Welcome back, and on to event final season. We’ve got four today, starting with men’s floor, then women’s vault, then pommel horse, and then bars.
The current Simone update is that she has withdrawn from vault, bars, and floor, though we haven’t yet heard about beam. It’s possible that she might still compete that one and elect to do something less with no twisting as a dismount, but time will tell there.
The start orders are thus:
FLOOR
[2] Nagornyy
[4] Zapata
[6] Moldauer
[1] Dolgopyat
[5] Kim
[3] Ryu
[7] Xiao
[8] Karimi
It will be interesting to see whether Nagornyy elects to pull out a triple a push it with the opening routine. He was not far behind Dolgopyat in qualification with a 6.2 D, but “keep it safer for a medal” has never really been the way of the Russian men.
VAULT
[3] Skinner
[7] Moreno
[2] Andrade
[1] Carey
[4] Yeo
[5] Olsen
[6] Melnikova
[8] Akhaimova
We know that Carey and Skinner will be going for the Cheng and Amanar combo. The big strategic question will be whether Andrade elects to pull out the Amanar as well. Theoretically, her Cheng form should give her enough of an advantage that she wouldn’t need the Amanar, but the reality of the scoring in the all-around final may put the pressure on for her to do the 2.5 so she can match Carey and Skinner on difficulty.
HORSE
[5] Whitlock
[4] Yoder
[6] Sun
[8] Belyavskiy
[1] Lee
[7] Kaya
[2] McClenaghan
[2] Kameyama
Lee, McClenaghan, and Kameyama all tied in qualification on 15.266, with Yoder just behind them at 15.200, and then Whitlock at 14.900. Whitlock’s execution scores have not been high at these Olympics thus far, but he’ll set the mark to beat with that first routine with the most difficulty in the field. This one should get real, and the rotation order lends to the excitement as we have some actual gold medal contenders ending the final instead of getting them out of the way in the first half like on the other ones.
BARS
[2] Lee
[8] De Jesus Dos Santos
[1] Derwael
[3] Iliankova
[4] Melnikova
[7] Fan
[5] Lu
[5] Seitz
The conclusion of the much-anticipated Lee/Derwael race. Lee got the better of Derwael for the first time in the all-around final, which I thought portended some advantage to Lee because it wasn’t her best routine, though having seen something closer to the judges’ side angle from the NBC rebroadcast, you really couldn’t tell from that position how crooked Lee was on her combo, so that may not have been taken into account too much in the scoring.
Continue reading Olympic Event Finals Day 1