Welcome to the 2011 NCAA Conference Championships homepage!
Follow your favorite teams via live updates all in once place. …
Many of the college teams featured below will be providing live updates throughout their competition so you can closely follow all the action with up to the second inside information.
This is the final weekend for teams to count their team totals towards their Regional Qualifying score and only the top 36 teams will qualify to NCAA Regionals.
Tatiana Nabieva, VT: DTY with a step back. Smart decision not to do the Amanar. Piked Podkopayeva second vault, very nice, small step. A drama free rotation from Nabieva.
Qualifiers: Men’s floor: Gonzalez, Da Silva, Bouhail, Koczi. Still rings: Chen, Yamamuro, Pluzhnikov, Balandin.
Koji Yamamuro, SR: The lone competitor from Japan here gets a nice ovation…strong routine with a stuck full twisting double layout dismount from Japan’s resident strongman. A lot of fight and a lot of pride on his face during that exercise. 15.633 good for second right now.
On high bar, Zonderland and reigning world champion Zhang Chenglong will get to have a rematch. (Oooh…)
The goal of today for all these gymnasts is just to make the top four in order to move on to tomorrow’s final. So it’s not too much of a surprise to see Deng Linlin warming up a bhs, bhs, layout to two feet to Korbut on beam, or to see Yana Demyunchuk doing a roundoff, layout on the same event. It’s a risky strategy to throw everything you’ve got in the qualifying, because if you fall, you’re done.
Super photographer Grace Chiu GraceClick updates us on Facebook:
Super clean Sam Zakutney, of National Capital (Ottawa) dominates Argo field of 33 with 86.300 points AA after 1st day of competition, with most E-scores over 9.30 & top scores on vault, p-bars, & hi bar. Kieran Fagan of Capital City (Edmonton) is in 2nd with 83.550 points.
The Marsden boys, of Capital City, lead Tyro field with Teagan 80.800 & Aiden 80.350. Cory Paterson closely in 3rd place despite huge growth spurt since Nationals.
Canada’s “A” Team will travel to compete at Chinese Nationals in early May before Canadian Nationals! This would be the first time a foreign team is invited to compete at a Chinese Nationals. Courtesy of Liang Cheng.
Nathan Gafuik is not here nor in Paris (World Cup). He is recovering a broken ankle and is still on the roster for Kyle Shewfelt’s meet next weekend in Calgary.
Welcome back a healthy Brandon O’Neill after a year-long recovery from an ACL tear. He will compete on floor, pommels, vault, & p-bars &/or hi bar
Simon Porter …
Canada Games champion Simon Porter, TGI, stands in 1st place amongst Juniors followed by Kal Nemier, Flicka, and Curtis Graves, Taiso.
Jackson Payne, Capital City, showed a masterful pommels set to lead Seniors AA, while local host gymnasts Tariq ‘Flipsz’ Dowers and Casey Adrian Sandy of Mississauga are in 2nd & 3rd.
Tomorrow is day 2 of the AA & the apparatus finals
Follow Steph Mason-Harris live blogging the meet @CANGymnastics
• do NOT provide an embed code
• use deadly slow brightcove rather than the fastest streaming service, YouTube.
British Gymnastics TV decided to make both of these mistakes, in an effort (I assume) to force viewers to go to their website to see BGTV videos.
Right now there’s a tutorial with coach Paul Hall. … But will you bother to click over to watch it?
… If I email British Gymnastics, they are gracious enough to send me an embed code. But why not simply include the embed code for one and all?
Thanks for the link, Sarah.
I LOVE Gymnastics Examiner … but Examiner videos are even worse than BGTV. If you have a fast internet connection and a tolerance for pre-roll ads, click over to watch podium training at the French Invitational.
Blythe Lawrence is at the French Invitational in Bercy. Watch for detailed coverage on Gymnastics Examiner. And @GymExaminer.
Podium training:
… Aliya Mustafina looks…well, better than she did during American Cup training (though she still missed her piked Jaeger on bars the one time she did one). It looks like her new floor combo, the one she biffed at the American Cup, is going to be a 2.5 twist to Rudi. Yes, a 2.5 to Rudi third pass. Ooh. A natural upgrade for her, and very exciting to see.
She also tossed the new combination on bars she didn’t throw in Florida: Tkatchev to Pak to immediate stalder Khorkina II. Nabieva looks exactly the same on bars as she did five months ago. …
… On beam, Deng Linlin flirted with but never quite made her two bhs to layout full to Korbut. It was very obvious that the combination was weighing heavily on her mind. Too heavily, perhaps — she did several timers, and also two or three with the layout full, but never actually threw the entire series. To my eyes she doesn’t have enough room at the end of the beam. But I guess we’ll find out…
GymNiceTic kicks off the discussion on what nations will qualify a full team to the Olympics at the first qualifying competition, World Championships Tokyo in October:
… Gerhard Pfisterer, predicted the first seven qualification spots will go almost certainly to China, the USA, Russia, Romania, Australia, Great Britain and Japan.
And Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Brazil, Canada, Switzerland and the Ukraine will fight for the eighth spot, with which they can qualify directly to the Olympics. …
Gymnastics Coaching.com 