A. Convoluted Swiss Nonsense

Even though we’ve entered the post-Olympics, post-worlds stupor, there’s actually still a fair amount of gymnastics happening over the next couple months what with the Voronin Cup and the junior Pan American Games and the usual competitions in France and Belgium. This week is marked by the annual Convoluted Swiss Nonsense meets, with the Arthur Gander Memorial on the 3rd and the Swiss Cup on the 7th.

For the uninitiated, these meets welcome mixed pair teams from around the world to compete select apparatuses in various rounds to try to crown a winner. At the Arthur Gander, the men and women compete individually. In the first round, the women select two events to compete and the men select three events, with the top 6 gymnasts in each division advancing to the final round. In the final round, they must compete an additional routine (not one of the apparatuses they already competed) to determine the overall winner. At least, that’s the usual format. Last time around, they all just competed all their intended routines on their chosen events at the same time. Whatever.

The Swiss Cup, meanwhile, is like, “That’s a dumb format, get a load of this multi-paragraph system.” At the Swiss Cup, the 10 mixed pairs compete as teams instead of individually. In the first round, everyone competes a single routine, and the two weakest teams are eliminated. In the next round, everyone on the remaining 8 teams competes another routine on a different apparatus. The scores from each of the first two rounds are combined, and the top 4 teams then advance to the semifinal bracket.

In the semifinals, the teams go head-to-head with everyone competing a routine on a third different event. For this round, all the scores are wiped, so only the semifinal results decide which teams advance to the final. In the final, the athletes on the two remaining teams compete a fourth routine, but this time, they are allowed to repeat an apparatus that they already competed, and only the final-round scores decide the winner. 

The key strategic consideration at the Swiss Cup is what event to save for the semifinals. You need to score well enough on your first two events combined to make sure you’re in the top 4, but then you also have to save a good enough event for the semifinals to get you into the final on that score alone. So, needless to say, this is weird and pointless and I love it.

The team of Melnikova/Nagornyy (because Melnikova doesn’t need a break or anything) will headline each event, with Giorgia Villa, Ilia Kovtun, Yul Moldauer, and Ahmet Onder also gracing us with their presence at both. Kim Bui will compete at the Swiss Cup, and Moldauer will be joined by Ciena Alipio at Arthur Gander and Olivia Greaves at the Swiss Cup.

The Swiss Cup will be broadcast on SRF Zwei starting at 12:45 CET on the 7th if you have a VPN set to Switzerland.

B. NCAA is coming

The season (I know it’s a college sports thing just to call it “season” instead of “the season,” but kill me please) starts in about two months, which counts as soon and means preview season is upon us. Deal with it.

We’re still waiting on some schedule stragglers, like Oklahoma cough cough cough, but enough teams have released their slates that I have made the 2022 master schedule and added it to the menu bar at the top. Here’s a quick look at the highlights, starting with opening day on Wednesday, January 5th and ending with the national championship on April 16th:

2022 NCAA Schedule Abridged