Molodyets! Congratulations to Maria Paseka, World Champion on vault! #glasgow2015
My best wishes to Giulia for a good recovery.
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Thursday, October 29, 2015
WAG AA results
Congratulations to all the medalists, including Simone, who wins for the third time winning, Gabrielle, who has completed a comeback after a break since Olympics, and Larissa who overcame a mountain of disappointment after qualifications.
Russia's promise, Seda, had quite a good first AA competition, but fell on beam and lost rather a lot of marks. But she is still one of the world's top gymnasts and will do better next time!
http://www.longinestiming.com/File/Download?id=00000E0001000101FFFFFFFFFFFFFF03
Aliya Mustafina : knee surgery on 3rd November
World and Olympic Champion, Aliya Mustafina, will travel back to Moscow on the 2nd November, ready for surgery on an injured meniscus in her right knee on the 3rd, head coach Valentina Rodionenko said today in an interview with R Sport. Aliya tore the ACL in her left knee in spring 2011 and recovered from surgery to win gold in the London Olympics in 2012.
The injury is not serious and it is expected that recovery will take six to eight weeks, allowing Aliya to begin training for Rio in early January, all being well. 'It's just a strain', said Rodionenko, adding that medical advice suggested it would be better for Aliya to have the surgery than suffer the pain.
Aliya made the decision herself to have the surgery in Russia this time, rather than in Germany. She will make her recovery at Round Lake (the national training centre) and if she is well enough will travel to Israel on the 10th, to participate in the rehabilitation camp with the rest of the national team.
Aliya herself has said that she doesn't consider that missing this World Championships will be detrimental to her Olympic preparation. Valentina added her voice to this, saying, 'Everything will be fine, do not worry'.
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
The domino effect - Russia collapses and must rise again
Newcomer Seda Tutkhalyan did well to improve her floor performance for her team.
It was a tough competition today for Russia. Put simply, they fell too much for a better outcome.
The girls were on a swell following a great vault performance and two top class bars exercises. Next, however, returning champion Viktoria Komova went for an extra dimension on one of her pirouettes - and fell. It was a domino effect that ran through to first time World championships gymnast Seda Tutkhalyan on beam, and carried over via Kharenkova, back again to Komova. 4.5 points were lost as the checkers tumbled one after another. In the end, Moscow's Maria Paseka steadied the boat with her fluent floor exercises, and Tutkhalyan held things together with a routine that was much improved since Monday. Afanasyeva topped things off.
At the end of the comp, the girls were all cheers and smiles. But there were glum looks behind the ironic smiles. I think that all the team will be very unhappy after losing the medal in such a way.
What's the learning here? It's not the fact that you fell, that can happen to anyone. More the manner of the reaction to the fall.
There were some good moments. Vault saw a significant improvement since Sofia, and floor was much better than in qualifications. There is clearly much potential on the team. But potential does not win medals. Russia needs to learn how to balance on the crest of a wave and exploit the adrenalin of success to pursue gold or silver in future. This is exactly what the USA does so well and, today, China and Britain did better than Russia.
Valentina says that all the coaches and gymnasts are upset by this performance. And so they should be. Even President of the RGF, Vasily Titov, looked a bit sheepish at the medal ceremony. Perhaps heads will roll, and Romania won't be the only ones seeking coaches after this. After qualifications Russia looked to be respectable silver medalists here. But they weren't even scratch bronze medalists. Home advantage for rivals Britain or not, they should have done better.
In quals, Komova seemed to have mastered her nerves and to be on track in her revival as a team leader. Hmph - it is back to the drawing board there. Something has to change if the Olympian is truly to have profited from her career break. The youngsters have more grace from me for their errors, understandable under the pressure of competition and the strain of seeing their returning hero collapse at the first hurdle.
I don't want to blame any individual for a team failing - and the coaches have to take much of the responsibility - but Russia needs more confidence than that. Phoney smiles and shrugged shoulders are probably a sarcastic or philosophical reaction to adverse media and fan reactions to tears - what do you expect, they seem to say? But I would suggest that the girls need to start building themselves back up during EFs. I hope that everyone will reflect and realise that this was a lost opportunity to pressurise America in the run up to Rio. A close fight without Mustafina here could have been even closer with her next summer. Now, the exclamation mark will remain a question mark, and the pressure is all on Russia to prove themselves once more. The psychology of winning has to be more positive than we saw today.
Congratulations to the medalists, who all fought hard for their booty. To all the finalists, who truly deserved to be at the top table of gymnastics. Good luck for the coming days, and bring home some medals. Keep heart in the coming months as you prepare for the Olympics.
If Komova wins a medal on bars on Saturday, I hope she gives her beam finals place to Maria Kharenkova - who deserves a boost after a disappointing time here. The young girl has been competing with a painful right leg throughout quals and finals. She and Seda both looked very downmouthed about this result. They are Russia's future and both are much better gymnasts than we saw today. Russia cannot survive on past glories forever.
Full results are here. Fetch a handkerchief, a gin and tonic or a bar of chocolate. No, all three. http://www.longinestiming.com/File/Download?id=00000E0001000103FFFFFFFFFFFFFF03
Monday, October 26, 2015
Sunday, October 25, 2015
The changing identity of artistic gymnastics - what do you think?
There is a really good comment on my post 'Maybe it's the end'. It is from Cami, and I didn't want it to remain relatively hidden at the bottom of the post as it is full of ideas for discussion. Thank you, Cami ...
