - and she is planning on training the amanar regularly). And even this doesn’t take into account the many other American competitors who could be challenging for the second AA spot in London.

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Who knows what is going on over at WOGA. Could Bross still challenge for the second AA spot? One thing seems certain, she will have a DTY at the absolute best, whereas Raisman and Wieber will both have Amanars. That is 7 tenths to try and find elsewhere.

Despite these reasonable doubts, I still think the original point stands: a gymnast capable of performing this vault to a good standard could harness extreme scoring potential. As with anything in modern gymnastics, however, there are likely to be those who perform it to a poor standard of execution and safety. Hong un Jong was rumoured to have a TTY at the time of the Beijing games, but elected not to perform it after Cheng Fei had fallen. Nabieva was also close to a triple twist. Calling anything resembling this vault a TTY would be an injustice, however. I personally prefer to call it an impression of a jellyfish being hit with a tennis racquet.

In my humble opinion, the only vaulter worthy of this vault, past and present, is Maroney. If she is training it, I simply cannot wait to see it. 

3 EXCITING VAULT DEBUTS

1. Cheng brings out the Cheng

What a moment, and what a gymnast. It seems likely Maroney will have this as her second vault. If it looks anything like Vanessa Zamarripas was on a good day, I'm happy.

2. Khorkina has a lot of nerve

A tucked version of the above. As annoying as the NBC terrible trio are, I always found their Khorkina giddiness very endearing.

3. What a powerhouse this one was

Not the first time she did this, but the first world level performance with a good video. Her power was verging on scary. 

An aside: will the TTY end the Yurchenko arms race?

As vault difficulty has evolved over the past few decades, the vast majority of the resultant vault "species" have been Yurchenko variants. First the full was trendy. Then the half. Then the 1.5. Eventually, we end up where we are today: almost every federation chases the Amanar, with the DTY being the second best option.

But is it even POSSIBLE to push this envelope any further? Is it even POSSIBLE to chuck a TTY? People once would have said that only a select few are Amanar capable. Yet they are getting more common every competition.

Will the TTY becomethe next rabbit to chase? In twenty years from now will all the girls be doing one? Who can say, but I hope not. 

Lost in time part 2: mounts and dismounts

In our earliest years of education, we learn a simple fact about stories: they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Not one of these components can be singled out as the best, or the most important, with each having its own particular contributions.

In gymnastics, routines on two of the four apparatus follow the same rules. A mount begins a routine. Several skills follow, forming the middle section of the routine, and a gymnast ends with a dismount.

Based on classic storytelling rules, all three sections should be of equal importance when composing the routine. Why, then, have modern routines of bars and beam come to resemble an optional middle and a compulsory start and finish? This is obviously an exaggeration, but it is undeniable that interesting mounts and varied dismounts have quickly become a thing of the past.

Uneven Bars

To my knowledge, not a single competitor in a world or Olympic level bars event final since (at least) 2000 has mounted with anything other than a glide kip on the low bar, jump to high bar or a vault with hand repulsion to the high bar (be this straight or straddled) - but I would be happily corrected if I am mistaken!

In fairness to modern competitors, mounting the uneven bars was never a particularly noticeable hotbed of ingenuity. There was, however, some variation and certainly a great deal more than there is today. Even the simple half turn into kip on the low bar made a pleasant change to the norm (as competed most memorably in my mind by Tatiana Lyssenko, but also by many others including Lavinia Milosovici).

There were or course those who really took it to the next level with their bars mounts. My personal favourite for irregularity and difficulty is the fantastic Olesia Dudnik, whose roundoff Arabian somersault to hang on high bar really makes those used to modern bar routines look twice.

To my mind, the last top level gymnast competing a bars mount that could genuinely be considered interesting was Elena Zamolodchikova, with her roundoff to flip full turn to handstand on the lowbar. Even this was shortlived and often badly performed, though.

However, as I mentioned earlier, there were never really that many bars mounts around to start with (relative to other skill types). Therefore it is pretty forgivable if a little disappointing that we never see anything beyond what has become the norm. Less understandable, though, are the dismounts.

