Crack open the vault

We are witnessing the death of an apparatus. What happened to the vault?

Remember the 2000 Olympic vault final? I do. A Huge amount of tension surrounded the apparatus following the height mishap in the All Around competition, adding extra excitement to wat was already a great showcase of talent. The lineup was starstudded: lots of top all around competitors were present along with some wildcards like Laura Martinez, whose DTY had been super consistent during her stay in Sydney. There was a nice variety of vaults, high levels of execution, and the general feeling that the vault title was as prestigious and important as any other gold medal in the sport.

What the hell happened next?

Vault has undergone a major transformation since the millennium Olympics. Although vault was always an apparatus which benefitted a specialist (statistically, vault is the apparatus on which world champions have the greatest chance of repeating). However, in recent years the field has gone from slim to almost non existent.

If gymnastics were a company, vault specialism would be the IT department. Locked away in some basement somewhere and treated with less regard than other medal possibilities in the sport, vault has for a while now felt like a continuous footnote in gymnastics. In the All Around, the top group starts on vault, and there is ever the feeling that it is like a warm up for the other “real” events: something that most gymnasts simply “get through”. Even in the case of athletes who go for top shelf vaults, there is never the sense of truly perfecting an art on vault and making an all around impression there - it is ever an ambience of squeezing as many tenths from the throwaway apparatus to ease the pressure later on.

This is no coincidence, and could easily have been anticipated. With the open ended code, start value is everything as we have all come to know. The code demands exhausting routines on the other three apparatus, asking more of gymnasts than ever before. For an instance demonstrator of this, watch a bar routine form the 1992 Olympics: they look positively bare by comparison to today’s.

Gorgeous, and a worthy winner. But look how few skills there are compared to today

With so much time and investment having to be put in to learning huge quantities of skills and connections on other apparatus, it is no surprise that vault gets left out in the cold. This has two pertinent consequences for this apparatus....

1. Yurchenko fever. It would be erroneous to blame Yurchenko dominance on the open ended code, because Yurchenkos have been overperformed for about 30 years now. The main difference is that in the past, whilst most competitors used Yurchenkos in team and AA situations, they DID have a second vault and hence WERE familiar with other vaulting techniques. Now, one could attempt a different entry, but why would they? It is easier and more rewarding to chuck an extra twist onto a vault they already know. Hence everyone progresses towards an Amanar and that is that.

2. Some of the best vaulters don’t for event finals...because they don’t have time. Learning a second vault is hard work. Learning a cracking routine on any apparatus is hard work, but the key difference is that other routines can be used in a team situation AND in the All Around: these events are blind to a second vault. Therefore for someone like Jordyn Wieber, whose main focus is the All Around, doesn’t bother with a second vault even though she has the potential to be one of the world’s top vaulters.

So, the consequences of the code of points, and the fact that two vaults were only required in team and AA for one quad (97-00), is that the two vault field has got thinner and thinner. In 2008, only three of the 8 competitors were top 10 finishing all arounders. Compare this to 1992 where 7 of the 8 were top 10 AAers. In a way this is good as it indicates that specialism is more greatly accepted, but it is undeniable that vault medallists are not always the best vaulters or those with the best technique.

There is a greater problem exacerbating this. Hinted at above, the Olympic team format does nothing for the vault specialist. It is one of those points that gymnastics fans seem to universally agree on. That team size is just too damn small. For me, the 2008 6-3-3 format was too small so this new one is just a complete insult. Remember old team finals? Back when there were compulsories, 7 member teams? Back when to watch a full one you had to totally bed in, stockpile the supplies and unplug the phone? These days they are over in a flash. Vault specialists struggled to make teams at the best of times, but it was possible! Look at 2004, where the USA took Annia Hatch to Athens, allowing her to take a silver medal.

