A. Ashton Locklear retired

From the world of US elites, Ashton Locklear announced her retirement yesterday after a long bout with the concept of having knees. Locklear last competed at the WOGA Classic in February on bars and beam—and at that point was also discussing the possibility of adding back floor—but she has now decided that enough is enough.

Locklear had a successful run, making two world championship teams in 2014 and 2017, advancing to two world bars finals, and winning team gold in 2014. In terms of future prospects, she has been constantly injured, and there wasn’t truly a realistic path to team selection for her at this point.

In announcing the retirement, her talent agency released a statement saying, “WE DEFINITELY KNOW WHERE COMMAS SHOULD GO.”

It also includes a doctor’s note (so that she can get out of PE, I think) and an explanation that her 2018 knee surgery has prevented her from continuing, even though she came back to…you know what, never mind. You can just retire. You don’t need a reason. You don’t need a doctor’s note. It doesn’t have to follow logically. You can just be done. It’s fine.

B. Zhaoqing World Cup

The World Challenge Cup circuit gets underway again in a couple days with the Zhaoqing event, which runs Sunday to Tuesday for some reason. Because the FIG is always so clear with its organization and naming of events, a little clarification. The World Challenge Cup events are completely different from the Apparatus World Cup series and have no bearing on Olympic qualification whatsoever. They’re just the normal apparatus events that we’ve had before. Continue reading Things Are Happening – May 17, 2019 →

A. The loser is everyone

Scott Reid at the OC Register has a bunch more information this week about the wildly typical and predictable barf-trench that was USAG’s attempted hiring of Edward Nyman as its first ever director of sports medicine and science.

The reason for Nyman’s firing—that nonspecific “conflict of interest” that USAG flopped out there—was, according to USAG, that he failed to disclose Safesport-related complaints or allegations of misconduct against New Heights Gymnastics, the gym owned by his wife Amy. The latest update of the article states that Safesport is also reviewing an issue of some description involving Nyman himself.

Um, so, yeah. Not great. I encourage you to read the complete article (and the full statement from Nyman that originally appeared in near-full in the article) because you’ll be left going “Who are these people?!?!” It may be the most #TeamNobody situation we’ve ever had to endure with USAG. And that’s saying quite a bit.

There’s a lot of back-and-forth between the two parties about who actually knew what, and disclosed which, and who lied when, and who is corrupt, and which accusations are true and false. I have no idea, I wasn’t in these meetings, but a few things are clear.

USAG has no excuse for the wild failure that was this attempted hiring. The lack of appropriate vetting and lack of any kind of intra-organizational communication betrays a continued inability to function at a basic minimum level of professionalism. Regardless of what Nyman may or may not have disclosed, USAG needed to be able to find out itself that this was a poor choice, especially because—as we’ve learned from Reid’s piece—USAG’s in-house counsel knew about the safety/training complaints regarding New Heights. USAG can blame Nyman, but that information is on USAG to know before it hired him.

As any competent organization would have. Nyman’s statement is full of personal agenda and should be taken with a bucket of salt—his categorical defense of New Heights against all claims because that would never happen can only provoke the question “how would you even know?”—but the picture he paints of USAG as a corrupt, disorganized, image-obsessed mess is nothing new.

As for Nyman, we don’t know what will come of these Safesport issues, if anything, but even their very existence is disqualifying. You can’t take a position of high-profile leadership at USAG when you are connected in any possible way to unresolved Safesport complaints, regardless of the ultimate findings. I mean, that should be obvious, right? Am I taking crazy pills? While USAG bungled this in every possible way, it did the right thing in terminating Nyman. It would have been far worse if we had learned this information later, after he had been on the job for a while.

Other thoughts:

• USAG cited his “poor judgment” in its explanation of Nyman’s firing, and viewing the bizarre caps lock decisions in Nyman’s own personal defense, I can’t argue. Fair assessment. Also, you know, the Safesport stuff and taking it upon himself to disclose the Stephanie Peters complaint against a men’s national team member to the press (which is a whole extra bag of huh??? we don’t know anything about yet)—but the caps lock, you guys. Intense Trumpy Lee Tracy vibes.
• One of the other things I can’t get past in that statement is the conversation between Amy Nyman and Mark Busby—the USAG lawyer—at Congress where he supposedly told her she had nothing to worry about with those complaints. Why on earth is a USAG lawyer making that determination, why is that being communicated in an informal conversation at Congress, and why is that informal conversation viewed as “I guess it’s fine now?” No. None of that. None of that is how it should work. See lack of professionalism above. Have you all learned nothing?
• Nyman says he was never owner nor co-owner of New Heights. I had said he was co-owner because of the BGSU press release from when he was hired there, which refers to him as a co-owner. So there’s that.
• A quote from John Manly in the article claims that Nyman was hired to replace That Guy at USAG. That’s not really accurate. The strategy is to try to draw a link between the two and USAG’s trashiness, but Nyman was hired to a non-treatment, administrative role. There’s no need to misrepresent what’s happening. The regular representation is bad enough for USAG.