Although uneven bars dismounts are more varied than the above, they are still pretty stagnated. It generally comes as a shock at the end of a routine if the dismount isn’t any of the big three: the full twisting double tuck, the double layout or the double front. To my knowledge, no event final competitor in the new millennium has dismounted with anything other than a double somersault variation from a forwards/backwards giant.

This is such a shame when we consider the beautiful possibilities that exist out there! For a start, twisting dismounts are almost never seen and they can be gorgeous. I would love to see a triple twisting layout at the end of a bar routine (I always thought Yang Yilin would have been perfect for this).

I imagine with skills like this, norms of coaching are a problem. Perhaps it seems less worth training a twisting dismount when the techniques learned can be applied to little else (learning a double back off the bars can be modified into a whole host of skills). Maybe, though, it is just force of habit that causes these dismounts to be left languishing in the shadows. 

At least when something was never popular, one doesn’t have the problem of “missing” it. This can be said somewhat for the twisters but sadly not for the toe on and hip circle dismounts of this world. The eighties brought us many of these, and they were allowed to live on through the much missed compulsory exercises. A personal favourite of mine is the underswing front tuck salto with a half twist. Here it is performed by Svetlana Khorkina in a rare example of a bars compulsory video by the superstar Russian (incidentally the whole routine is a favourite of mine, as I think it shows she DID have good technique on the bars beyond her own niche set of skills).

(Love seeing my favourite bar worker doing my favourite bar transfer. That's another story though)

Of course, this particular dismount and many like it are rated as C elements or less, and hence do not fulfil D dismount category of the code of points. I understand this rule as it necessitates the maintenance of difficulty throughout a routine (a paltry dismount at the end of a routine can be really disappointing: for example I really hated Elena Produnova's double pike dismount in 1997). It is a shame however that some sort of originality bonus cannot be worked into the code, allowing us to see a greater variation of dismounts.

But not all of these types of dismounts are low rated: the super cool “Ma” is an F (A hip circle hecht with full turn to salto backwards - nice).

Beam

Since the code change, many gymnasts mount the beam as if they are getting on a bus. Thankfully, there are still many gymnasts who begin a routine with an exciting, acrobatic skill. Alicia Sacramone has been front piking for years now, and while I was never fond of the attempted connection to back tuck it certainly begins the routine with a bang (or on occasion, a bang and a crash...but hey, that was 4 years ago).

In terms of interesting and artistic mounts, Lauren Mitchell’s cartwheel to chest roll is pretty original (and it was nice to see Shawn is using it too, making a great change from her 2008 borefest). For others, though, one finds oneself having to look back until at least the last Olympics where we saw a few nice press to handstand variations, such as Nastia’s beautiful start.

One thing I particularly miss is roundoff mounts. At one stage the roundoff LOSO mount was relatively common but we sadly get very few of these today. A personal favourite of mine was Khorkina’s roundoff BHS 1/1 mount directly into a flight series: linking an interesting mount straight into difficult on-the-beam work is unheard of these days.

Other favourites include Ivana Hong’s front handspring.

Looking to dismounts, I am bored to tears with an endless tirade of double pikes. An interesting point, though, is that there were just as many double tucks from the beam in years gone by and these were not nearly as irritating. The problem is this: the double pike is an E whereas the double tuck is a D. Therefore gymnasts obviously go for the former. This would be fine is everyone’s looked like Bridget Sloan’s, but sadly the vast majority end up as a messy, unstuck and knee eating catastrophe that quite frankly ruin a beam routine for me. I would rather take a stuck tucked double (like Lobaz’s beauty) any day of the week.

Love ya Bridge

In terms of dismount variation, it was lovely to see Casey Jo Magee bringing the swing through 2.5 twist back from the dead at this year’s visas. 

Perhaps this is just the spoilt ramblings of someone who rarely gets to see their favourite skills, but maybe it is something bigger. I can't help but feel like we never see anything intriguing anymore, and in few areas is this as true as it is with mounts and dismounts. 

Born This Way

It is Christmas Eve, and time to do what I do best: write an article about what happens to be on my mind and awkwardly shoehorn it into a relevant theme suitable for the times. Let’s have a go then.

