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 Why Should I Watch? Not only is it one of the marquee events of the Olympics, it is an incredibly challenging sport and the difficulty on display is at all-time highs. You will see the best gymnast of all time looking even better than she did in 2016, plus a slew of gymnasts pushing the sport forward in a variety of ways. We’ve got old gymnasts, young gymnasts, gymnasts that came back out of college, gymnasts with a good chance to win the first-ever medal for their country, gymnasts planning to perform the most difficult skills ever, and more. It’s an exciting time to get into the sport and I want to highlight why it’s so awesome. When Can I Watch It? All dates/times are in US Eastern. There will also be replays on stream.nbcolympics.com if you’re in the US and have some kind of TV subscription that carries NBC channels. If you hate NBC's coverage (and who can blame you?) check out the NBC sucks thread for alternatives. Qualifications: Session 1 – July 24 9 pm Session 2 – July 24 10:50 pm Session 3 – July 25 2:10 am Session 4 – July 25 4:05 am Session 5 – July 25 7:20 am Team Final: July 27 6:45 am All-Around Final: July 29 6:50 am Vault Final: August 1 4:55 am Uneven Bars Final: August 1 6:27 am Floor Exercise Final: August 2 5 am Balance Beam Final: August 3 4:48 am Who Is Competing? 12 teams have qualified: USA Russia China Japan Italy Great Britain France Canada Belgium Germany Netherlands Spain Plus a whole bunch of countries with gymnasts competing as individuals. You can see the full list of who is competing and what qualification session they are in here (under the Details tab). (In case you’re wondering why Romania is not listed here, for the second Olympics in a row they have not qualified a team, as their program has fallen off drastically in the last 10 years or so and they are sadly a far cry from their world-beating days of old. However, they do have two gymnasts competing as individuals; more on that later.) Rules to Know Team vs. individuals: For this Olympics, the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) came up with a weird and overly complex qualification system where countries could qualify a 4-person team to the Olympics as well as up to two gymnasts who can compete as individuals. This means that for some of the countries listed above, you will see 5 or 6 gymnasts competing in the qualification round, but only 4 of those gymnasts will be part of the team final if their country qualifies. The other gymnast(s) from that country will be able to compete in the all-around final and event finals if they qualify, just not the team final. The gymnasts who are not part of the 4-person team will be wearing different leotards in the qualifying round to differentiate them. (If you’re confused, don’t worry; even people who follow gymnastics extremely closely have been at times. So much so that FIG decided well in advance of the Olympics to scrap this system and go back to the normal 5-person team going into 2024. So if you don’t understand it too well at least you’ll never have to see it again.) The 2-per-country rule: The rules stipulate that only the top two gymnasts from a country can qualify to a final, regardless of where they finish in the overall qualification ranking. So if you’re in the top 8 for an event final but two other gymnasts from your country qualified ahead of you, sucks to be you, you get skipped over for the ninth place qualifier from a different country. This controversial rule means that some very good gymnasts will be sitting out of some event finals because their teammates did just a little better. Why aren’t the scores out of 10 anymore?: That’s been the case for 15 years, keep up! The final score is a combination of two separate scores. First is the difficulty (D) score: each skill is assigned a point value relative to its difficulty level, and the values of the top 8 most difficult skills in a routine are added together (except vault, which just has one big difficulty score since it’s basically just one skill). Then there is the execution (E) score, which starts at 10 and gets deducted from for errors. So a score might look like this: D 5.9 + E 8.666 = 14.566 final score. Who to Watch on Each Event Team Final:  USA: They are so far and away the best team here that anything less than gold is unthinkable and would be an embarrassment for the ages. If you pay attention to sports at all you probably know that the team is led by Simone Biles, the undisputed GOAT of women’s gymnastics. We will basically be basking in Team USA’s greatness during this whole final. Russia vs. China: The real battle in team final will be for silver vs. bronze, as Russia and China are very close in scoring and it will come down to who has the better day. China has historically been weak on vault but