World Championships

Just the Good Stuff: Event Finals Day 1

29 Comments

What you need to know, in quick, easily digestible bullet points.

Men’s floor

  • Kenzo didn’t win!?!
  • Kenzo had superior difficulty, but he was outpaced by AA gold medalist Dalaloyan by the slightest margin because of execution
  • The winner might actually have been Nagornyy, who was perfect through nearly the entirety of his exceptionally difficult routine, but he botched his last pass for probably .600 in landing deductions—1st to 5th
  • Moldauer was fantabulous in the first position, recording the highest execution score of the final, but simply didn’t have the difficulty to challenge the medalists and finished 4th
  • Sam Mikulak ended up with the lowest difficulty score in the final but hit mostly cleanly for 7th
  • CARLOS YULO, our new favorite Filipino hummingbird, took bronze, the first medal ever for the Philippines.

Women’s vault

  • Simone’s Cheng was not her best possible Cheng, once again not getting the SIMONE block we expect, but it mattered exactly 0%
  • Even with the short landing, her Cheng was the second-best vault of the final, behind only her Amanar
  • So yeah, Simone won vault
  • Alexa Moreno took bronze! Her Rudi and Tsuk 2/1 showed the second-best execution of the final, enough for Mexico’s first ever WAG medal
  • Remember all that drama about her being body-shamed on twitter during the Olympics?
  • Make them eat your medal with a side of psssssh
  • Shallon Olsen took silver, the only other vaulter to show a 6.0 D
  • …Her DTY was nice
  • Chuso attempted to upgrade to the rudi, which was successful, but her landings were not secure enough to get her into the medals—4th place for Chuso
  • Yeo Seojeong factored as a legitimate medal contender coming in, but she landed her DTY short and didn’t have the E to move any higher than 5th
  • Ellie Black was among the cleaner participants, though her handspring full landing was shorter than she would have liked with a hop back, but with the lowest D of the final, she placed 7th
  • Pyon Rye Yong did the Splatmanar. We’re not super surprised

Men’s pommel horse

  • Ties! Ties! Ties for everyone!
  • At least in event finals, we use a sensible tie-breaking method, the execution score
  • This gave the gold medal to Xiao Ruoteng over Max Whitlock
  • So actually never mind, this tie-breaking procedure is a stupid butt
  • It should be based on who’s Whitlockiest
  • Hooray for Lee Chih-Kai!
  • It’s a bronze medal for everyone’s favorite flare monster, who does pommel horse properly because of nothing-but-flares (and I refuse to write “flair”—just because the people who invented the skill were illiterate doesn’t mean we should be).
  • Sam Mikulak produced the lone hit routine that did not earn a medal, placing a heartbreaking 4th despite a clean effort
  • Mikulak did not get awarded the full difficulty he received in any of the other segments of the competition, though even if he did it doesn’t look like it would have changed anything because the medalists still had more difficulty than his peak routine
  • Falls from Tommasone, Nagornyy and Cupping Addiction took all three of them out of contention, while Belyavskiy stayed on the horse for a whirling FML, which garnered a score equivalent to a fall

Women’s uneven bars

  • Nina things
  • It seemed clear that if Nina hit bars, she would win gold, and that’s exactly what happened, with both the highest D score and highest E score of the competition
  • Basically, the last year and a half has been building to Nina being crowned the best bars worker in the world
  • With a silver medal, Simone has now completed the gym slam, with a worlds medal on every event
  • These two medals today bring her worlds total up to 18 (2nd all-time) and her worlds/Olympic total up to 23 (3rd all-time)
  • Also significant was Elisabeth Seitz getting her medal on bars—finally a bronze after appearing in eleventy-hundred of these finals dating back to the dawn of time
  • Meanwhile, an inconceivable miscarriage of justice placed Aliya Mustafina in 5th, and I for one would like a full investigation
  • Morgan Hurd didn’t quite have the dismount today to get into the medals, placing 6th, but on the bars themselves it was her crispest routine of the entire competition
  • Exactly the same goes for Luo Huan, but she was able to take 4th
  • Jonna Adlerteg fell, and that’s all that happened in this final
  • No one else competed
  • I don’t know what you’re talking about
  • Everything is cupcakes and rainbows
  • No grief comas at all

