Welcome to the most interest you’ve ever had in the Pan American Games! The competition begins tomorrow (Saturday), with the session-by-session schedule found below.
For US viewers, every session will be streamed on ESPN3 in Spanish, so you should be able to watch every moment. There will also be some TV broadcasts (i.e., the US women’s team session on Saturday is slated to be included in the ESPN2 window), though the TV coverage windows are listed as multi-sport, so you might want to have the web coverage on standby just in case. The TV coverage will have Bart and Kathy on the call, and here’s a live shot of me learning about that just yesterday.
July 27
4:00pm ET/1:00pm PT – Women’s Qualification/TF Subdivision 1 –
Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Jamaica, Dom Rep, Cayman Is
6:20pm ET/3:20pm PT – Women’s Qualification/TF Subdivision 2 – Chile, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, Guatemala, Venezuela, Panama
9:30pm ET/6:30pm PT – Women’s Qualification/TF Subdivision 3 –
USA, Brazil, Peru, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Uruguay, Bolivia
July 28
5:30pm ET/2:30pm PT – Men’s Qualification/TF Subdivision 1 – Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Ecuador, Dom Rep, Uruguay, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Bolivia
9:30pm ET/6:30pm PT – Men’s Qualification/TF Subdivision 2 – USA, Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, Peru, Jamaica, T & T, Costa Rica
July 29
2:00pm ET/11:00am PT – Women’s All-Around Final
7:00pm ET/4:00pm PT – Men’s All-Around Final
July 30
2:00pm ET/11:00am PT – Event Finals Day 1
July 31
2:00pm ET/11:00am PT – Event Finals Day 2
In the women’s team competition, expect the US to take the gold medal, nothing new there. Canada is sending an exceptionally strong team that could have made a legitimate run at gold if this were one of the years (like, every other time) when the US sent a fully B-squad group to the Pan American competition. But with the near-A-team level of the US squad this year, it’s unlikely that they can be caught by the Canadians, especially a Canadian team that will now be without Ana Padurariu because the world is stupid and I hate everything. Padurariu has been replaced by Isabela Onyshko, who can of course do the job but not with the bars and beam scores we expect of Padurariu.
For reference, if we do a “domestic scoring” comparison between the US Classic and Canadian Nationals (caveat, that was in May), this US group would go 173.300 compared to the Canadian team at 167.665, so the US should have some margin for error. Continue reading Pan American Games Preview