has been trying to boost their difficulty on the event to help their scores, while consistency will be important for Russia in order to beat out China. Either way we should be seeing some nice (if cookie cutter) uneven bars routines from Russia and some super difficult balance beam routines from China. Japan: They have a decent team and if Russia or China has a meltdown Japan could sneak in for the bronze. They are a team on the rise and it would be cool for them to get a medal as the home country’s team. All-Around Final:  Simone Biles (USA): Like the US team as a whole, Simone is so far ahead of everyone else that she is basically unbeatable here. She’s never lost an all-around final in her career, and would be the first to repeat as Olympic all-around champion since 1968. Sunisa Lee (USA): With the 2-per-country rule, only one other US gymnast can qualify to the all-around final, and I think she is the frontrunner for that spot. If she makes it, she will be the frontrunner for silver as well. However, if she has mistakes in qualifying, any of the other 4 US gymnasts is capable of edging her out for this spot. Rebeca Andrade (BRA): A very talented gymnast who has had a terrible run of injuries (3 ACL tears in her career), she is strong on every event and is in amazing form right now. Hopefully her perseverance will pay off for her here. Look for her to make some event finals as well. Angelina Melnikova (RUS): She is a second-time Olympian who is much improved from 2016. She will have some competition in qualifications from her teammates, but she bagged a bunch of medals at European Championships earlier this year so she is a strong contender for an all-around medal. Mai Murakami (JPN): She is the anchor of Japan’s team and kicks rear end on floor, and has a World Championships all-around silver under her belt. She will be in the hunt for a bronze here. Ellie Black (CAN): Considered Canada’s best-ever gymnast, she’s has a good amount of success, including a World Championships all-around silver in 2017. She’s a consistent and well-rounded gymnast who can make some noise in the all-around final. Melanie de Jesus Dos Santos (FRA): She’s become France’s It Girl in gymnastics and is in the mix to make every event final. Has issues with inconsistency at times, but does a lot of exciting stuff. Vault:  Simone Biles (USA): She dominates on this event, even without her newly famous, insanely hard double pike vault. (She has said that she will not do this vault in event finals because for some idiotic reason the gymnasts are not allowed to warm up on the apparatus in event finals, and she doesn’t feel comfortable doing it without a warmup.) Would be a major upset if she did not get gold here. Jade Carey vs. MyKayla Skinner (USA): The 2-per-country rule rears its ugly head once again as both of them will be fighting for one spot. Both of them are in the individual spots mentioned above, so they will not be going home with the almost-guaranteed team gold, meaning that making event finals is that much more important for them. And THEN, complicating things further, they both do the same two vaults, so their difficulty scores are identical, and they are often very close in execution. It will come down to minute details as to who makes this final, and whoever does will be the frontrunner for silver. Oksana Chusovitina (UZB): Gymnastics’ iron woman, she is 46 and competing in her eighth and final Olympics. She has long been a standout on vault, winning an Olympic silver at 33 which was already old as hell by gymnastics standards. The competition for bronze will be tough here, but I wouldn’t count her out. Alexa Moreno (MEX): She earned a World Championships bronze in 2018 and missed the podium by a small margin in 2019, so she is definitely in the mix for bronze here too. I like watching her because she runs for the vault like she’s the T-1000. Giulia Steingruber (SUI): She is the defending Olympic bronze medalist on vault, and I believe she was the first gymnast whose country did not qualify a team to the Olympics to win a medal. She’s maintained her form since then, so she’s another strong contender for bronze. Yeo Seo-jeong (KOR): I’m shouting her out here because she has a vault named after her that I think is super cool to watch, and also happens to be one of the hardest in gymnastics. I think she is planning to compete it at the Olympics, which would put her in the running for a medal if all goes well. Uneven Bars:  Nina Derwael (BEL): She has won gold on this event at the last two World Championships, so she’ll be looking to keep her streak going here. At 5’7”, she looks like a giant compared to most of the other shorty gymnasts, and her height gives her a unique style on bars. Sunisa Lee (USA): She and Nina will be in a tough fight for gold vs. silver, as they are both extremely skilled