Men’s rings

  • And, like, rings was a thing
  • Bebop and Rocksteady took first and second place, as expected, Petrounias with just a little more difficulty and smoothness than Zanetti to edge his rival for gold
  • My new theory is that Petrounias’ alleged shoulder injury is just a clever ruse
  • Bronze went to Marco Lodadio for his 6.3 routine, and everyone else hit pretty well except Igor whose neck tattoo yelled, “FEED ME” in the middle of a handstand, distracting him for his dismount

29 thoughts on “Just the Good Stuff: Event Finals Day 1”

  1. can’t wait for balance beam EF tomorrow. super excited to see what it will be like…. Kara, Simone, Sanne…. can’t get any better….

    FX will just be completely anticlimatic.. We already know what gold and silver will be unless there’s a disaster somewhere, which i think is unlikely to happen..

    So i guess the only thing to look forward to is beam tomorrow.

  3. Floor will not be anti-climatic! Sure, Biles and Murakami are favored, but Simone is dealing with her pearl, and Murakami isn’t completely untouchable like Biles is when she hits.
    On top of that, bronze will be a great battle! Saraiva, Melnikova, Hurd, DJDS, and Akhaimova can score similarly, so YAY FIGHT IT OUT LADIES!
    Moors is a treat to watch so go Brooklyn!

    1. Agree, I don’t think Mai is untouchable at all. I’d favor her to be on the podium somewhere, just because she’s the most consistent, but I will expect Hurd, Saraiva, DJDS, and Melnikova to jostle for the podium as well. Silver and bronze will, again, be very tight. Mai will do herself a favor if she can hit that quad turn. I’m personally hoping Flavia sneaks in there… 🙂

    2. Moors for silver on FX to match Olson’s silver on vault and if Black (I think she’s qualified) can medal on beam it would be a great Worlds for Canada.

      1. Melnikova leaving Doha with no individual medals after all that crap she dealt with last year to be where she is this year? That would be complete injustice.

  4. God I love event finals. Now this was a thrilling day of competition! Just PISSED that Olympic Channel cut off the recording and I didn’t see the rest of the Still Rings. Usually my least favorite event, but this one was compelling… until it cut off. Boo. Also Nastia Liukin has become a great commentator now that she’s so honest, and I think it is Terry Gannon who has made her feel so much more comfortable than that creep Al.

    1. YESSSS, I love that. I used to think she was kind of a meh commentator, but actually she is ONE OF US and I love it. Terry Gannon is a HUGE improvement over Trautwig, and he handles Tim Daggett’s more irritating comments well.

    2. Did you watch live? I watched on the Olympic channel and it showed all routines. It went long, but I always set my dvr to record for an extra 30 minutes on live events. It’s not the OC’s fault the competition went over time and I was pleased they showed every athlete.

      1. I wasn’t really that pissed. This is a snarky blog, I was being snarky….

    3. I am *loving* Gannon’s commentary. I’ve especially been noticing how much more relaxed I’ve been watching, watching and enjoying the gymnastics and not cringing at Al’s inanities. Tim has improved as well, whether unconsciously or by design.

  5. I’m really impressed that Xiao raised his D score on pommel horse by 0.5 from QF to EF.

    I wish we see EF upgrades successfully done more often in WAG. Becky 🙁

    1. Yessssss, finally someone noticed that.
      This is the first time I saw him perform to such potential, he did 6.4 last year (without the flairs) and 6.3 this year (minus busnari). Hope one day he could add these difficulties to his all around routines tho.

  6. I’m struggling to figure out where they found the E score deductions on Aliya. Her handstands were all so handstand. I thought her routine was amazing.

    1. Despite her always 4th/5th sadness, I would’ve placed her over Seitz. Possibly challenging Simone. That deserved a 9 E score if I’ve ever seen one.