B. Waller, Waller everywhere

OK fun stuff time now! After much speculation, Chris Waller has been hired to replace Miss Val as head coach at UCLA. It can’t be considered a surprise since he has been next in line for that job for seven hundred years and is supremely qualified for the position. He has put in the time. Still, you can’t help but notice that the hiring is rather un-UCLA in its even, predictable normalness. You half-expected Miss Val to pop out of a cake and be like, “The new coach is me!”

We’ll see how it goes. Despite the fact that Waller has been there for so long, being the face of the program is a very different position from what he has had before. He’s not simply going to be able to say, “let’s keep doing what we’ve been doing” because he’s not Val and can’t try to be. That will be a difficult tightrope because many will be waiting to say, “Ugh, it’s not the same” the second Waller goes out there and isn’t Val, and yet he can’t go out there and be Val because that would just be weird. He’s a different person who will have a different identity as head coach and will coach a team with a different culture. At the same time, I don’t expect there to be much of a leash or much forgiveness time if the team gets all blah (see Clark, Jay). He’s going to need to win and win quickly.

And now with enough of that chatter out of the way, here are some GIFs of Waller from those Reese’s Cups. You know, the important stuff.

The other big coaching news of the week concerns Utah hiring the McCools following their departure from…not getting the Arkansas job. Courtney will still be a volunteer assistant coach because of whatever nonsense that’s about, with Utah’s official coaching staff comprised of Tim Farden, Carly Dockendorf, and Garrett Griffith now. You’ll notice that Robert Ladanyi is nowhere to be found, but no official word yet on where he has ended up. Stay tuned.

Chris Swircek is also stepping back to a volunteer coach position at Stanford.

C. Chinese nationals

Women’s qualification concluded at Chinese Nationals today, with Liu Tingting leading the all-around standings, followed closely by Ou Yushan (junior), and Luo Huan.

Luo had an important day, placing third all-around and among the top-3 EF qualifiers on both bars and beam. I mentioned last week that she needed a result here to avoid looking superfluous. It’s still a tough road for Luo because she doesn’t have the vault and floor scores, but she did her job on her important events to stay in the main mix, especially with Chen Yile and Li Qi absent here.

LTT is in control of China (just…as a country) at this point, even advancing to the floor final in 2nd place with a 13.100. And, yes, the fact that 13.100 and a 4.7 D got into the floor final in 2nd place is still very much a cause for concern. Zhang Jin leads that event by a ton with 13.850, but no one else really got a score. Unfortunately, our great floor hope Qi Qi fell on an attempted double double tuck (that also didn’t look close in PT). She’s still going to be essential for floor, but that result was a bit disappointing. Qi Qi did, however, hit a very proficient DTY on vault, something the team needs.

Meanwhile, the project to turn world tumbling champion Jia Fangfang into a floor option continues as she did advance to the floor final with a Tingting-matching 13.100—and did it with less-than-ideal landings on a couple of those passes (but a definitely ideal landing on the FTDLO). The dance elements aren’t there and are probably never going to be there, but if she can fill in with enough tumbling difficulty, she can be a real option.

Liu Jinru did hit her DTT for a solidly high vault score, but with the presence of Qi Qi, you wonder if that alone is going to be enough for her to continue challenging for teams because the floor score was only in the 12s, despite advancing to the final.

Fan Yilin qualified in first place on bars of course, and Luo Youjuan made the beam final, so we’re going to be OK. This competition also brought Shang Chunsong back to us, and she advanced to the floor final with this routine.

In the junior department, Ou Yushan’s beam is life-changing, so if you’re looking to be totally over all the seniors and getting obsessed with a junior, here.

Just cursorily based on today, I’d probably want Liu Tingting, Zhang Jin, Fan Yilin, Qi Qi, and Luo Huan as a first-choice team of five—using a Yfull on vault rather than compromising elsewhere—but there’s still plenty of time to change that. I was hoping for a little more from Tang Xijing here. She did place 6th AA and did advance to the beam final, but not a totally convincing performance that I would put into a team of five right now.

D. GymCastic

Yep, it’s the Morgan Hurd/Heath Thorpe episode! You can listen here.