on this event. Sunisa has shown a lot of difficulty in her routine this year, including some extremely hard connections that to my knowledge no one has done before. Getting all of those connections right will be key for her to beat out Nina. Fan Yilin (CHN): One of China’s gymnasts who is competing as an individual, bars is her standout event. She is just below Nina and Sunisa in difficulty and could maybe even sneak in for silver if one of them has a bad day. Basically all of the Russians: Retired Russian gymnast Aliya Mustafina won the last two Olympic golds in this event, and her legacy is that Russia has basically copied and pasted her routine for their current gymnasts. Angelina Melnikova, Viktoria Listunova, Vladislava Urazova, and Anastasia Iliankova are all capable of medaling here, it will just be a matter of who can top who in qualifications, as they all score nearly identically to each other. Elisabeth Seitz (GER): A perennial contender on bars, she's consistent and does a lot of big release skills off the high bar. She's come close to an Olympic medal in the past and could maybe get bronze if she's on and others are off. Balance Beam:  Simone Biles (USA): She is the favorite for gold here too, but unlike every other event final she is not unbeatable here. It was a bit of a shock when she faltered in Rio and dropped to bronze, so this is probably the gold she wants most of all this time around. She’s more consistent on beam than she was in 2016, so she can certainly pull out a gold, but balance beam is the most unpredictable event so anything can happen. Basically all of the Chinese: China has a whopping five gymnasts with medal-worthy beam routines, but once again only two will make it to beam final. Ou Yushan and Guan Chenchen do have a slight edge over the other three (Lu Yufei, Zhang Yin, and Tang Xijing). However, the Chinese gymnasts’ routines rely heavily on connecting skills to increase their difficulty score, and when you’re on a 4-inch wide beam with the world watching you it’s easy to wobble and miss those connections, dropping your score way down. So consistency will be a factor in which two reach the final, and the two that do will be strong medal contenders. Flavia Saraiva (BRA): She is known for her great combination of difficulty and execution on this event, with textbook-perfect ring leaps and very nice artistry. Her only issue is inconsistency, but when she’s on she is so nice to watch. Sanne Wevers (NED): The defending Olympic gold medalist, Sanne surprised in Rio to earn the Netherlands' first individual medal in women's gymnastics. She does a much different routine than most of the field, focusing on difficult turns rather than a lot of acrobatic skills. Sanne hasn't been near her 2016 form recently so it's unlikely that she'll medal, but her routine will be interesting to watch nonetheless. Larisa Iordache (ROU): She is probably the unluckiest gymnast in the history of the sport. She made the Olympics as part of the Romanian team in 2012 and picked up a team bronze, but an injury limited her in the individual events, where she was expected to contend for medals. After Romania failed to qualify a team in 2016, she missed out on the Olympics altogether when Romania opted to send Catalina Ponor in the one spot available to them. Then in 2017 she tore her Achilles at the World Championships; she needed three surgeries and was told that she only had a 50% chance of being able to do gymnastics again. She was able to return to training in 2019 and started preparing for Tokyo. She had a bout of COVID in late 2020 that interrupted her training, then had to compete while suffering from a kidney infection at the European Championships this year, as that was her last chance to qualify for the Olympics. Then last month her mother died of cancer. So after all that, she’s in Tokyo, only to announce that she will not be able to compete the all-around due to ankle pain and will only be doing beam. I don’t know who she pissed off in a past life because drat. She has a very nice beam routine with high difficulty and if she can keep it together there she might be able to medal, and I really hope she does. Floor Exercise:  Simone Biles (USA): Another event where she dominates, even more so than vault due to the differences in scoring potential. If you want to understand why she’s the greatest of all time this event probably demonstrates it best: extremely difficult tumbling executed very well all the time. She tends to bounce out of bounds because she has too much power, but those minor deductions will not be an issue. Jade Carey (USA): This is where things could get a little interesting IMO. Jade has spectacular tumbling passes, very hard stuff that she makes look easy. She has been teasing a new skill, a triple twisting double layout that if she is able to do