  7. Loved how rock solid Morgan has been on bars this worlds. Would love for her to add some big upgrades and really become a standout here. Seems like the capability is there to do a more difficult routine.

    1. yeah, i think the US can definitely maintain this TF lead in bars which they have now done for two TF in a row…. I mean it’s still going to be an uphill thing for the US to win the bars EF gold, but being able to maintain #1 bars in TF as well as getting two people into the EF for us is definitely not out of question anymore.

  8. Day 2 of EF is coming. Oleg! Oleg! Oleg! All I want is a PB medal for Oleg–preferably the gold one. And for Sam to hit HB.

  9. Just want to give a shoutout to Sam for his sportsmanship. This impresses me every time I see him compete. No one, not even the amazing Kenzo Shirai, is as positive as Sam is on the competition floor. He has been disappointed so. many. times. but always has a smile and a sincere congratulations for his competitors. He’s always cheering for his rivals, even if he knows that a hit from them will knock him off the podium.

    Above all, I hope American gymnastics, both MAG and WAG, becomes known for this – positivity, enthusiasm, respect. Sam really embodies this and I wish there were a sportsmanship award because he would win the damn thing every time.

    Kenzo mentioned after TF how much fun it was to rotate with the Americans because they cheered for everyone. I’m an American and it made me so proud of US MAG. Way to go Sam and the guys.

    1. There isn’t a sportsmanship award yet, but I would say it qualifies as elegance. A-hem. Longines.

    2. What you’ve described is precisely why I want him to hit and get a medal. He’s so endearing.

  10. Will USA MAG ever try to increase difficulty? Sam and Yul would have likely medaled had they increased their D scores. This seems to be a theme with the men’s team. I keep thinking the difficulty will be there next year and then next year rolls around, and it’s more of the same.

  11. My top 3 takeaways going into the last day of this worlds (which I will not be able to watch live):

    1. Holy mother of somebody we need better E score separation. It’s not that they are systematically too high or systematically too low, it’s that being 5 degrees off in a handstand is different than 10 degrees, a 6″ step is different from a 2′ one, and perfectly executed gymnastics with a step on the landing should score higher than messy, scary gymnastics with a stuck landing. I’m actually pretty happy with how D scores are working this quad. E scores are problematic.

    2. Women’s vault is really disappointing this quad. I sort of expected someone to show up with a really clean YTD/rudi combo or similar, and there was, at best, one in the whole competition. Every other event seems to have many examples of difficult clean gymnastics – except women’s vault.

    3. With one day to go I am aware of 0 meet-ending injuries. This is frickin amazing, makes me so happy, and I want to figure out what caused this and get it to happen every year. This has made Worlds so much better than any major meet in recent memory, at least to me.

    Yay!

    1. 1 i noticed a lot of gymnasts make no effort to land with feet far apart (both mag and wag), when they do that the chance of a stick is bigger, but it is very ugly. I wish there would be more deduction than those who actually land with feet together but somehow have some adjustments.

      3 People complained about the quality of Taishan apparatus, but it turned out that there was much less injuries than last year. The only victim seemed to be Kenzo Shirai though, since he was one of few people who couldn’t perform to full difficulty.

    2. I think the issue with women’s vault is two fold. First, team and AA don’t require two vaults so fewer train them. Men have six events so you can be a two or three event guy and still make teams (or you could until the 2020 Olympics, man does the four person team screw over male specialists), whereas that is much harder to do in women’s, especially in countries with a smaller pool of talent. Second, because the overall pool of athletes competing two vaults is smaller in women’s gymnastics you get more gymnasts who aren’t competitive in terms of teams or AA trying for the spots by being a vault medalist and those programs have less funding, less expert coaching, equipment etc.

  12. The bars final that never was will be told of in song for generations in the UK. Two of the best bars workers in the world came, saw and…
    There’s always next year.

  13. The saga of the bars final that wasn’t will be told for many generations in the UK. Two of the gymnasts with the most difficulty in the world, came, saw and…
    There is always next year.

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