So to summarize the problems: vault is dying. Variety has gone and the gaps between vault D scores encourages the Yurchenko progression above anything else. Vault finals are paltry affairs with few competitors, and those that are present shouldn’t even really be considered specialists: they are simply ANYONE who can put two vaults of a semi decent start value to their feet. Finally, the stupid new team format is ruining the apparatus further: gymnastics talent tends to come from powerhouse countries, within which it is unwise to be a vault specialist because a second vault means nothing to the team. We are currently in a scenario where it is probably more likely for Jade Barbosa to make the Olympic vault final than it is for Mckayla Maroney, who will have to stamp her ticket somewhere else.

Vault can be a brilliant, exciting event. It can also be beautiful. Sadly, every current rule in the book seems to discourage athletes from perfecting their art on vault. We have lost execution, variety, depth and recognition. Vault has become a throwaway footnote in a sport of combination bonus and packed routines elsewhere.

I just hope we can get it back. The new vault final rules (see: http://theepanel.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/cops-and-robbers-best-bits-of-draft.html) should make some difference, but ultimately I think the only longterm solution would be to reinstate the two vault requirement for teams and All Arounders. This way national teams would be forced to recognize specialisms, raising vault excellence to a level field with the other apparatus, and variety would be forced back into place. People would say this would be too demanding on the athletes, but it would be unfair to let vault take the hit for the exhausting nature of the other three apparatus. It isn't about difficulty: its about variety and execution.

Pictures: http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/DPP2xa_573f/2011+Visa+Championships+Day+2/iHd-aKD6d27/Jordyn+Wieber, http://images.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/_photos/2004-08-23-hatch-ins.jpg, http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/z1x1rC-mNiV/Artistic+Gymnastics+World+Championships+Tokyo/FjBG76GxpE1/McKayla+Maroney

USA: The land of the Amanar (and thoughts on AT&T)

Just a quick note on the American Cup podium training videos that are surfacing.....

It can be confirmed that Gabrielle Douglas and Alexandra Raisman both have Amanar vaults. And they arn't half bad....

Gabby

Jordyn

Who would have expected them both to have such solid looking 2.5 twisters this fast? Maybe some, more astute fans out there, but not me. I have made the foolish mistake recently of not taking Gabrielle Douglas' chance of making the US Olympic team seriously, but with this vault looking as good as this already I think Gabby is now a serious threat: she could be happily put up to vault in a team situation AND be one of the flagship contenders on the Uneven Bars (an apparatus on which she would probably be a world medallist if she had hit in Tokyo EFs). As has recently been the case in women's team finals, your team is only as good as your worst bar worker: therefore a package of high scoring vault and high scoring bars puts Douglas in an extremely enviable position right now.

Douglas' looks good, but Raisman's looks great. Based on this video it seems to be stronger than Jordyn's! What a difference a year makes. Confirmation of this bolsters her chances too: Aly is now super usable on 3 of four events, and will probably be the USA's top floor worker if upgrades go to plan and she can work on her choreo a bit. 

The flipside of this good news is a foreboding outlook for Maroney fans: where does this leave Mckayla's Olympic chances? Her Amanar is mind blowing but in a team situation, the few tenths difference between Douglas' vault and hers will not get Mckayla on a plane to London when other apparatus are considered. Further, the planned second vault is irrelevant in this situation as USA rarely if ever appears to take gymnasts on the basis of EF hopes. What this cries out to Mckayla is this: get better on bars and upgrade floor, and do it now if not sooner. 

The US Olympic race is hotting up, and it is more exciting than ever.

Post Competition thoughts


I can't remember the last time there was such an exciting three days in gymnastics. I think it is a really great time to be a fan of this sport: I don't think we have had the prospect of such a deep and exciting Olympics for at least 12 years, and the start of the competition season is just building that excitement further.

Firstly: the scoring. It is always terrible, and more terrible than ever. None of these scores seem to add up, and Wieber, as much as I love her, was way overscored on at least 3 events. It is hard to imagine how this keeps happening: the American Cup is an FIG event - there is no excuse for these ridiculous score inflations. It is a bit embarassing for everyone concerned really.