will be the hardest skill in gymnastics period, even harder than anything Simone does. So, if she can do that skill (big if because it’s so hard that it’s actually kind of dangerous) and everything goes well with the rest of her routine, could she have enough difficulty to upset Simone for gold? The chances are small but it makes me wonder. Mai Murakami (JPN): She’s won a World Championships gold and silver on this event in the last few years, so she will be right in the thick of it for a medal. Great tumbling, nice turn skills and a fun routine to watch. Vanessa Ferrari (ITA): This is her fourth Olympics, and she finished in fourth place in the last two floor exercise finals, so she is determined to finally get a medal on her best event. At 30 years old she’s still bringing the goods. Angelina Melnikova (RUS): She’s racked up a bunch of medals on floor in recent years, including the most recent World Championships bronze, and she looks to be in good form to continue that success here. Eythora Thorsdottir (NED): She does not have the most difficult routine so it will be a challenge for her to make the finals, but if there was a medal for artistic expression she’d probably win it. She has unique and interesting choreography, and she even recorded the vocals for her own floor music. Future Wax fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Jul 23, 2021 |
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Jul 23, 2021 08:36
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 03:14 |
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Frances Nurples posted:are they allowed to wear pants? They are, though it's not really been the done thing until recently. Germany has been trying to promote the option this year; here's what they wore at podium training:  Shimrra Jamaane posted:Been really into gymnastics since Athens. Something I find pretty interesting is that this years US team is the oldest I can recall. It must be the oldest ever. In both 08 and 12 Nastia and Aly were the oldest on the team at just 18. But this year the youngest woman is 18. Simone is 24 and is likely gonna put on history’s greatest performance. I like that maybe the old philosophy of Womens gymnasts reaching their prime at 16 and some countries sneaking 13 year olds in and it being so painfully obvious might be obsolete. I think the change to an open-ended scoring system was the best thing that ever happened to the sport, as it's allowed gymnasts of a variety of ages and body types to have success. That combined with a recent reckoning over how gymnasts are coached means that this is just the beginning of a trend of gymnasts having more longevity in the sport and not being pushed to retire when they reach drinking age.
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Jul 24, 2021 01:24
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So far the NBC stream commentators seem good, I think it's the primetime ones that will be annoying. I haven't tried any other sources yes.
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Jul 25, 2021 02:11
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I could only watch the first session live and spent all day catching up, let’s talk about what happened. Team Final: USA didn’t qualify in first place!!!  Seriously though, not the harbinger of doom that it will be hyped up as. The qualification round was stressful as hell for this team because they were all competing against each other for finals spots. I think they will be sharper in the team final. Which means Russia did qualify in first place. People scoffed when Russia’s head coach said this team could beat the US if they didn’t have Simone Biles, but turns out she was right on. The Russian gymnasts brought their best and did quality routines everywhere. They are determined to throw everything they have at this team final and see if USA leaves a door open. Outside the big 3, Belgium surprised with a fifth-place finish, their best ever by far. Coming in as a bubble team for the finals, their rise up the rankings ended up bumping Canada out of the finals after they had a rough day. Italy looked sharp and Japan didn’t do so hot, barely making finals. All-Around Final: Simone Biles still qualified in first place for all-around even with mistakes, and although I think expectations are weighing on her more than she lets on, ultimately she should be fine here. Rebeca Andrade rocked it, qualifying in second and making two event finals too. Before she looked to be in the hunt for a bronze, but now silver is on the table for her. Angelina Melnikova also looked great, qualifying in fourth (along with three event finals), but only slightly behind Sunisa Lee. It will be interesting to see how things go between these two in the final. Vault: Rebeca Andrade’s strong all-around finish was partly due to her