In my Report Card on the current Code of Points, I gave Men’s Floor Exercise a score of 4/10.
Fugly.
Dwight Normile:
… The 10-skill requirement for men’s routines has led to the six-pass routine, and inadvertently eliminated corner moves (and probably increased the number of Achilles’ tendon injuries).
So men’s floor exercise, once an exploration of creativity, of rhythm and contrast, has become a monotony of tumbling in a confined space. For the most part, there is no “performance” aspect. …
There are some excellent comments on that post, too.
JuliaK recommends Tomas Gonzalez as the best routine under the current Code that still has a little bit of style. (15.275)
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Many feel that reducing the number of counting skills to 8 instead of 10 would improve artistry. I agree.
In addition, I’d love to see some bonus for artistry and variety. The old R.O.V. (Risk, Originality, Virtuosity) was eventually abandoned for good reasons, but it did make for far more interesting routines. 
2 comments ↓
Not again. This is a sport, not a performance.
Artistry is in the eye of the beholder, anyway. There is no fair way to include this in the score. All it will do is increase the role of chance in the outcome. It will also aid and abet cheaters.
Write Bruno Grandi and get him to change the code…or make your peace with it and move on.
Emil Zatopek was one of the greatest distance runners of all time, and is hero in the running community, but they don’t obsess over him they way gymnastics fans do over stuff from 1966. The current female marathon world record holder could beat him by THREE MILES. I see the same thing when I watch Yukio Endo and Jake Dalton.
I can’t understand why people are so obsessed with the corners. One would think guys were peeing in the corners from the way people carry on about this.
90 % of FX skills are tumbling. This is why men’s floor is mostly tumbling.
Jake Dalton is artistic. If Cy Twombly can call himself an artist, Dalton certainly can.
I didn’t have a problem with the difficulty requirements in 2008. The only problem was the judges not taking deductions properly. However, in terms of routine construction I found it pretty good. Lots of interesting 3 skill combos with much less repetition that in previous codes, also a good mix of difficult tumbling. The major problem seems to be the removal of combo bonus for 3 skill combos. This has had the horrible consequence of excessive numbers of tumbling lines.
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