But we all know this so I don't want to harp on about it too much. I guess this year, even with fair scoring, an American gymnast would have got the top WAG spot. In other words, I think that the podium was correct, it was the NUMBERS that were wrong. So very wrong. AT least Iordache was justly awarded a monster beam score, but more on that later.

COMMENTARY, OR LACK THEREOF

I have bitched and moaned about NBC before (both in a general sense and in a dedicated article, see: http://theepanel.blogspot.com/2011/09/wednesday-whining-nbc-terrible-trio.html)

We all hear them. Most of us hate them. I am most definitely in this latter category.

Usually though I try and just shut up and get over it, but I thought today was a particular example of how terrible those three can be. As usual my thoughts are mainly directed at AL and Tim (thats not to say Elfi is any good, but hers is a more general incompetence with fewer standout moments)

HOW IS IT THAT AL STILL HAS TO ASK THE MOST BASIC OF QUESTIONS?!

I am so sick of the other two having to qualify everything they say through Al's basic understanding. Say what you like about the other two (I certainly will) but at least they have the technical knowledge. Al is still asking questions that would be more symptomatic of a person who started watching gymnastics regularly a month ago.

"what does that mean?" -when Tim said Iordache was improvising)
"So, is that good?"  - When Leyva's vault score came in. etc.

WHY does a man who has been commentating top level gymnastics competitions for twelve years appear to know nothing about the sport he is paid to talk about? Commentators are supposed to make sport more understandable and accessible for the audience at home, it does not bode well if one of them cannot decide for himself whether a double twisting Tsukahara with 9.4+ execution is good. Al seems to be capable of bringing nothing but fluff.

On the note of people at home: I seriously feel for anyone who watches gymnastics for the first time and has to endure these guys. They just simply don't explain what they mean most of the time, it is so exasperating!

Perfect example: right at the beginning of the broadcast, Tim is talking about Jordyn's vault. True, it was great and one of her best. Obviously Al has to ask why its hard (because he probably can't tell the difference between a Yamashita and an Amanar) which would be a perfect opportunity to educate the less experienced members of the audience with some helpful information. So how does he respond?

"it has that extra half twist"

As opposed to what? Have you been discussing a DTY? NO. Do you know that your audience knows you are comparing the Amanar to a DTY? NO. Is there indeed any reason to justify explaining why an Amanar is difficult in that manner? NO. They spend zero time explaining skills yet waste entire broadcasts yacking about how the American Cup has a tradition for deciding who wins the Olympics, which gets fluffed up at every given opportunity. Even if that was true (which is clearly isn't - it happens that American's have won at the last two Olympics and the top American ALWAYS wins the American cup anyway), it is self indulgent and an utter waste of time to go on about it that much. Why do they have to wheel out Carly and Nastia to talk about how great the cup is? The people seeing that are already watching it!

As usual their actual coverage itself was biased and lacking. With only a handful of competitors it would be easy to show a lot more routines than they actually do.

NICER THOUGHTS

I (like everyone else, as far as I can tell) was absolutely blown away by Gabby Douglas. Great performance, she must be so happy. My favourite part of the entire competition.......BOUNCE

Now THAT is how to jump out of a tumble line. Nice to get these reminders of how things that get code-whored all the time can still be fantastic (and the leap out of her double arabian was nice and high too).

Raisman's floor is looking great too. I don't know if it is just me but I think her expression is getting just a little better. And what about that first pass - INSANE. Absolutely love it, so original and difficult and I have never seen that much air on a layout punch.

Jordyn Wieber debuted a new combination on beam: front handspring stepout-standing full-back handspring. Now in theory I think that is fantastic. If it could be combined quickly I think it could be stunning and super original. Sadly though it is likely never to be so. This just continues the ongoing issues of what gets credited as a flight series on beam: the back with a full into back handspring combination was controversial enough amongst fans. It will be interesting to see what judges and spectators do with this new addition.

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.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnrQICIqml2PniDhXMAxvHti_z2Oej_ZSUnuGhCfLf5WGZYZBtqldNsOrgRir0C-Max_w7nD-RLSSeeUH7pF2LWHdX1YdpBMx8pR8ofZJ7YumBFNFxf2IGYqOmNbmkbTooipeBqUi0MpuH/s1600/WOGA1.jpg

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. 