Cami says -
'You make excellent points, about how the identity of artistic gymnastics is changing. that�s the nature of sport though. i feel artistic gymnastics is still unique from any other branch because it is gymnast and apparatus, and nothing else. they are artists with their own bodies (no balls/hoops/or partners). a gymnast must be entirely focused on their physical, emotional, and mental self-awareness.
but if you are to give a gymnast a numerical score, there must be objectivity. in hockey, soccer - all goals are worth the same regardless of how much style they have. in basketball, �easy� shots are 2 points and �hard� shots are 3, regardless of whether they�re jumpshots or layups, half-court or right at the 3point line.
Gymnastics has tried to mimic this with the dichotomous d- and e-scores. but ultimately we cannot be like that because our athletes don�t just complete, they perform. as an american, I argue that Simone Biles is artistic because her gymnastics performance is a reflection of her, like painting reflects its painter or a composition reflects its composer. you see it in the way she quirks her hips or throws her shoulders back or directs her line of vision, not just in her flips and jumps. It�s what makes her difficult gymnastics different than say, Aly Raisman�s difficult gymnastics; it�s a difference not just in toe-point and leap-extension but in the ability to draw people in. I feel Aly�s lack of artistry gave her zero cushion in her scores today (especially on BB�), where as oppositely her unique big tricks gave her cushion room in 2012.
my current favorite american floor routine actually belongs to Bailie Key, one of our non-travelling alternates to worlds. in 2015 she�s struggled some with skills due to a growth spurt, but her floor artistry is loads better. I can tell that she has dedicated a lot of time into how she can best use her body and her strengths to tell the story of her routine. if you haven�t seen it yet, there are several online videos of her on FX this past summer, and I�d love to know your opinion. another american i�d like to know your opinion of is Brenna Dowell (she competed on floor today without her music), who just finished the 2014-2015 year competing on the american university level. it�s a whole different environment for gymnasts, with lower difficulty but many more contests/performances. she�s back on the elite stage now with nothing to lose, and I�d love an outsider�s before/after opinion.
I won't pretend to know as much about gymnasts from countries other than my own, but some of my recent favorites are vika komova (i thought for sure she was going to win AA in 2012, watching rotation by rotation...), jessica lopez of VEN, several JPN gymnasts, and i'm totally in love with this new crop of NED ladies. if russia and romania represent the "old guard" of artistry, i tend to prefer romania - no offense to you - simply because they seem to have more variety, at least among the girls chosen for worlds/olympics/etc. this is just my opinion watching the competitions, the finalized versions of each routine, not knowing their stories or how they individually approach gymnastics.'
I would just like to add my own take to this -
Objectivity is not the same as fairness. Objectivity is a philosophical stance, a way of seeing the world that involves measurement and calculation. Fairness is a state of making judgements that are even-handed and free of bias.
It is important to understand objectivity if we want to adopt it in any methodology. I am simplifying here but want to try to make this clear. Objectivity takes the position of viewing the world from a distance, as if individual phenomena can be observed as a separate entity from other phenomena and from the person doing the observation. It assumes that phenomena can be MEASURED and CALCULATED. Objectivity seeks to identify the phenomenon in detail according to existing knowledge and is dependent on a set of assumptions we call a 'paradigm'. These assumptions are critical because they are the basis of the objective view of the world and if they are off, can lead to continued misconceptions and a skewing of the vision and measurements. So for example if our paradigm (assumptions) is that the world is flat and we want to calculate how to travel from one side of the world to another, we would have to take into account the possibility that at some point we would fall off the edge of the world. If we assume (it is our paradigm) that the world is round, then we can calculate our distance in a straight continuous line.
Since the early 1990s the FIG has repeatedly emphasised their opinion about the importance of objectivity to fair judging, but WITHOUT STATING THE ASSUMPTIONS or making clear its world view/paradigm of gymnastics. A fair description of what was the intended meaning of 'artistry' appeared in the Code of Points as recently as 1989 but at some point was removed without discussion or debate and was never replaced with anything else. There has never, to my knowledge, been a clear statement of what the FIG believe the sport is, nor of the assumptions behind the decision to pursue a stance of objectivity in the marking. I believe that the FIG blithely uses the term 'objectivity' as a synonym for 'fairness' without really considering the implications, or operationalising the Code in a way that is consistent with its world view, assumptions or paradigm of gymnastics. I also think they would find it very hard to articulate their paradigm without conducting some significant research amongst their members or at the very least undertaking a thorough literature review.
As you mention, gymnastics' identity has always been fraught with creative tension and it changes all the time - that is why we have so many different forms and sub-forms of the sport. At present though, women's artistic gymnastics is being torn apart in various ways by the many forces to which it is subjected (too much to write now but there are whole fields of thought involved and while this era isn't yet provoking a rich vein of literature, hopefully it will soon and not just me).
At the end of the day, are people happy with the way the sport looks? Is the competitive field deep and rich and diverse? (I know it is internationally, but I mean in terms of the gymnastics - look at the floor final for a start.) I understand why fans are delighted to see the artistic presentation of the NED and BEL teams - they are making strides forward - but get real - they finished in 8th and 11th respectively as teams - this is hardly likely to transform the sport.
Finally, you make a fair point about the relative measurability of hockey and football compared to gymnastics and the idea that the aesthetic doesn't really count there. The big question is - do we think the aesthetic counts in gymnastics at all? Your point therefore is really about deciding our chosen paradigm of gymnastics. If we don't want it to be artistic, it doesn't have to be ... But then isn't that another sport? Do we want acrobatic gymnastics to replace artistic gymnastics at the Olympics? We really have to think about this!
