Held July 9th & 10th at Goyang Gymnasium, Andrew Hunt sends us some highlights of the Day 1 MAG competition:
Vault
Bouhail – first up, popped up a big tsuk double pike but rotated quit slow and took a big lunge forward. Looked like an ankle buster. Very nice dragelescu though and he finished 2nd overall.
Korean Gymnast- (Hak Seon Yang?) – 1st vault – hand-TRIPLE full (I think!!?), absolutely huge height, fast twist, broke out of it the twist to a small hop. Never seen anything comparable it was awesome. It was big off the block and he wrapped it like he was going for a randi then all of the sudden he broke out of it leading me to think it was just a double full. I trained gymnastics for 15 years and competed in college and I’m well versed in international level gymnastics and even I couldn’t tell how many twists he did. D and E scores were flashed quickly so I missed that but the total score was a 16.8….so obviously it couldn’t have been just a double full. Then he did a nice tsuk/kaz triple and finished with a 16.6 – over half a point higher than the rest of the field. I’m patiently waiting for it to show up on youtube so I can get a replay of it.
P-Bars
First guy up was from China – Wang GuanYin – Ridiculous set – peach half, peach, front uprise diam, dimitrenko, piked morisue, piked belle, tipelt, healy, straddle 5/4, double pike. 7.0 D score and he hit it really clean. It’s hard to make dimitrenko’s and piked morisue’s look that smooth but his were excellent and I’m still not sure how anyone can actually do a front uprise diam. He scored a 15.95 or something similar and I thought that was tough judging. He was first and immediately outclassed the field. Won by almost a point. …
Roman Kulezca (spelling?) had a nice interesting set with a tipelt front and the new bhavsar tipelt variation but in general, the European guys looked tired. Adam Kierzkowski fell on a front somme 5/4 to support and had a wild peters that he bailed on turned back into the bar…looked like a back full catch in support but in no way was it on purpose.
As for the Americans, both Melton and Silverstein hit clean and looked comfortable but lacked the difficulty to really challenge but I’m sure that was never the point of their assignment. They both gained valuable experience and looked like they were really soaking up the atmosphere. It was definitely a good showing for them.
High Bar
First Korean guy had a beautiful set going with huge kolman and nice lines on his elgrip work but faced it on his double double.
Chinese guy had a nice set but very typical Chinese high bar style. Kind of labored, lack of extension on his releases but nice difficulty and acceptable form. Full tak-yamawaki, half tak-kovaks, endo to eagle- layout yaeger. He got hammered by the judges and went 14.8 which I found to be a little too harsh.
KimJiHoon – Beautiful set – nice lines, big kolman and kovacks. Rybalko eagle immediate layout yaeger, really nice and smooth. Rybalko half (2/1 quast) the best I’ve ever seen preformed….the only one I’ve ever seen to catch above horizontal. It was a phenomenal set…D score I think was 6.9 and he went 15.6ish for the win which was well deserved.
… Overall, I was quite impressed with the high bar line-up. Eagles on average were caught quite high, lines were excellent, releases were big and there was a lot of variety.
Full Twist has the list of competitors, MAG and WAG.
Gymnastics Coaching.com 