The untimely departure of Ana Porgras

“But I am sure we will see her in the future. Three more years and I am sure she we have more experience”.

And it wasn’t just Christine Still who felt sure. At the 2009 World Championships, many gymnastics fans (included me) believed we were seeing one of the next greats. Ana Porgras is and was a fantastic gymnast, and yesterday’s news of her retirement is incredibly saddening. Saddening for her, saddening for the fans, saddening for Romania and saddening for the entire sport.

Ana was one of the only gymnasts this quad who could truly be called artistic. This simple fact is brilliant enough in its own right, given the times we live in. But further to this: she was a Romanian.

Who do we think of when someone says “Romanian WAG Gymnast”? For me: Simona Amanar, Lavinia Milosovici, Gina Gogean. In other words: compact gymnasts known less for their artistry, and more for their almost robotic consistency, vaulting and tumbling. And of course, their terrible bars.

This was part of what made Ana’s gymnastics so special. She wasn’t just good; she shattered a mould that had been set tight in the Romanian system for decades. Rather than perfunctory choreography, gluey feet and nailed landings, she was all about delicate lines, beautiful presentation and ethereal inconsistency.

She was the star of the 2009 World Championships, despite winning only one medal. A bronze on the uneven bars - in the final Ana showcased her classic lines and presentation to capitalize on a weak field. This medal is misleading though, as Ana is no bars specialist. It was all about her beam. There was a sense that if she could battle through her inconsistency problems, she would be a beam frontrunner. To me, it seemed like she was poised to upgrade dramatically and would become a real threat in the all around as the quad drew to a close.

2010 saw Ana stay on the beam to win a well deserved world title. However, even by this point, pressures of the code had drained much of the originality, poise and artistry out of her beam routine that had won over the fans and commentators in the first place. Thankfully, she retained her fantastic flight series ending in her super sky high layout. Even here, though, the artistic touches were fading: I loved in 2009 that she began her flight series with a back walk over as opposed to a back handspring. The change in tempo from slow grace to speed and power was fantastic to watch.

The highlight of Ana's career. But.....

...many of the personal touches seen here were gone. Look at that mount, and my favourite BWO into the flight series.

In other respects though, Ana never lived up to the hype that her debut seemed to promise. Unfortunately, she never seemed able to upgrade her vault from a full twisting yurchenko. In an open ended code, a vault start value of 5.0 was never realistically going to cut it against American and Russian 6.5s. Combining this with increasingly scrappy floor routines and bar work that was beginning to plateau around the 14.000 mark, Ana’s chance of impacting an AA podium was seeming slimmer and slimmer each competition.

You could say (as I have suggested in a previous article) that Ana was born into the wrong quad. A delicate, artistic girl with a great FTY would have been right at home in the early nineties. Sadly it is now a game of muscles and mammoth D scores.

A beautiful vault, but sadly lacking in the tariff necessary to compete at the very top level

Regardless of all of the above, and even regardless of making no finals at the 2011 worlds, it still seems a shame to throw in the towel at this point. Easy for the unfatigued spectator to say, but one would think it worth hanging on a few extra months to make all the years of training that bit more worthwhile. Still, all that can be done is to hope that Ana’s decisions are her own, and ones that she does not come to regret later.

And so it is will sadness that Ana Porgras becomes added to a list of fantastic, hugely talented and widely loved athletes who never quite managed to reach their true potential.

Three famous examples of unfulfilled potential

-         MO HUILAN

One gold and two silvers in terms of individual achievement: less than you would imagine for someone who made such a lasting impression on gymnastics. Mo was the epitome of inconsistency which cost her AA medals in 1995 and potentially 1996, and locked her out of the EF of her signature apparatus in Atlanta.

