So you want to be an “Olympian” …
If the USA qualifies teams to the 2012 Olympics in Artistic Gymnastics, they would be allowed to put 5 men and 5 women on the Floor. A total of 10 competing Olympians. (reduced from 12 in Beijing)
Yet in Swimming they could send as many as 52 Olympians. (26 men and 26 women)
In Athletics (track and field) … 126!
I got these numbers from a post by Andrew Thornton – Andy’s Proposed Selection Procedures and World/Olympic Format…
Is this fair? Is it smart?
No. … But I’m not expecting it to change any time soon. IOC has made it clear they do not want to increase the number of Olympic competitors.
… Perhaps we should propose to move Gymnastics sports to the Winter Olympics.
====
Update: Skyrider 95 points out that a maximum of 4 trampolinists could qualify for the U.S.A. … And we could add Rhythmic gymnasts.
The point Andy makes in his original article is that Women’s Artistic Gymnastics is one of the biggest single draws of all Olympic sports. Why limit the maximum number to 5 when the same nation can send 26 women in swimming events? … If we used the same logic as Athletics, the USA could send 4 women on Beam, 4 different women on Vault, etc.
5 comments ↓
Consider trampoline, in the olympics it’s considered a subdevision of gymnastics and because it’s not actually a gymnastics event they limit the total athletes in the sport to 32 (16 males and 16 females). A maximum of 4 per country. In gymnastics because it’s considered a team event they have to have a number per team and for them to allow specialist (espescially in women’s) they would have to eliminate the team competition all together and just have all around and individual events.
And they would then most likely limit the total number of atheletes who compete per even to 16 eight of whom would make finals.
So each country that qualifies a team should realy be looking for the athletes who can help them in all 4 or 6 events the most even if it means they wont be getting a bunch of individual medals. The athlete should be glad they’re even going to the olympics at all.
There are a lot more swimming events then gymnastics events. This is a stupid comparison
Well if gymnastics had more events such as beam with a time limit of 2 minutes or height of 2m. A vault of 1M height a floor routine within 10x10m then we could be just like swimming with several events that are basically the same.
I agree with the above that Swimming and track both have completely more events.
A Better comparison would have been between how many athletes they take for Equestrian games (which has only 6 events, Show Jumping, Dressage, and Three Day eventing, both team and individual). In Beijing, the US took 18 athletes total:
* Artistic (14)
* Rhythmic (2)
* Trampoline (2)
While for Equestrian games we took a total of:
8 people
Sometimes I am not sure people really read the post clearly before commenting. I’m just sayin’
Leave a Comment