Yesterday Yamilet Peña of the Dominican Republic competed a Prudnova (Roche for men) … the most difficult vault ever performed by a woman. (VIDEO from podium training)
She has the highest qualifying score, so far, half way through the preliminary competition.
FIG sends the message that extremely difficult and dangerous skills are to be rewarded. Coaches in gyms around the world will continue pushing in this direction.
Yet almost everyone in Tokyo right now will tell you that our greatest worry is safety of the athlete under the current Code of Points. Especially on the women’s side.
Consider this discussion paper by William A. Sands, Jeni R. McNeal, Monem Jemni and Gabriella Penitente:
Abstract
In spite of considerable media, educational, conference, and medical attention, gymnastics’ most serious problem remains – injury.
Programs for injury prevention, recovery, and treatment have been proposed often, implemented haphazardly and have shown little merit with respect to actually reducing injury incidence and rate. The countermeasures involved in injury prevention include a variety of tools ranging from apparatus specifications to the attitudes of administrators, coaches and athletes.
Sadly, if any one of the countermeasures is inadequate an injury is a likely result.
The relative risks of poorly constructed and implemented safety programs, poor training and a lack of imagination, and simple denial of risk are among the most serious threats to attaining and maintaining reduction of injury incidence and rate. …
read the full article – THINKING SENSIBLY ABOUT INJURY PREVENTION AND SAFETY (PDF)
Bruno Grandi was translated recently as saying “the code has mutated into a time bomb.”
This is it. This vault is the best example of a “time bomb” in our sport today.
Rewarding this vault cannot end well.
Judges in Tokyo are rewarding difficulty far more than quality. That means gymnasts must increase their start score in order to win. This means more difficulty.
Gymnastics was already a dangerous sport. The current rules have made it more dangerous.
The Code of Points and those in charge of the rules are partly responsible.
If over-split on leaps was winning, coaches would be recruiting Rhythmic gymnasts for their club teams. It’s time for the WAG rules to pendulum back to rewarding form, body position, flexibility, rhythm and grace.
I’d ban or devalue the most dangerous skills — multiple forward somersaults landing forwards (as Trampoline did decades ago) for both Men and Women. The big risk on those is scorpion landing.
But I wouldn’t ban skills like triple back. Those are safer.
related – Amy Van Deusen just posted a good historical summary of this issue – Is the scoring system hurting the athletes?
Please leave a comment if you have an opinion on this.
22 comments ↓
es eso, o por ahí las potencias mundiales gimnasticas se asustan que una latina pueda hacer cosas extraordinarias… otras gimnastas hacen tambien sus acrobacias de extrema dificultad y no e esciuchado alguna reacción sobre ello.. algo pasa.. se va a mantener la seguridad… no se ke pensar sobre este tema… el codigo a cambiado muchisimo los ultimos 20 años que no se hasta donde llegara…
Funny thing is Prudnova did this vault in the old code, how does your abstract deal with or ignore that fact?
She was a freak of nature.
[...] here: FIG rules cause injury — Gymnastics Coaching.com ← Becky Sauerbrunn Offering Injury Prevention Clinics in St [...]
tanto hablan.. lo que hace es historico para su pais, de sacar medalla y clasificar a Londres hara que un pequeño país del caribe pueda brillar, ..
I think, if they judged execution correctly, they wouldn’t have to ban skills to make the sport safer. If the training video is anything to go by, she shouldn’t have gotten full credit. Scoring should be such, that if a gymnast can’t consistently execute a skill precisely, cleanly, and properly, it shouldn’t be worth risking in competition. I dont know quite how to do that. Maybe we shouldn’t give credit to any element a gymnast falls on. Admitably, that’s very strict, but it would still allow gymnasts to push for more difficulty to separate themselves during competition. But it would only be worth it, if they can consistently safely land the element.
Come on… She scored under 8 for that vault. The top vaulters are scoring around 9.0. She got knocked a whole extra point — the amount of a fall — for landing so low. Let’s give some credit to this girl.
You have an audience, Rick, and with that audience comes a responsibility to speak the truth, right? Moreover, the statement below is unsubstantiated by the data so far:
“Judges in Tokyo are rewarding difficulty far more than quality. That means gymnasts must increase their start score in order to win. This means more difficulty.”
My first look indicates that the E-scores are quite rangey. The judges are HAMMERING bad execution. While strong routines are scoring near 9.0, poor routines are scoring low–VERY low in some cases. Yet D-scores aren’t that rangey.
Come on… She scored under 8 for that vault. The top vaulters are scoring around 9.0. She got knocked a whole extra point — the amount of a fall — for landing so low. Let’s give some credit to this girl.
