Make It Or Break It Cheerleaders and the Lost Art of Gymnastics

This has, so far, been the most political Olympic gymnastics competition that I have witnessed in more than 40 years of following the Games.  Some are characterising this as the FIG having chosen in favour of difficulty over execution.  I tend to think of it as something less strategic, more contrived and more misled.  It is almost as though a teen generation of gymnastics judges, let me call them the Make It Or Break It Cheerleaders, have taken over.  Belligerence and venom have been mistaken for reason.  A legion of teenage experts lead the opinion of professional adults who should know significantly better.  The desire for measurement and assumed objectivity - the desire to satisfy the needs of those 'stattos' amongst us who want to be able to predict and justify scores - has led the sport to degrade to the lowest common denominator.  If you don't believe me, just watch the floor final on Sunday - I'll eat my hat if the best wins (it's a felt beret, and will most probably choke me to death).

The most telling statement I have heard so far has come independently from several different sources - 'now that Louis Smith has only managed a silver on pommels, you can be sure that Beth Tweddle will win gold in Monday afternoon's uneven bars final'.  I've no desire to be uncharitable towards Beth - she is a great bars worker and has developed her routine to include an incredible array of difficulty that may well deserve gold - but whatever happened to the idea of the best routine winning?  It's come to something when lifelong fans of the sport have become so hardened and cynical by the political games played by judges that these kinds of opinions can be formed.  It is hard on Tweddle, who may well deserve the gold this afternoon without implications of it as some sort of favour to the hosts.

I have closed a couple of the comments threads on this blog, partly because the argument has become circular, but also because it is simply unpleasant to read some of the personal contumely that is dressed up as argument.  Opinion is necessarily varied around many of the subjects on which I write.  Some of the articles are provocative.  I appreciate reading a variety of opinion, but I don't appreciate it when words like 'moron' appear on my blog, and when discussions of racism replace those of artistry.  The 'trolls' who cause this trouble are in a minority but their behaviour is upsetting to the majority who just want to have an interesting discussion.  I thank the majority for their contributions, and hope they will continue to come here and to comment.

There are terrible double standards: elsewhere, the behaviour of McKayla Maroney on the podium goes unquestioned, while every sorrowful tear of Viktoria Komova is criticised as 'unsporting'.  I just think they are both teenagers, leave them alone.  It's highly unfashionable to bemoan Maroney's silver medal on vault, with a fall, yet every stutter and fall from a Russian labels the athlete a 'headcase'.  It is the kind of talk you might expect from a group of particularly poisonous 12 and 13 year olds desperate for a place in the most popular clique at school, multiplied by the power of the internet which, quite unselectively, gives voice to those with the most malice and greatest talent for insult.  I wonder if they would be so outspoken in person?  But the media, the coaches, the gymnasts, begin to follow suit : International Gymnast comments on an apparent slight by bronze medallist Aliya Mustafina of her coach; coach John Geddert blogs about the unfairness of the 2 per country rule which saw his gymnast Jordyn Wieber ruled out of all around finals; 16 year old German, Janine Berger, puts herself through the ordeal of a tearful press statement announcing her disappointment at finishing fourth on vault. 
 
Despite all of this fearsome noise, judges have to take responsibility for their judging at this competition.  I've heard it said, in defence of the judges, that the Code ties their hands.  While there are deductions specified for particular errors such as steps on landing, superior body posture and leg line do not attract a bonus.  This argument blames the Code whilst characterising the judges as powerless robots with no initiative, no imagination, and no moral dimension to their work.  But the Code does give a choice of whether to make the deduction at all, or whether to give a lower level of deduction.  The judges do have a choice of how to implement the Code, but many of them seem pretty clueless.  Russian coach Marina Nazarova has pointed out how inexperienced judges were unable to adjust to Ksenia Semenova's improvements over the course of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

An understanding of ballet training as a requirement to good gymnastic basics is lacking by many who mistake it as a personal preference for classical dance in the choreography of floor and beam routines.  Most American gyms do not employ a full time choreographer to hone and polish the work of their gymnasts from an early age, before bad habits can become engrained.  The culling of compulsory exercises many years ago has left the judges without a baseline by which to judge basic skills, allowing terrible unsightly gymnastics to dominate even at the top of the sport.  One well qualified commentator has observed that the tie-break procedure ... where execution scores determine the finishing order if the overall score is identical - is the only time that the sport prefers execution over difficulty.

The women's sport is groaning under the overwhelming influence of poor judgement and media distortion.   Russia made significant errors in the team competition and America deserved their gold there.  Judges made a poor call of the all around medallists.   The unexplained reduction in marking differential between USA and Russia on the bars has been instrumental in seeing America take gold in both the team and all around competitions here in London.  Russia's balletic heritage is apparently counting for nothing in a battle with a legion of MIOBI Cheerleaders. 

On Sunday, we will see the finals of the beam and floor exercises, the blue riband events of any gymnastics competition.  In both finals, 20 year old Ksenia Afanasyeva has qualified, her beautifully performed exercises a reminder of the gymnastics of the past.  Yet her start values do not measure up to the competition and her chances of winning either event - even if she avoids error - are low, if not non existent.  If Afansyeva were injured, she could be replaced in the beam final by compatriot Anastasia Grishina, a gymnast of almost equal beauty, without the experience of Afanasyeva but with a potentially higher start value and, therefore, a stab at a medal.  This would rob the floor final of Afanasyeva's amazing grace, most likely leaving a line up of Who Dares Wins cheerleaders (Raisman, Ferrari, Wieber) with the medals.  The FIG will have the sport it wants.

Before the competition began, team captain Ksenia Afanasyeva stated : 'We will win with beauty'.  Russia are the only team wholeheartedly to embrace this vision and philosophy.  In the dark room that is women's artistic gymnastics, the Russian team sits in a beacon of fading light.  How much longer can they prevail?