A. Jake Dalton retires

Jake Dalton Toe Point™ has pointed its last toe. Pour out a comically large bicep. Or something. I don’t know how this works.

The bam-bam-grrr events tended to be his things, but I was always partial to parallel bars.

Year in and year out, Dalton made teams to compete the power events during an era in which he had plenty of competition for those spots. Vault/floor gymnasts like Legendre, Ruggeri, and more recently Whittenburg probably can’t count how many teams they didn’t make because their strengths overlapped too much with Dalton’s and Dalton was already a lock for the team. His execution and relative consistency allowed him to rise above the rest.

B. P&G Championship rosters

I was going to do a post about the women’s roster for nationals upon release, but it was boring so I didn’t.

The senior women’s field will be comprised of everyone who competed at Classic except Laney Madsen, who did not get her qualifying score. Victoria Nguyen is also slated to compete after pulling out of Classic with injury, and Sydney Johnson-Scharpf will appear at nationals after having her petition approved. (She was sick at Classic and also technically got the necessary qualifying score at Cracky-Scoring Iceland Meet. It just wasn’t a national team assignment and therefore didn’t count for her qualification needs.)

Several gymnasts also managed to achieve only two- or three-event qualifying scores at the classic meets, so while they were allowed to compete the AA at US Classic, they can compete only on those specific events at nationals. Here are the event scratches in spreadsheet format because of course I did.

On the junior side, the field is much smaller than it was at classic because of the somewhat harsh qualifying standard (only harsh in that scores from elite qualifiers cannot be used to qualify to nationals—the qualifying score must come from the ranch, an assignment, or a classic meet). It’s a necessary harshness, though, because otherwise the nationals field would just be too large. We still have 31 juniors making it in as is.

Sadly, Madelyn Williams—the winner of the Faux-gines Prize for Elegance from US Classic that I just awarded—is not among them as she has pulled out of nationals. Continue reading Things Are Happening – August 11, 2017 →