What you need to know, in quick, easily digestible bullet points.
- So here’s the thing about tiebreaks
- I like them
- The goal is to decide who was the best one, so if you need a tiebreak procedure to do that, then do a tiebreak
- Everyone is most certainly not a winner
- I mean, have you seen people?
- BUT: the stupid-ass “drop the lowest score” all-around tiebreak that we became familiar with during the women’s AA final in London is just the worst possible tiebreak you could come up with
- It basically means that the person with the single worst routine is the winner
- How is that a thing?
- So, as you might have guessed, we had a tie
- Artur Dalaloyan and Xiao Ruoteng tied for first place, but since Dalaloyan’s pommel horse was the weakest event score between the two, he was the gold medalist
- ……….?
- Is this a satire?
- If they had used a sensible tiebreak, like highest cumulative E score, Dalaloyan still would have won, but that’s not the tiebreak they used. They used a stupid one, and it must be destroyed
- In “fight me” news: It shouldn’t have come down to a tiebreak in the first place because Dalaloyan was the better gymnast on the day
- He did the most fantastic double front pike vault and potentially even more fantastic PBars routine, and even looked good on his bad events, like pommel horse
- He had no mistakes
- Just…none
- Xiao had things, like struggling on his randi on floor again
- Really, the routine quality was quite exceptional from that lead group
- It could have been a splatfest (especially given the cast of characters and their histories), and it wasn’t. Mostly.
- Samuel
- We need to talk about Samuel
- Samuel was having a strong day through five events, equivalent to his performance in qualification.
- He was in third place going to high bar
- THIRD
- TO HIGH BAR
- HIS GOOD ONE…?
- Then…you know…it happened…
- …on a Tkatchev 1/2
- So, anyway, Samuel finished 5th
- “This is the saddest I’ve ever been. I don’t think I’ve ever been this pissed off in my life.”
- Basically same
- Empty chairrrrrsssssssss…at empty tabllllleeeeeeeesssssss
- Tim Daggett was trying to make “he could have won gold” happen, but that wasn’t going to happen. He would have needed the kind of E score that no one has received on HB in the entire meet, multiple tenths better than his fantastic qualification routine
- With any kind of hit routine, however, he would have won bronze
- Instead, the miss allowed Nikita Nagornyy to take third place
- Nagornyy performed close to but not as well as he did on the first day (a leg-silly on pommel horse, just little landings here and there), and that would have put him in medal danger the way everyone else was competing, but Samuel had the much larger mistake
- Sun Wei actually ended up only a few tenths behind Nagornyy after a hit meet in what would have truly been an upset had he won a medal. Sun Wei!
- Oleg tried to make a sudden and remarkable Oleg happen and was leading the competition after three events, but he’s still not quite ready yet
- High bar was a catastrophe for him, culminating in a dismount fall, and then it all turned to mush from there on the final three pieces
- I think someone might need a new witch doctor
- Kenzo also participated in the top group, winning floor and vault (stuck TTY nbd), but he didn’t have the remaining event scores and ultimately took 7th, behind his compatriot Kazuma Kaya
- No Japanese medalists for the first time since 2001, when Japan didn’t even go
- Yul Moldauer took 12th, a fall on pommel horse dashing his hopes at a top-10 finish
- Favorite new hummingbird Carlos Yulo had the most disastrous day overall, but he did get the 4th-best score on floor
- Our two final qualifiers into the final—Marios Georgiou and Artur Davtyan (who got in as the first reserve) ended up finishing in 9th and 10th place. So there