fantastic performance on vault, debuting (I think? Pretty sure she hasn’t competed it before) a new vault for her that has put her in medal contention here too. Simone Biles and Jade Carey did pretty much what was expected for them and qualified in first and second. Also glad I shouted out Alexa Moreno and Yeo Seo-jeong in the OP since they’ll both be competing here (Yeo Seo-jeong looked super good too). Uneven Bars: The gold medal frontrunner is still as murky as it was going in, with Nina Derwael and Sunisa Lee scoring extremely close to each other, although Sunisa can increase her difficulty a bit from qualifications. As expected, 2 Russians (Angelina Melnikova and Anastasia Iliankova), 2 Chinese (Fan Yilin and Lu Yufei), and Elisabeth Seitz round out the final. (Ignore the “Simone Biles still on track to win 6 golds!” hype; there’s no way she’s medaling here let alone gold.) Balance Beam: Guan Chenchen had a stellar routine to qualify in first place. Sunisa Lee looked good here too, and other than a big error on the dismount Simone Biles had a nice routine. This one is wide open enough that I think any of the top 6 have a shot at gold. My earlier shoutouts Flavia Saraiva and Larisa Iordache both qualified, but they both got injured and I haven’t heard if they’ll be able to compete here.  (Edit: Looks like they will both be in the final. Flavia's injury was not serious, but I can't believe Larisa performed so well with the amount of pain she's in.)Floor Exercise: Vanessa Ferrari qualified in first, looking in great shape to finally get a medal. Simone Biles flew so out of bounds that she was off the apparatus completely, which knocked her down to second. Jade Carey activated flipbot mode and calmly qualified in third, her tumbling looking as good as ever. Murakami Mai just eked into this final in eighth which was a little surprising. But ultimately what order you qualify in doesn’t mean poo poo and finals are a fresh start so lots of stuff could happen in any of these finals! Future Wax fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Jul 26, 2021 |
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Jul 26, 2021 02:49
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I can’t watch live and I feel like I’m so behind! Going to recap again: Welp, this is why you play the game. I was careful to say “almost” and “practically” about USA’s chances in my OP because there was always a possibility that this kind of thing could happen. But they way it played out was really a win for everyone; USA getting silver with basically only 3 gymnasts to every other team’s 4 is really impressive. Keep in mind that this is the first Olympic medal for Sunisa, Grace, and Jordan, so most anyone would be happy with that. USA Gymnastics’ overconfidence as an organization showed today. They expected Simone to carry the team and didn’t pay attention to the details; the team director’s comment of “A few tenths won’t matter” after trials really looks foolish now. Not to mention the chatter about how USA could send 2 or 3 teams and they would all medal, how Simone could just do her Rio routines again and still win, etc. They fed into the hype and it ended up stressing Simone out to the point that she couldn’t compete safely (as others have said, gymnastics is extremely dangerous to do if you’re not in the right headspace; in others sports you might lose, but in gymnastics you might get paralyzed). Simone deserves a ton of credit for making the choice she did and it shows how much mental strength she really has, but it never should have gotten to the point where she felt that way. How relieved she looked after pulling out of the final was telling. Russia really earned their gold, doing quality gymnastics across the board. Viktoria Listunova in particular performed well, hitting her routines in situations where the margins were close between Russia and the US. Another shock was Great Britain earning bronze; after a lot of controversy surrounding their team selection (including jerking around Becky Downie right after the sudden death of her brother and then not putting her on the team anyway) they weren’t expected to earn any medals, so being the first team that’s not US/Russia/China/Romania to get a team medal since 1988 says a lot for these 4 gymnasts. China's questionable team selection didn't pan out so well for them; they weren't at full strength and had several falls to put them way down in seventh. What does this tell us about the remaining finals? A lot is up in the air since we don’t yet know what if any finals Simone will compete in, or how she will do if she does. And for the one final where she wasn’t a medal contender, uneven bars, Nina Derwael and Sunisa Lee got the exact same score in team final, so basically just take any predictions made up to this point and throw them in the garbage.
