Author: Rick Mc

The year after the Olympics is often a time of rebuilding, Junior gymnasts moving up to Senior for the quadrennial.

But the results in Senior Women’s preliminary competition do not look good:

Lemieux-Guillemette finished with a total score of 53.35 points followed by Kristin Klarenbach of Edmonton with 52.3 points and Ashley Quinton of Calgary at 49.5

Gold medal contender Britanny Rogers of Coquitlam, B.C., sustained a rib injury in the warmup and did not compete.

This year’s line up in the women’s competition does not include 2008 Olympians Elyse Hopfner-Hibbs of Toronto or Nansy Damianova of Montreal and several other top-ranked competitors from last year.

Hopfner-Hibbs and Olympic team alternate Alyssa Brown of Oakville, Ont., left the national team and recently finished their first seasons on athletic scholarships at UCLA and Stanford, respectively.

Damianova remains on the national team but has not competed since the Olympics last August. …

Gymnastics Canada – Lemieux-Guillemette takes the lead in women’s competion at the Canadian gymnastics championships

The highest score is 53.35.

Ouch.

Last night a great new kind of gymnastics coach education started. The first presenter Mary Lee Tracy.

… Project 2012: a Web Event for Coaches highlighting the essential techniques for gymnastics success in the next quadrennium. This 12-week event, brings the best coaches in the United States to your computer screen doing LIVE lectures and demonstrations on the most important cutting-edge information in our sport.

Session One begins Tuesday June 2 at 6pm PST-9pm EST and once a week until July 7th. (US$199)

Session Two runs from July 14 through August 18th.

Sessions normally are 45 minutes of presentation and 15 minutes of question and answer, using live lecture, video, power point, and of course your questions, all on your computer. (The first session ran 1hr 26min total.)

homepage – USAproject2012.com

Tracy and her presentation are terrific. I can see why she was chosen to launch. I was happy to get a copy of her Powerpoint presentation as part of the package.

You can participate LIVE as it is streamed. Or watch the archived footage online later, as I did next morning. (My attempt to get to the internet by 6PM Pacific was a comedy of errors.) Click “Float All Panels”. Chat, Participants, Table of Contents and Video.

USA Gymnastics recently took over all the Regional Congress events in the States. Many fear they will all be similar in future. You might well get better value for your coach upgrading dollar through distance learning options like this. And if you don’t live in the USA, no need to fly there to learn from some of their best clinicians.

I could see a club using Project 2012 as part of their professional development strategy.

I’m very positive about this pilot so far. And am looking forward to the next presentation, Week 2 – Tuesday, June 9th at 6PM Pacific.

They had a couple of glitches on the first go. Especially with the audio on the Q&A. But overall it was far better even than I expected. And will only get better each week. Congratulations to the organizers.

Hey, Mary Lee trained only once a day last season. Shawn Johnson seems to have inspired a bit of a trend away from two-a-day workouts.

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The project is associated with GymSmarts. And Alison Arnold’s sport psychology site Head Games.

Olympic medallist Jason Burnett of Toronto claimed his fourth consecutive men’s senior trampoline title Monday at the Canadian gymnastics championships in Hamilton.

Burnett opened up a huge lead in Saturday’s preliminaries and powered to the gold medal with a final routine that included three triple somersaults for a total score of 114.4 points.

Quebec City’s Charles Thibault finished second with 108.2 points, while Kyle Soehn of Red Deer, Alta., was third with 103.0.

“Everything went pretty well the way I planned it,” said Burnett, who won the silver medal at the Beijing Olympics and is currently ranked first in the world in men’s trampoline.

Burnett now turns his attention to preparing for several World Cup competitions later this summer and fall, including the world championships in St. Petersburg, Russia, in November. …

MacLennan beats Cockburn

In the women’s trampoline final, Rosannagh MacLennan held on to the lead she established in the preliminary rounds to take the title away from perennial Canadian champion and three-time Olympic medal winner Karen Cockburn.

MacLennan, seventh at the Beijing Olympics, finished with a total score of 105.3 points while Cockburn trailed with 103.9 despite a slightly higher score in Monday’s final routine.

“It feels great to win the title, but Karen didn’t have the competition she was hoping for,” said MacLennan. “She messed up a bit in the preliminary round, which gave me a bit of an edge going into the final.” …

read more Trampoline and Rhythmic results – CBC Sports

Karen, now age-28, has won medals in the past 3 Olympics. And is not ruling out competing in London.

Stacy Clark from Montreal emailed looking for very specific athletes.

Gymnast, trampolinist or Russian bar specialist sought for a new creation by Cirque du Soleil:
English
French
Russian

Acrobatic or artistic gymnast sought for Cirque du Soleil’s OVO:
English
French
Russian

For other jobs at Cirque du Soleil, click through to the general casting page via the link the top right of any page.

Have you ever heard of the ”Nadia Com?neci” Sports Venue in One?ti, Romania?

It seems to be a multi-sport facility that was begun around 1989 and never completed.

If the government kicks in 20 to 30 billion ROL as they had promised “the venue could be inaugurated this summer”.

Inspired by Nadia – ”Nadia Com?neci” Sports Venue in One?ti

I assume gymnastics is one of the sports included.

Amy’s Gymnastics Blog on About.com linked to this terrific 15.35 routine at French nationals this past weekend.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

I’m surprised she does the Shaposhnikova from free hip. Everybody is doing it from toe-on, toe-off these days.

Click through for commentary on Shaposhnikova type combinations.

There’s much excitement for World’s in the host city for the 2012 Olympics.

Many are deciding whether or not to attend as spectators.

It would be fantastic … but London is so bloody EXPENSIVE.

The Couch Gymnast will be there.

From 13th to 18th October 2009 the World Gymnastic Championships will be held in London for the first time. The championships will act as a vital precursor for the Olympic Games in 2012 and will give a strong indication of which world-class gymnasts will be defending their positions at the Olympics in 2012, and who will be the rising stars that will challenge them. …

official website

World’s the following year is scheduled for Rotterdam, Netherlands. Unfortunately they have a budget shortfall of about 1 million Euros right now.

This reported by Fangymnastics.

The Dutch run excellent gymnastics meets. Hopefully savvy organizers can find a way to make up the revenue.

I was hoping for something more astounding.

This is only a Tippelt to an immediate Giant. Two value parts, I would think.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

I do like the connection, though. And the routine.

Congratulations Raj.

Thanks Valentin.

Our sport is confusing to the general public.

Explaining gymnastics to friends is … difficult.

To see American National Team gymnasts on this subject click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

This is one of 130 excellent videos posted by the now defunct Gymnast.com site.

I’m still hopeful that their old website archive material will one day be restored as an archive.

Like most coaches, I love the original videos on Gymnastike.com.

For example, the recent video of Men’s training at the US Olympic Training Center featuring Joey Hagerty.

But personally I have two problems.

1. The Gymnastike videos stream inconsistently.

I assume the quality and size of the video is bigger and better than YouTube. But on my wireless internet connection, the playback is sometimes choppy.

2. Gymnastike videos cannot be embedded on this site.

WordPress.com, the best host on the WWW, only easily allows Google video, YouTube video, and DailyMotion videos.

I can’t embed and share Gymnastike videos on this site.

Too bad.

Gymnastike does have a YouTube channel. But only 3 videos have been copied there as of this date.