This past week I have been thinking about luck of the draw. About the extraneous factors which hugely influence a gymnast’s chance for success on the world stage but are not directly related to their talent and are not things that can be helped. The main thread of this thought is as follows: the code changes each quad. Each new code is bound to favour a certain type of gymnast more than another (in the 05-08 and 09-12 quads, it favoured those who could do an amanar, whereas in 89-92 it favoured those who could stick an FTY, as a simple example). Whilst this gives some gymnasts a right-place-right-time advantage, it also puts some at an instant disadvantage: you could say they were born into the “wrong quad”.

Christmas is a story of a birth. SEAMLESS, right?

Below are the gymnasts that stick out most obviously to me as being born at such a time to put them in a quad which didn’t play to their strengths.

STELLA UMEH

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For me, this girl had one of the best flight series on beam of all time. If not THE best. It is one of the most exciting, original and difficult combinations I have ever seen (BHS-LO 2 feet-BHS-LOSO). On a side note, she also had some pretty cool little extras: it was hugely refreshing to see that mount, which I had forgotten about, as I searched for this video. As was the forgotten second acro combination: a cartwheel through to two layout stepouts. Now THESE are beam connections. Fast, flighted and difficult.

So why, then, does this fantastic gymnast not even have her own Wikipedia page? Stella Umeh went on to find success in the NCAA program, where she was the two time floor exercise champion (1995, 1998) for UCLA. Her elite career was no failure: at the 1994 commonwealth games she took the all around title, and followed this with a vault gold and UB silver in events finals. However, on the world stage, recognition of her talent was less forthcoming and Stella has no world level medals to her name.

I do not contest the scores that Stella received: the code at the time valued stuck landings and polished leaps over acrobatic difficulty, and sadly Stella was not great at sticking her double back cold and her leaps were less than ideal for the time. But one has to ask the question: does this not sound similar to Shawn Johnson, the current Olympic beam champion? I think so, a powerful compact gymnast who excels at acrobatics and big tricks over the finer details of leaps and stuck landings. If Stella had trained such a difficult and original flight series as her routine highlight back in 1991 before the code really required such difficulty, it is fun to imagine what she might have managed today had she been rewarded for her difficulty.

Quads competed in: 89-92; 93-96

Quads more suited to: 05-08

ANA PORGRAS

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The beautifully uncharacteristic Romanian who had a brilliant world debut at the 2009 world championships. Ana is everything that Romania is not known for: long graceful lines, originality, artistry, nice bars; and the inconsistency that often comes with these abilities.

Many may think of Ana as a strange choice: she is certainly not lacking in the recognition department: she has plenty of fans and is a well known gymnast, and is the possessor of a world championship bronze and a world title on the balance beam. Her debut world championships in 2009 could have been far more fruitful for her had it not been for a few silly mistakes: she could have made the AA podium and been a two time balance beam champion.

So as you can see, Ana is not without her success. However, she has a big problem: the vault.

Unfortunately Ana cannot seem to upgrade from an FTY, and although there have been rumours and the odd video of her training an unsure looking DTY into a pit over the years, nothing has ever surfaced in competition. This poses a problem for her: she is fantastic elsewhere. Her beam is wonderful and her bars and floor are not half bad either (could do with quite a few bars upgrades but she is far from terrible).

Factoring into the AA in the 09-12 quad with a paltry vault is even harder than before. Nastia Liukin took the Olympic AA title in 2008 with a comparatively simple 1.5 twisting yurchenko (which also happened to be one of the most beautiful vaults of the quad in my opinion). She was able to do this because of the code of points at the time: the 10 elements rule meant that she could form monstrous D scores on other apparatus to compensate. Ana is less able to receive this luxury: 8 elements per apparatus mean that scores on bars, beam and floor are lower than they were this time 4 years ago (for example, the highest bars score of the 05-08 quad was 16.900, in this quad it currently stands at around 16.133). Sadly, the Amanar is more of a necessaity to win than ever.

Ana has qualities that match her very well to a much earlier time. Her lack of modern difficulty on vault would not have been a problem for her and she would have excelled in terms of her difficulty in other areas (in a very similar way to Tatiana Gutsu). At the very least, she would have benefitted from being one quad behind: the 05-08 rules would have at least given her more of a chance to build difficulty elsewhere to reduce the pressure on her vaulting.

