Year: 2011

Jessica is blogging for Double Front and has quite a different perspective of the meet than we do in the well-fed media sections:

Follow her posts over the week on Double Front.

@officialFIG during the women’s AA Final.

Click PLAY or watch her on YouTube.

It’s a lot of FUN following twitter LIVE during the competition. If you don’t have an account you might want to try it for BIG MEETS only.

FIG Official … The young Russian was impressive today. First of the All-Around Qualifications (60.157) and best score of the competition : 15.733 on the Uneven Bars.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

… At this time, Liukin doesn’t plan to do the All-around, but rather will focus on uneven bars and balance beam, once again teaming with father Valeri as her coach.

“Trainings been going well, just basically taking things a day at a time,” Liukin says. “I’ve been trying to go out of my way to train here [in Tokyo]. It’s been hard. I have to be here for every single session as the FIG Athlete Representative, so it makes it a little bit difficult with my schedule. I’m definitely going to go out of my way to find time to train, if it’s waking up at 5 a.m. just to go for a run or driving an hour to get to the gymnastics gym. …

Inside Gymnastics

Excellent.

Next step is to give up all the distractions of celebrity. As Shawn has.

Read more details on Nancy Armour’s AP release.

Click PLAY or watch the Inside Gymnastics interview on YouTube.

Is this correct?

Click through and you’ll see the votes don’t add up.

GymInfo – 2012 Men’s Gymnastics Pre-Season Coaches Poll

RANK

1 Oklahoma
2 Illinois
3 Michigan
4 Stanford
5 California Berkeley
6 Penn State

… see the full list.

FIG Official – Qualifications, Uneven Bars.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube. (14.900).

That’s the way backward giants should be done. I’m happy to report there are very few giants “tapping” over the low bar (WOGA style) at Worlds.

She’ll likely qualify for Bars and AA Finals.

The star for China in prelims was YAO Jinnan.

FIG Official – Qualifications, Beam. The best Chinese gymnast in the All-Around Qualifications : 59.031.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

She’ll almost certainly make Floor, Beam and Bars Finals as well as AA.

… Hey, this is the first meet in a long, long time where there’s been no talk of Chinese gymnasts being underage. Nice.

The landing of the front layout was her biggest error in the AA.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Brilliant routine for Vika in the preliminary competition. Though competing 3rd in the Russian line-up, she scored an astonishing 15.733.

… Expected, actually.

Russians seem to compete far, far better than they train.

This is what we’ve been seeing in the training gym all week. Click PLAY or watch it on Gymnastike.

http://www.gymnastike.org/embed/NTg0NTA4MzI3?related=1

Watch more video of World Gymnastics Championships Tokyo 2011 on gymnastike.org

This must drive the coaches crazy.

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.