A sequel!

Actually, that exclamation mark is a little too enthusiastic for these purposes.

A sequel. There, that feels more appropriate. It better encapsulates the split jump + sissone mood that I’m going for here.

Following the same procedure as for bars frequency, the following tables show the frequency with which skills were performed on balance beam at 2012 Visa Championships (% of total routines featuring the skill). This time, I did not limit to C skills because then how would we discuss turns and dance combinations? Instead, I included all skills except back handsprings, front handsprings, and round-offs.

When counting the elements, I credited the skill attempted rather than the skill that would actually have been awarded by a judge with eyes since this is about intended composition choices. Determining the skill attempted was a burden sometimes because . . . these switch rings, you guys. (Why would a coach include a never-getting-credit-in-this-universe switch ring and a switch split in the same routine? The switch ring is always going to be downgraded, so the switch split becomes a repeated skill. It happened a lot.)  

Skills are divided by type and sorted by the frequency of their appearances in senior routines. The junior routines and total frequency throughout all 45 routines (22 senior, 23 junior) are also included for the sake of comparison.

Much like the bail handstand+stalder shoot on bars, the free walkover and layout stepout dominate the acrobatic proceedings because of the gold mine that was the D+B+C combination for .2 CV, which was probably the silliest part of the 2006-2012 codes. When a code regulation is imposed, routines will always descend to the least challenging or least creative denominator in order to fulfill the requirement with minimum risk (which is why broad and vague is preferable to specific when it comes to the code – when a regulation is too specific, the solutions will always be identical). D+B+C and free walkover+bhs+loso was by such a large margin the easiest way to receive .2 CV that no other combination stood a chance.

That is why, as of now, I am happy with the series bonus rule on beam because it creates more parity across combinations. No combination is valued so high with respect to its difficulty that it shuts out all other combinations the way D+B+C used to. The series bonus is a broader way of awarding CV and allows for more composition solutions. Let’s just hope this one doesn’t descend to some heretofore unimagined least creative denominator as well.

In spite of the new (and welcome) focus on rebounding connections, I still expect the free walkover to reign supreme over the next four years because it is a solid D acro that nearly everyone at this level can do and because the D acro + A dance combination will help it retain combination worth.

Because of that D+B+C combo, we nearly reached 100% of juniors performing the layout stepout, but plans were foiled by Ohashi and Desch and their infernal layout 1/1s, allowing them to eschew the layout stepout. What, just because you can do an amazingly difficult skill you think you’re too good for a layout stepout? People these days.

In other news, that side somi percentage is too high for anyone’s liking, and the onodi percentage is far too low. Interestingly, a significant gap emerged between the seniors and juniors in performing back pikes. Many seniors threw them after switch splits for the C+C connection, while juniors favored back tucks or did not attempt that kind of combination. It’s probably another instance of juniors not being as focused on squeezing as many CV tenths out of the code.

Oh, the dance combination requirement. Where would the sissone be without you? Few incorporated counting dance elements into their combinations, with most favoring A+A instead, but the ones who did received a demure smile from me, which is worth more than a gold medal.

I’m slightly surprised by the relatively low number of wolf jumps. In my mind, they were in every routine. Maybe I was just being prescient because the D acro + A dance combination for this year is asking for a ton of wolf jumps again.

Instead of the split jump + wolf jump, the most popular way to fulfill the dance element combo requirement by far was the split jump + sissone. By the way, negative one million percent of gymnasts hit 180 in their sissones.

BORED!

(To clarify, sitting on the beam like a lump of nothing encompasses everything in the squat through to rear support and flank to rear support families, all the “Are you actually doing anything besides personifying mental anguish?” mounts.)

(Also, rear support. I’m four.)

See the note about the least creative denominator above and apply it to the full turn. Why do something risky when you can fulfill the requirement by not doing that? Once US gymnasts woke up to the existence of the C+A turning connection around mid 2011, that helped save the L turn a bit. In the 2008 code, when the turn had to count, we saw L turns in nearly every routine. Now they’re almost exclusively performed as part of L turn+full turn combinations for .1 CV.

The double pike was the favorite of the seniors, many using the B+B+E combination for .2, while the 2.5 was the clear favorite of the juniors. I’d love to argue for more variety in dismounts, but . . . what dismounts? Double fronts have gone to pasture because they don’t allow for CV, and most everything else has difficulty that is too low to be impressive or too high to be performed in an aesthetically pleasing way.

The homogenization of routines. It happens throughout gymnastics at all levels, but one of the most compelling criticisms of the current elite code is that it has accelerated and broadened this process, leading to routine after routine featuring the same few skills.

The changes to the current code should, in theory at least, be made with an eye toward keeping routines new and exciting and discouraging that which has become flat cliché. So, what has become the flattest and clichédediest? Let’s take a look. 

The following chart shows the frequency with which each uneven bars skill appeared in American routines during the 2012 Visa Championships. It includes only skills of C difficulty or more (to dispense with the likes of Giant – 100%) with the exception of the toe shoot to high bar because I am specifically interested in the frequency of the low-to-high transitions that we have (all negative three of them).

