IG is reporting that FIG has made a drastic rules change to improve our sport.
Artistic gymnastics is getting a new “kiss and cry” area, the FIG announced Saturday.
“The Federation is taking steps toward making its competitions more entertaining …
Artistic gymnasts will join figure skaters and rhythmic gymnasts, who already wait in the score zone to receive their marks after competing.
Gymnastics competitions are in “dire need” of overhaul, the FIG Executive Committee and Council decided following a meeting in Lillestroem, Norway. …
The GymBlogosphere is near unanimous in response:
… Dear FIG,Remove your collective heads from your collective anal sphincters …
thailek – IG Forum
Blythe on Gymblog:
… What better way to make gymnastics look less like a sport and more like a beauty contest or reality TV show. …
How embarrassing is this going to be for Men’s Gymnastics?
Now … I don’t mind a rendezvous spot on the competition Floor for coach and athlete to meet after the routine. This is done often now for TV broadcasts. It might even look spontaneous and natural.
FIG is clearly a disaster. Great people. But great people who are making one bad decision after another.
It’s time for a coupe.
We need support a block to replace Grandi and his long time supporters.
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AAAAAHAHAHAHAHA….
Oh wait….
You’re serious? Is FIG actually serious about this?
That’s completely idiotic.
Couldn’t the athletes just not go into the kiss and cry area? If all the coaches just don’t let their kids go sit in front of the camera, it should shut down pretty quickly. And if they’re required to, or they don’t get a score, as long as everyone joins in, they’re not going to hold a meet and not give out a score to anyone.
“No Susie, we need to go get mentally prepared for the next event, we don’t have time to look silly for the TV.”
This is getting dumber and dumber the more I think about it. If the girls now have to wait in a room to get a score, in order to televise that, producers will either have to extend the length of the broadcast and slow the competition down, or focus on fewer athletes or fewer events. None of these will make the sport more interesting to lay fans. If anything, it will have the opposite effect, as it will decrease the awareness of athletes by limiting broadcast to only the most televisable and increase the focus on the arbitrariness and subjectivity of the judging by drawing out the judging process.
I hope this is only for EF situations
it works at Stuttgart and Cottbus
DO NOT WANT
To do be more specific, this is a team sport–these athletes should be given a chance to celebrate their scores with their team. And have time to mentally prepare for the next event! Sheesh!
Yeah, it ‘s fine for World Cup events (well, it doesn’t really add anything but it’s not horrendous), so if it is just for EFs, I wouldn’t really mind. It just wouldn’t be viable at all for AA or team competitions though.
I think it can only, safely, be for EF situations.
AA and Team situations require much preparation in between (change of grips, taping of ankles, etc)
Just watch the Beijing Women’s AA. The girls are running around like crazy trying to get to their next event.
I’m a bit worried for the safety of the gymnasts if they will feel rushed in between events and lose concentration.
This type of waiting for scores is not compatible for gymnastics. There are several events going on at the same time. Some girls don’t like to look at the scoreboard for each event. It takes time to get physically and mentally prepared for each event. If this ever got tried out, it would be very obvious it was incompatible for the athletes, their coaches, and the television cameras.
They only thing we need like Ice dance is allowing Acro Gymnastics to dress/costume to theme like Ice Dancers can. That would be GREAT
But…. this idea of the Ice Dance world of the interveiw room while waiting on scores… like another poster said…. really can only fit into Event Finals. This is still limitied though. Would ONLY work on their last event when any athlete who qualified to more than one final.
The decline in viewership of Gymnastics is cause of LIVE coverage. This is HURTING gymnastics. Gymnastics sports dont do live well. The delay between routines.. Viewers dont understand the long drawn out score periods, viewers dont like the innability to easily follow who is in the lead, who is coming on strong and might beat someone else…. etc etc. It just makes for poor live coverage.
Tape the dang thing… Edit it into chunks… Heighlight the moments of competition… “competitor A (or team) is only tenths behind their opponent”… “lets see how their routine turned out” “Will it be good enough” then show it. This better heighlites to Joe Public and his kids who is in first and who is in trying to out score them etc. Duhhhhhh… competition, Joe Public and kids understand that.
If it was a close competition for team or AA for athletes who are on two different events then do majic editing and show that. If it its hair bitting close in score between gold and silver or silver bronze on a single event…. then show that too. It’s not rocket science.
TV folk can review films and grab out the best routines, most artistic, most tragic, Most excited coach moments etc etc. The stuff that is entertaining. Edit that all together and televise this in an order that provides best effect etc. So So much more can be done NON live.
I miss the non live coverage of the past Olympics etc. Hmm… 92? and back? Have not watched much Televised gym since going live either actually and if I as a gymnast’ thus built in interest, dont watch it anymore then why would one think Joe Public and fam. with less ties to gymnastic world would?
A big plus to non live…… SHOW IT WHEN KIDS CAN SEE IT…. instead of later at night like they do in the Olympics now. This later at night alone is helping to kill the gymnastic biz industry. Less kids watch now thus less kids get excited thus less kids enroll in our classes. Get the TV time back to family TV time.
I’m in wholehearted agreement with the above comments–this is not only a ridiculous idea and belittling to the sport, it’s also a potential safety hazard given the mental prep required throughout a competition. If it’s true stated intention is to make competitions “more entertaining,” it seems destined to backfire; as has been noted here and elsewhere, showing more routines would be the smarter way to increase entertainment value.
But I’m wondering if this isn’t the real motivation behind such a hare-brained idea: “The ‘kiss and cry’ zone is also a potential source of revenue for the FIG, which can sell ad space on the area backdrop.” (Source: International Gymnast online)
Hasn’t anyone in charge, or anyone else noticed that the decline of gymnastics came with the advent of the tours? In the mid 90s, gymnastics was one of the most popular spectator sports on television. The reason, I believe, was the same reason that skateboarding and other extreme sports have taken off in recent years. It was the daring, high flying athleticism of the sport. And yes, there has always been a huge audience that has tuned in to watch figure skating, but that audience was different. That audience, in my opinion, was more of a “pagent-dance recital” type of audience. Before someone bashes me, I am not saying that figure skating doesn’t require athleticism. That is not the argument here. I think, though, that we began losing our casual viewing audience (those that were not, in some way, involved in the sport), when the tours began, and people started seeing us prance around and do “shows”. It was the beginning of the end of our sport being viewed as an athletic event, and the beginning of the comparisons to figure skating and recitals. Top that off with a confusing scoring system, and you have a great recipe for alienating many of the viewers we had.
In closing, if we do this, then we have made the complete transition, and I urge all coaches to do as stated earlier by JAO, “DON’T LET YOUR ATHLETES DO IT!!!!” Please, I am begging you for our sport, take a stand and do not participate. I, for one, will take a stand by not watching it, or buying tickets to the competitions that have that. I mean, what’s next? Maybe an evening gown competition prior to the meet? Maybe we could have football teams go and sit in “penalty judgement” areas whenever a flag is thrown on the field so that they can wait to hear who the penalty was on, and then decide whether to decline or accept it. I just can’t take it…
what do you expect? it’s Bruno Grandi’s FIG.
For you youngsters, the organization ran very differently under Yuri Titov. It was treated as a sport and with respect.
From someone who has watched figure skating from a young age, The kiss and Cry area (which isn’t what it’s called anymore anyway. Learn a bit why don’t you…) is just a waiting area. Many Figure Skaters don’t go there either. They do just to wait for their scores. They’re not interviewed, not talked to by anybody but their coach. If you watch most events, the camers are already on the girls to wait for their scores anyway.
I think they’ll probably change it only for event finals because as others have said, there’s no time.
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