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Jul 27, 2021 20:03
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surf rock posted:I made a couple of whiny little bitch posts this morning when we didn't get gold, but with a bit of hindsight, still winning silver even with an emergency sub-out of Biles is pretty legit. Not unusual for her, she got 3 World Championships medals in 2019 and was long seen as most likely to make the team after Simone. She'll almost definitely be adding to her medal total here, so she'd be the star for sure.
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Jul 27, 2021 22:08
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I think the issue is that Adderall and similar drugs are illegal in Japan, and they do not allow foreigners that have it prescribed to them in their own country to bring it in regardless of medical need. I think there might have been an exception for Olympic athletes but I can't find anything confirming that.
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Jul 27, 2021 23:15
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Kaal posted:This might be a social media misunderstanding. Simone Biles is taking Ritalin (methylphenidate), which Japan specifically exempts and regulates as a legal Schedule I psychotropic medicine. Oh, I had heard a few years ago it was Adderall and that was why people were screeching about her taking a PED, guess that's not correct though.
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Jul 28, 2021 01:51
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barkbell posted:this one aged well Yeah, this is a big oof to read now. But in retrospect some of the signs were there, especially at Olympic trials (although at the time I thought she was nursing an injury). Simone had a lot of struggles on the second day, and I noticed that she didn't seem all that excited when talking about having made the team afterwards. She said what one would expect her to say in interviews, but the feeling wasn't really there. So all this stress culminating in a mental block is in a way not surprising. Her vault from team final is kind of scary to watch in slow motion; there's a moment where she's just falling towards the ground head first before finally turning herself around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxN2b2fs9eM On another note, the finals so far have shown why it was so dumb for NBC to try to make this the Simone show when everyone on the US team is very talented. When watching an all-around final it's like you can just feel who has enough for gold and who doesn't, and Sunisa Lee was the one who had enough that day. Not to take anything away from Rebeca Andrade, she had a great showing too, and the all-around silver is huge for her and for Brazilian gymnastics. Also, I don't know if it was really noted in the broadcast but this was Jade Carey's first international all-around competition ever, and she competed in it on short notice, so a top 10 finish is really impressive in that situation. She was age eligible for Rio and could have been pushed to try to make that team, but instead was allowed to reach the elite level at her own pace and is so much better for it. More evidence that gymnasts don't have to be made to burn out in their teens.
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Jul 30, 2021 23:28
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jimmydalad posted:Should we change the title to Gymnastics because we’re talking about men’s and women’s? Yeah, should probably change it at this point, I named it women's because I didn't know enough about men's to do a write up but it's just the general gym thread now. Simone might still be doing beam, that was the one final I maybe saw her doing when stuff first happened, and MyKayla Skinner said in a press conference that Simone was trying to get ready for it so we'll see.
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Aug 1, 2021 18:14
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surf rock posted:Is it realistic for Biles to do a competitive routine on beam with zero twists? I guess I haven't seen a ton of twisting moves on beam outside of dismounts since the qualifiers. Normally she does at least one twist in her dismount (sometimes two), but she could downgrade it to a simpler double pike or double tuck without too much of a hit to her difficulty score. Other than that it's pretty twist free, so if she's feeling confident on beam in general she might go for it. No other US gymnasts would go in her stead, the spot would go to Ashikawa Urara of Japan. Vakal posted:So was Grace McCallum only competing in the team event, none of the individual stuff? She didn't qualify for any individual finals so team was it for her.
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Aug 1, 2021 22:36
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sheri posted:The Twisties aren't just about twisting though, right? It's about losing spatial awareness in general? I think so, but she said that she was not having as much of an issue with flips so she may be able to get that much worked out before beam final.
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Aug 1, 2021 22:40
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Chaotic Flame posted:Can't find today's event finals on nbcolympics. Am I just blind? Apparently NBC blocked this replay until after it airs in primetime. Gee I wonder why, couldn't have anything to do with Simone could it? I'm so annoyed, I was doing so well avoiding spoilers until this point.
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Aug 3, 2021 16:59
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 03:14 |
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I'm thinking that because Simone withdrew from so many finals they want to milk this last one for all it's worth.
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Aug 3, 2021 17:27
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