Skills are listed according to the percent of routines in which they appeared in the competition and are sorted by the frequency of their appearances in senior routines. The junior routines and total frequency throughout all 44 routines (21 senior, 23 junior) are also included for the sake of comparison.

The chart includes all skills performed more than once in either the junior or senior division. The following skills appeared in one routine in either or both sessions:

Stalder circle forward
Toe-on circle forward 1/2
Giant 1.5
Clear hip full
Ono
Ono 1/2
Rybalko
Weiler kip
Markelov
Tkatchev 1/2
Toe-on Tkatchev
Clear hip Shaposhnikova
Piked stalder shoot to high bar

• Note that the nemesis of all that is joyful in the world, the bail handstand + stalder shoot combination for .1 CV, certainly makes its mark on the table. Score one check mark for the new code for eliminating the value of that D+C combination in 2013, at least for high-to-low flight. [Pipe dream] This will result in the immediate and severe reduction of stalder shoots with respect to other possible low-to-high transitions [/Pipe dream]. [Reality] The US will continue performing worthless bail + stalder shoot combinations until 2014 Worlds, after which they will copy the smarter composition of a lesser country [/Reality]. 

• Even though the bail and the stalder shoot were the two most common skills in both the junior and senior divisions, I actually thought the numbers would be higher. They would have been higher earlier in the quad, but enough people had become wise to the Shaposh 1/2 treasure trove of CV that not every single person was using the stalder shoot anymore. Just two-thirds. 

• CV is also the prime culprit for the frequency of the toe full, which appears just as often as the bail in the senior ranks. The skill would often appear on the low bar right before a Shaposh 1/2 for .2 CV. Now that both elements would need flight to achieve the .2, we may see a slight decline in the prevalence of the skill, but since it’s still a solid D element that can get .1 for any number of combinations, it should still remain fairly common. Instead of the toe full + Shaposh 1/2 combinations, though, we will see many more attempts at Pak + Shaposh 1/2 to try for the .2 connection. 

• I’m pleased that the code is trying somewhat to suppress the routines with hyper pirouetting by forcing more flight in connections, but I never had a problem with the D+E (one element with flight) combination receiving .2 CV. The ideal routine shows proficiency in both turning and flight elements, so it seems that something like a toe full + piked Tkatchev combination is exactly the kind of thing that we should be encouraging because it shows true mastery of several facets of bars in the same connection. That the combination is now .1 instead of .2 seems unnecessary to me. 

For easy reference, here is the same information broken down by skill type:

• Let’s talk about this last area and how there are only two skills in it. Believe it or not, there are more transitions from high bar to low bar in the world (but not that many). The tyranny of connection value has made them all but disappear. The bail wins, but several gymnasts do show both in the same routine.  

• One person in the whole competition did a clear hip Shaposh. Everyone else did toe-ons. Interesting.

• I sorted the table by seniors because that gives the truest picture of how the code was being used by people who were truly trying to use it. Unsurprisingly, the junior routines feature simpler skills, more C circle elements without turning and fewer D pirouettes, Shaposhes (Shaposhi?), and E same-bar releases. Many of the juniors, especially on bars, are given routines that are much more concerned with simply getting 8 skills and the requirements into a hit performance. Using the code and exploiting CV to its best effect are the least of their concerns. This is a major reason for the senior difference between the stalder shoot and toe shoot (67% to 19%) being so much larger than the junior difference (69% to 60%). The seniors don’t have interest in throwing in some B element. Many more juniors also start on the low bar and do both in the routine, while that is very rare for seniors.  

Once the 2013 season has ended, it will be interesting to do this for the routines from this year and view the effectiveness of the code changes for this quad through the prism of skill frequency.

The official motto of the American gymternet is Illos numeros inter gentes numquam accipiet. (She’ll never receive those scores internationally.)

Over the years, we’ve all seen any number of hilarious scores showered upon US gymnasts at domestic competitions, and this storied history of ridiculing hyper-American judging has cultivated the widespread assumption that less biased international judges would never succumb to such silliness.

At times in the past, this has been the case, but in the last few years, the international judges have seemed willing to evaluate the execution of routines with that we would normally consider an American lens. Has the “she will never receive those scores internationally” argument become a knee-jerk response to perceived overscoring without a strong correlation to fact? Will she probably receive those scores internationally as well?

Those are my questions, at least. So, as a way of reintroducing myself to the elite world, which at this point has been [scene missing] ever since the Olympics, I compared the execution scores given to the US team members in 2011 and 2012 at Classic/Championships/Trials with the scores they would later receive at Worlds/Olympics. (I went back no further than 2011 because I don’t have the D/E breakdown for 2010 TF and AA and 2009 AA.) I threw out routines with falls and major mistakes, since they would skew the execution score in a misleading direction. This is about the evaluation of essentially equivalent routines, not comparing falls to hits. Certainly, there are differences in the actual quality of all routines (a wobble or two here, no wobbles there), but those issues should even out between the two sets of competitions, providing an overall reliable sense of how the judges are evaluating American performances.