You have an audience, Rick, and with that audience comes a responsibility to speak the truth, right? Moreover, the statement below is unsubstantiated by the data so far:
“Judges in Tokyo are rewarding difficulty far more than quality. That means gymnasts must increase their start score in order to win. This means more difficulty.”
My first look indicates that the E-scores are quite rangey. The judges are HAMMERING bad execution. While strong routines are scoring near 9.0, poor routines are scoring low–VERY low in some cases. Yet D-scores aren’t that rangey.
There IS a story to report — but that’s not the story.
My point exactly. This vault got “only” additional 1.0 in deductions over decent vaults. The one point is the FIG deduction for crash landing alone, if you cannot get it to your feet properly there should be way more deductions for technical insufficiency leading up to the fall in the afterflight and perhaps even before that.
Had she done a great vault and fell then so be it but it is anything but a great vault. As Rick has pointed out time and again it is barely getting around and yet the difference in execution compared to all others is nothing more than the fall itself.
My point is the vault should be BANNED.
Tsuk double back is OK with me, though.
.. when the phone call came in, I assumed Nellie was saying NO WAY.
I was wrong.
JUSTICE would be that a fall on Vault should count double or triple what it does on Beam.
Or Pommels.
“Rewarding this vault cannot end well.”
I don’t have a problem that the vault in general is rewarded. I just think it sucks for it to get rewarded even when the athlete has demonstrated that they can’t actually do the vault. That’s the real problem.
This girl is getting 10s and 11s on the other events. There’s no way she’s the type of gymnast that should be trying a double front. At least not as long as she’s with a coach that can only get her scores up to 10s and 11s on three events!
Speaking of Produnova, she did it with a great landing at the 1999 University games. By the time Worlds rolled around her landings had become poor. In team finals replay you can see her knee kind of jerk the wrong way on impact. Yikes.
[...] my loud criticisms of the WAG Code of Points being partly responsible, most girls are strapped up, but still walking following the prelim [...]
Great, ban MORE skills … that’s the answer.
Again I reiterate you offer no correlation between the performance of difficult skill and injury rates. This isn’t a story or responsible reporting its just your opinion. You have even offer a single statistic to support your claim you simple want people to assume your ranting, “ban this, ban that, that’s ok with me” is based on something other then your personal opinion when in fact you offer no evidence to support your points.
True.
On top of the ABOUT page:
http://gymnasticscoaching.com/new/about/
I’m happy to post your opinion too, positing that increased difficulty does not lead to increased injury. Send me the text you want posted.
I follow the sport science articles too. Keith Russell, chair of the FIG Sport Science Commission, thinks that 1/3 of elite female gymnasts today are functionally injured at any given time. But hey don’t have iron clad data on that either. It mostly comes, I think, from a study in Australia.
[...] Issue – FIG WAG rules cause injuries [...]
My argument is simple. Yes, injuries are a problem in gymnastics but they have always been. I can give you tons of anecdotal evidence from the 80′s and 90′s to support this. I don’t disagree there is potential injury with increased skill level but I disagree with the statement that the “current code CAUSES injuries” Participation in gymnastics causes injuries, period. I have yet to see a shred of statistical evidence to support causation. As a matter of fact I’d say there is some evidence to say that even in this code some female gymnasts are having longer careers then ever before (eg Chuso)
I agree completely. These FIG rules should thoroughly changed. This is a medically speaking an extremely unhealthy code, deducting if a gymnast steps out a difficult acrobatic skill to reduce the impact of the landing is outrageous. It should not incur a deduction of .3.
Artistry in gymnastics has suffered terribly from this code. There are not so many difficult skills to choose from, so all the exercises contain more or less the same leaps and acrobatic skills. Besides CV can not be obtained through gymnastic combinations, the only opportunity is a mixed (acro-gymnastic) combination. It is better to score beauty then to deduct mistakes. Awading is easier then deducting First of all add points for amplitude and artistry. Deviation > 20 degrees from splitposition should result in a lower DV. Ridiculous requirements for ring shapes, these elements are very beautiful but made useless because of the executionrequirements.
Example: Afanasyeva’s extremely beautiful floor exercises (Tokyo and OG. It was a shame that she did not qualify for finals with these exercises and ofcourse it is a loss for the audience too. Count 4 gymnastic skills and max. 4 acro el’s on floor and beam.
So please restore the sport to its original beauty and make audiences, coaches, gymnasts and their families all around the world happy again with this beautiful sport. Aks people to send in suggestions (incl. motivation) how to solve this riddle to do justice to the athletes and artistic gymnastics.
[...] Gymnastics Coaching, Gymnastics Examiner and Amy Van Deusen of About Gymnastics have thoughts on these injuries. [...]
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