Were this the case, she may have been respected as a true AA gymnast and have enjoyed success as such, as opposed to being considered a specialist with a weak vault.

Quads competed in: 09-12

Quads more suited to: 05-08

KRISTEN MALONEY

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Kristen Maloney has the unfortunate pleasure of being one of the most famous American gymnasts of what was perhaps the USA’s darkest gymnastics period in the modern history of the sport. The 1997-2000 quad was not a good time for the American’s, and the magnificence of the 7 could not seem to be transferred to a new crowd.

In a home setting though, Kristen was well known and successful. A two time national AA champion is not an accolade that comes easily and is certainly one to be proud of. However, international success was never forthcoming for Kristen and hence her international medal cabinet contains only the dubious bronze awarded late due to the age falsifications of Dong Fangxiao.

One thing to be said for Kristen: she had some fantastic skills. Although her presentation was often scrappy and she seemed to never be 100% healthy throughout her entire career, she could pull some very, very impressive tricks out of the bag. Her floor routine at the 2000 Olympics was, and is, one of the most difficult ever to be performed. It included a full twisting double layout, a whip through to double layout and a pike punch through to triple full (as well as some really interesting artistry). It’s the kind of routine that makes you feel exhausted just watching it.

I cannot help but feel that Kristen would have been right at home in 05-08, the trickster quad. Then again, it could successfully be argued that Kristen’s downfall was simply inconsistency. After all, had she not stepped out of the floor area during qualifying she would have made the floor finals. Had she performed in these hypothetical finals to the same standard as her team final performance, she would have received a 9.737. This would have been enough to take the bronze over Simona Amanar = Kristen Maloney would be an OLYMPIC medallist. Crazy, right?

So whether it was the coding climate that held back Kristen, or indeed herself, is a matter of opinion. Yet I still believe she would have found greater success in the quad of the code overhaul. As would a fellow Sydney competitor below....

Quad competed in: 97-00

Quad more suited to: 05-08

MOK UN JOO

I know virtually nothing about this gymnast. I stumbled upon her beam work whilst absent mindedly half-watching the sub divisions of the 2000 Olympics WAG qualifications last year. Out of knowhere came this statuesque and hugely talented gymnast I has never heard of before. It is very rare that I watch something and am genuinely surprised by what I see: usually when we watch footage we know a lot about the competitors and have most often seen the routines several times before. But this was something entirely different. An unknown Korean gymnast at the Sydney Olympics competing a routine containing a BHS-BHS-LO2F connection AND a roundoff layout full?! Insanity.

It is times like this when you realise why the code needed to change. I am usually such a modern code hater, and totally unforgiving of wobbles, but the fact is that this routine obviously did not receive the recognition it deserved. The guidelines of the time were blind to its huge difficulty. And yes I am well aware that a lot of it was messy and wobbly and not as fluent to watch as many others, but even so, it’s very impressive. With everything that is wrong with the sport today, at least we can say that gymnasts, most of the time, are rewarded adequately for the hard skills they learn.

There are undoubtedly many more names that will come to me post writing, but time constrains me. I always love to hear feedback and differing opinions particularly on something as abstract and speculative as this.

Merry Christmas!

Crème brûlée or Jell-O?

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With all the time I have spent recently talking about execution, artistry and irredeemably ugly skills, I got to thinking about what we actually look for in gymnastics, what about it we enjoy and for what reasons we say we enjoy certain skills (this may all seem very self explanatory but bear with me - I promise I will come to something resembling a conclusion).

To begin thinking about this, I found it useful to think back to the very first gymnastics I ever saw. In the early summer of 1996 (when I was the tender age of 7), my younger brother was born and my older sister and I went to stay with my Grandmother in Wales. I spent the daytimes in the sea and the evenings watching the gymnastics coverage, and it was great.

It wasn’t until 2000 that I watched more, but at this point I was old enough to remember specifics. I vividly recall thinking Viktoria Karpenko’s vault was amazing, specifically because it was among the first pieces of gymnastics I had ever seen. When I look at this vault now, my neck hurts in empathy with the arch of her body; I notice how painfully low it is and overall have nothing particularly positive to say about it. And this is exactly my point: what we enjoy comes with experience, and what level of experience we have determines our favourites.