-        DOMINIQUE MOCEANU

Only one individual silver for perhaps the most overhyped American gymnast of all time. Dominique showed exceptional difficulty at a very young age (if age restrictions stay the same she will forever be the youngest American national champion, aged a mere 13 back in 1995). Personal issues and injuries prevented her from coming back strong at the world level beyond the Atlanta Olympics.

-        EKATERINA LOBAZNYUK

For me the greatest waste of potential of them all. Lobaznyuk was one of the stars of the 2000 Olympic Russian team: in my opinion one of the greatest assemblages of talent in the modern history of the sport. Sadly, they failed to deliver in a spectacular way. Ekaterina’s career was similarly underwhelming in light of the incredible talent that she possessed: she has an individual silver and bronze to her name. A bad vault in 2001 tore her ACL and MCL, which ultimately prevented Lobaz from progressing in the sport. The fact that this girl has neither AA medals nor any floor medals is a real shame. This was surely world class in anyone’s book...

Pictures: http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxwdph5pXs1r1zfpao1_500.jpg, http://pics.livejournal.com/ardelive/pic/001a94ak, http://gymnet.org/forum/files/mo_huilan_poutre.jpg, http://www.thecouchgymnast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/moceanu-bb.jpg, http://www.gymbox.net/images/LobaznyukOS001.jpg

Crème brûlée or Jell-O?

http://gymnasticscoaching.com/new/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Porgas-switch-ring.jpg

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?

produ[NO]va

http://www.kostiskal.net/june23/vane688.jpg

Any gymnastics anorak knows about the Produnova. It has become a modern gymnastics legend. Few skills are considered with such high regard and such awestruck anticipation. Since we last saw Produnova herself (one of my all time favourite athletes) perform the double front in 1999, we have been waiting with baited breath for another powerhouse to come along and perform it. The hype and dreaming that comes with the handspring double front in women’s gymnastics is matched only by a very small handful of other skills of equal insanity (the mythical double layout beam dismount, the TTY, the quad on floor). For years now we have speculated on who might appear to pick up this Holy Grail and stun the world.

                                                                   Elena Produnova in 1999

...and as if from nowhere, Yamilet Pena popped up in Tokyo: a mostly unknown gymnast prior to this competition (and also from a minor country in gymnastics terms – the Dominican Republic). She threw a good few double fronts in training and warm-ups (not all of them landed, not all of them an easy watch for someone with legs) and after qualifications earned a ticket to the event finals.

Then came the crisp camera quality, commentary and slow motion. The few vaults we had seem Pena throw in Tokyo prior to this EF were mainly through shaky, long distance camera phone recordings from which little could be made out except the rotation and the landings. But the EF performance was a different story.

It was different because of this: it was a hideous, hideous vault. I don’t even mean this because she didn’t land it (if anything I am glad for her ankles that she let her back take the hit). I mean instead that the hype, history and legend of this vault have masked an uncomfortable truth: the handspring double front is not at all nice to look at.

What stopped me reaching this conclusion a decade earlier is the advances in sport coverage. My memory of the Produnova is based mainly on 3 videos from 1999: 2 at the worlds, 1 at the University games. This grainy coverage allowed the imagination to fill in the gaps, with an end product being a mental picture of an explosion of the horse into a light speed flipping and a crisp, planted landing. But in reality the vault falls short, as there are so many unsightly adjustments that have to be made to make the vault attemptable. These include a cowboy stance, an uncomfortably deep landing and clown feet. Also, so many flips make the whole vault seem completely downhill, with mechanics equivalent to under rotated twisting vaults which “twist into the ground”

All in all, I am not so sure how comfortable I am about the return of the Produnova, in almost every aspect. I think that new slow mo footage shows that even if the vault is landed, it would still be an unsightly piece of gymnastics. Further, it is clearly downright dangerous. That much rotational speed onto a blind landing seems to just beg for an injury, especially with girls like Pena who clearly haven’t got the skill competition ready. Also one has to ask the question, could it be satisfying for a gymnast to win a vault title with a messy 1.5TY and an ugly but hugely high tariff vault? I am thinking not.