At Worlds in 2011, things were fairly regular and predictable over the four events with the average US execution scores falling somewhere between a tenth to a tenth and a half lower than the scores received domestically for hit routines. It’s a significant but not overwhelming or decisive difference. At the Olympics, things got a little funkier. The execution scores on bars were significantly lower than what was received at Championships and Trials (three or four tenths), and the floor scores were somewhat lower as well (more in line with what we saw in 2011). However, the beam execution scores were quite constant throughout all competitions, and the vault scores were much higher at the Olympics than in the US. The outlying increase in numbers on vault in 2012 can, at least in part, be attributed to legitimate improvement in execution leading up to the Olympics from the likes of Douglas and Raisman, whose Y2.5s were far stronger by that point.

I would contend, though, that on a number of occasions the vault scoring at the Olympics went a little Florida @ Utah. 9.400? 

That’s my shallow overall impression of the numbers. There is enough of a difference between domestic and international scoring to remain significant, but it is not dramatic and can easily be overstated. In almost all cases recently (and we’ll get to that almost in a moment), the overall execution scores received in the US have not been outside a believable range with the international scores. If we go back to 2009, the Worlds infamous for harsher execution scoring, the difference would have been greater, but in the years since, the scores have adjusted to a more forgiving place.

While those are the larger trends, they are far from consistent from gymnast to gymnast, and that’s where things get interesting. The average difference in 2011 may have rested in that 1-2 tenth range, but some were consistently on the low end (or below the range) while others were always over the range. This in and of itself is not necessarily surprising, but I would have assumed that the difference would be greater for gymnasts with more questionable form issues, ones that might be ignored domestically and caught internationally. Translation: I thought it would be Aly Raisman.

Raisman received more “she’ll never get those scores internationally” comments than any other gymnast of the quad, and yet of everyone, she was the gymnast least susceptible to knock-down execution scores at Worlds/Olympics. She did get those scores internationally, and she got them every single time. The justification of those scores is another question, but they happened. Raisman’s execution scores were almost always within a tenth either way. Her worst differential was on vault in 2011, where her US execution average was +.125 over her World average (if we throw out the Amanar attempt from Classic, which is not comparable to the execution scores for her DTYs at Worlds – if we put it back in, her Worlds average is better). On floor in 2011 and vault in 2012, her international averages were far stronger than her domestic ones. Even on her much-maligned bars routine, there was no appreciable difference between US and international evaluation. The international judges felt pretty good about her bars work.

8.200

While Aly Raisman was a steady little tugboat, Jordyn Wieber was quite the opposite. On both the 2011 and 2012 teams, she had by far the most disparate execution scores. If Raisman’s difference rarely reached above a tenth, Wieber’s difference rarely reached below two tenths and was usually greater than that. It was upwards of five tenths on both bars and floor in 2012 (where Raisman was closer to one and Douglas was closer to two). Even on vault in 2012, the scoring jackpot, her increase was the smallest on the team (along with Maroney’s, which I would account more to hitting a ceiling and having nowhere higher to go). Over two years of senior (major) international competition on bars, Wieber received consistent E scores between 8.700-9.000 at home and never broke 8.500 internationally. On floor, she was almost always 9.000 or greater at home yet only once reached that plateau on the big stage (for that rather strong 2012 TF floor routine, which still scored significantly lower in execution than all her domestic routines in the lead up to the Olympics, which didn’t go below 9.150).

9.400

The only event where Wieber’s execution evaluation was fairly constant was beam, but I would certainly make the argument that home scoring did her the greatest disservice on beam in 2012 by pretending that her 6.3 composition existed in a real world. Home scoring with regard to D score is certainly an issue, but it comes into play less frequently. D score issues have not usually had the kind of significant impact they had with Wieber.

So, what do we make of this? As with all quantitative assessments, it should exist alongside qualitative assessments. An argument can certainly be made that Wieber peaked early and simply showed better gymnastics domestically, accounting for the major difference in scores. That is absolutely part of it, but does that account for the whole difference? In 2011, the bars difference was three tenths even when throwing out the routines with mistakes like the AA performance, and the evidence of 2012 FX seems to show that even strong international performances were never going to match the domestic scores. That just didn’t happen to the same degree with the rest of the team, particularly Raisman. It wasn’t a whole-country thing. It wasn’t even a just-the-famous-ones thing. 

These last few years, it appears that home scoring is alive and, while maybe a little bit more feeble than it used to be, still kicking. However, “she’ll never receive those scores internationally” needs to be tempered as a credo because it lately amounts to only a tenth or two of difference for most gymnasts rather than a dramatic break that blows up potential scoring and because it is far from consistent, even among the various chosen ones. It has been quite person-specific.

Two years is an admittedly small sample, but let’s keep an eye on it in 2013.