Viktoria Karpenko putting her spinal chord to the test

I thought further about this due to the recent comments of a non gymnastics fan: my boyfriend. Having been subjected to my perpetual youtube trawling he has (through sheer bombardment) seen his fair share of skills but obviously has no knowledge of what they are and no particular interest. This makes him an interesting candidate for opinions: he has seen enough to not be impressed by anything but doesn’t have specific knowledge and can hence judge on visuals alone.

I clocked onto this when I was sitting and randomly watching Catalina Ponor on FX from Tokyo (with BBC coverage incidentally: Mitch Fenner is just hilarious), and my impartial judge happened to look up and watch for the first two passes. Not being one to usually pass comment, I was surprised how impressed he was by a double layout. I asked him why: “because she goes around twice, thats really cool” (or something to that effect). A basic assessment, yes, but an interesting one. Here is someone who has probably seen plenty of double doubles, double Arabians, double pikes, full ins, double tucks....but it took a double layout to realise that the gymnasts are performing double somersaults. Imagine, if you will, a similar commentary to Matt Baker: you don't get the impression they really know anything but they are enthusiastic.

Ponor: Clean up a bit and I will love you forever.

(I will point out to anyone who was as horrified as I was at the thought of one’s first double layout being Catalina Ponor’s that I referred him instantly to Pav’s 08. Phew.)

I have a theory, and it goes as follows. The impartial judgment of the beauty of skills by seasoned fans like me and likely the readers of this blog is compromised by having too much knowledge. In knowing how difficult a skill is, we become biased and fail to see the real truth: that there are a few skills that transcend difficulty and are far more beautiful than their trickier counterparts. I believe one of these skills is the double layout.

To test this theory, I bored my judge for a little longer. I reasoned (based on the views of countless friends and family unfamiliar with the sport over the years) that the vault is the piece of apparatus on which the non knowledgable viewer finds it hardest to judge the difficultly of the skills performed (as they all looks pretty similar to a non experienced eye and are over very quickly indeed). So I quickly chose a selection of vaults (all in the layout position for simplicity) of varying difficulty and asked him which were his most and least favourites.

The options were:

-Shannon Miller 1992 AA Vault 1

-Yang Yun 2000 TF Vault 1 (one of the best vaults ever IMO)

-Elena Zamolodchikova Vaults 1 & 2 2000 EF

-Monica Rosu vault 2 2004 EF

-Cheng Fei Vault 2 2005 EF

My prediction was that he would not necessarily find the vaults that I knew to be the most difficult the most impressive. Indeed, he chose the best as Miller, Yun, Zamo 2 and the worst as Zamo 1 and Fei.  And I can see why. Tsukahara doubles and half on vaults are very difficult, but they don’t look particularly good. They are often messy, low and laboured and the non-knowledgeable viewer may not expect them to be difficult. It seems that simplicity and/or perfect landings won the contest.

One of the "best"

One of the "worst"

A similar thing happened when I happened to be watching some of the world champs with my mother. I kept setting her up for big skills, anticipating them with “this is so hard, watch”. But often she wasn’t bothered by them at all. She brushed off a double double with “looked a bit messy and I couldn’t tell what was happening”, only to be awestruck by a whipback.

So my conclusion, weak as it may be, is this: difficulty and beauty are not the same thing, and the perceived difficulty of a skill is not often anywhere near accurate (for the non fanatic viewers). When I think about it though, I have to agree. There is something fantastic and beautiful about a certain few well executed skills that others cannot match up to.

To use a tenuous example, lets turn to Julia Robert’s in the fantastic “My Best Friend’s Wedding”. Here she is talking about the potential relationship choices of her best friend, but just pretend for the purposes of this argument she is talking about a TTY and an FTY.

Skip to 0:42

Sometimes, we all want Jell-O. Obviously our respective jell-Os are different. After careful consideration, these are mine:

-Double layout

-A really high straddled jaeger

-A perfect piked full in

-A stuck Pod vault

-A stamped out front tuck on beam

-A switch ring

So what are yours?