With all the 2.5 chucking of last year I never thought I would say this, but I am all for the Amanar over the Produnova. Mckayla Maroney showed us what vaulting is all about: power combined with beauty. Not to be mean to Pena (she deserves real respect for her attempt) but I doubt there is any gymnast anywhere who could make the Produnova pretty.

With rumours of other gymnasts (including Mai Murakami) training this vault, let’s hope hard for gymnastics as opposed to cowboy legged circus tricks in the coming years.



Decoded?

The end of the 10 system was treated by many as the end of a golden age. And in many ways, it was. Gymnastics since 2006 has felt somewhat different, and in many ways less exciting. Gone are the days when a step on a dismount loses a medal, when an OOB knocks leaders off the podium and a wobble on beam spells a goodbye to a world title. Excitement on the level of the 1996 AA is lost: there is no longer such a thing as the underdog. In a hypothetical competition where all the competitors hit, the winner is pre decided on the basis of the much slandered open ended D-score.

But is this a bad thing? The debate about open ended scoring is too deep and complex to be considered in any single article. But broad brush statements can still be made. Although the above is true, there are definite benefits to the new system. We see far more exciting skills and a real push towards difficulty and technical ingenuity. The classic gripe of the gymnastics fan is to whether or not this comes at the expense of perfection.

Steliana Nistor being hit by a bus. Oh, wait...

I think pictures such as this represent perfectly the issues with the new code. Here we see Steliana Nistor blocking for a DTY, and resembling a mosquito squashed against a car windscreen. One would argue that the value of difficulty in the new system encourages skill chucking and discourages a fine tuning of skills. This certainly seems true in part for the past few years, but are we seeing a change in the tides?

In recent discussions of possible changes to the code, an idea that caught my attention was that of “D+2E”. Basically, that instead of a final score produced from a combination of difficulty and execution out of 10, the value of the execution score should be doubled before it is added to the difficulty so creating a system that favours the execution side of gymnastics in a throwback to years gone by. This sounds great in practice, but one has to ask the all important question: would it make any difference?

Being a big geek I decided to test this based on the scores from this weekend’s world championships women’s event finals. The following tables represent what would happen were the D+2E rule enforced with these scores.

Vault

Bars

Beam

Floor

I was shocked to find no change whatsoever to the medals. Why? Because in each discipline, the competitor with the highest execution score took the gold medal. This to me suggests that the code might be maturing into something that actually works, favouring both difficulty and execution. It seems that gymnasts and coaches have begun to see renewed value in perfection and are using it to win medals. Yes, the gold medallists also usually had the highest D scores, but the difference now is that they can complete all their skills to an impressive standard. This is, of course, a matter of opinion, but I believe much of the work we saw at this year’s world’s to be of the highest standard of its kind in years (particularly the gold medal winners on every apparatus).

Compare this to the event finals from the 2008 Olympics: with D+2E there would have been a change to every podium except bars.

Vault

YES ALICIA!

Bars

Beam

Floor

I think the times are changing. Execution is coming back.


Results all taken from www.gymnasticsresults.com. Apologies for any potential error in my calculations. Important note: I did not include penalties in the calculations which would certainly have an effect on the outcome but would surely be weighted differently in the d+2e system.

Waiting for "The Sacramone"

Picture: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/6/68674823_a37f28fec7.jpg

During the next few days, somewhere in Houston, Texas, a piece of gymnastics may be performed that the world of die hard fans waits for with baited breath. I am talking, of course, about what may come to be known as “The Sacramone”, the first eponymous skill of the fantastic vault world champion Alicia Sacramone.

I would be surprised if fans of the sport have yet to hear about this, but if not, check out this training video which surfaced a few weeks ago:

As we can see, “The Sacramone” is a handspring straight 1 and a half somersault with two twists: TWO TWISTS. Thats the same number as a DTY, but flipping forwards and set up only by a handspring entry. You can see why this person chose to put Katy Perry’s firework over the top of this video: to even attempt this vault would require huge levels of explosive power, but luckily that is one of Alicia’s strong points.

But that isn’t all Alicia has to her name. In a time where we see freeze frames of gymnasts blocking on difficult vaults resembling squashed insects, Alicia has impeccable form – pencil straight from head to toe. Matching such explosive power with such control and attention to detail is what makes Alicia such an exciting vaulter to watch. Even in this training video her form is great....imagine what it looks like now (if it is still being trained).

At the moment I feel like a kid on Christmas eve. There is nothing better than watching gymnastics coverage, crisp quality and good commentary, and knowing that the next thing a gymnast will throw is something you have never seen before. It is hugely exciting. Take, for instance, the 2000 Olympic team finals when Khorkina first threw the Khorkina II - what a moment. I am never reserved about my less than favourable opinions on NBC commentary, but in this moment I have some fondness for them and their excitement.

Now let’s just hope, if Alicia does submit this vault, that it gets the huge D score it deserves. Bringing this to worlds would most definitely help Alicia’s cause of repeating as vault world champion: something I would love to see happen as I am sure would fans of difficultly and preciseness the world over. Good luck, Alicia!



Crunch.

Sadly, since the 2011 VISA championships ended a few days ago, this is the lasting memory which reverberates round my head. Not the sound of cheers, not the creak of the bars, not the smack of a stuck dismount and not even (somewhat thankfully) the grating idiocy of the NBC trio. Instead it is the sound of Rebecca Bross’ right kneecap being crunched out of position by a bombed double twisting yurchenko. This was the devastating end to a championships that, although filled with the joy and anticipation of Olympic comebacks, was marred by a previously unparalleled number of errors and falls.

The questions that remain now are various. Is there blame to be laid for poor Rebecca’s injury? If so, where does it lie? In the wake of this splatfest championship, what hope now for the USA in Tokyo?

If one was so inclined, a case could definitely be made for this injury as part of a turning point in gymnastics history, when coupled with the unfortunate demise of Aliya Mustafina at this year’s Europeans. Is the code of points to blame? For years people have speculated that the open ended scoring system encourages gymnasts to become circus like tricksters, slamming out highly rated acrobatic elements to beef up a D-score. However, the key difference here is not necessarily the difficulty: Tatiana Gutsu was throwing a standing full back in 1991 (to use but one of many, many examples). Rather, the issue is that with the current coding gymnasts are rewarded for competing skills that they clearly cannot complete to a high enough standard for top level athletes. Back in the 10 system, taking a fall or a wobble on a very difficult skill was less preferable to nailing an easier one, hence we saw less inaccuracy and hence the new code hailed the rise of “skill chucking”.

One struggles to find a better example of this than Aliya Mustafina’s yurchenko 2.5, her performance of which is only rivalled in terms of sloppiness, poor form and terrible blocking by her teammate Tatiana Nabieva. On that day back in April when slow motion cameras captured Aliya landing with bent, messy legs and landing shock ricocheting through her right leg and tearing her ACL, many gymnastics fans around the world new that it had been a question of when, and not if. Aliya should not have been competing that Amanar, not just because she wasn’t good at the skill but also because at the European championships, she did not need to. However, she and her coaches were encouraged by a code which was rewarding a messy, unsightly and frankly dangerous piece of gymnastics.

In similar fashion, Rebecca Bross did not need to complete a DTY at the VISA championships. It was clear to everyone watching from the very beginning that for Rebecca’s health and safety, a vault downgrade was needed (and arguably also on her beam dismount, a twice incomplete and scarily landed Patterson). However,  it was competed regardless and as a result, one of the most talented and promising gymnasts in the world is now recovering from a serious knee injury, when she could have been in the gym getting her skills back at a sensible pace.

Let’s hope the American’s, and the world, learn something from vaulting this year. After all, what true gymnastics fan would prefer a career threatening Amanar to a pencil straight, beautifully executed 1.5 yurchenko? Those who are unsure should take a look at Tatiana Nabieva 2009 vs Nastia Liukin 2008. There really is no contest.

Beauty: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTbPH3nYqXs 

The Beast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmQc75FoAeI