So this is a thing now.
The European Championships introduced a new mixed team final today—and by introduced, I mean did the same format we know from the Swiss Cup and DTB Pokal, but at a big meet.
Most importantly, the mixed team event allows an opportunity for the national men’s teams and women’s teams to show they can work together in seamless harmony.
This is also gives us a preview of the mixed team event that will be part of the 2028 Olympics (so we can have three whole years to prepare our complaints and criticisms). But better start taking this seriously because…you could win an Olympic medal at it. This isn’t some showcase. I guess. So I’ve been told.
Let’s get into it.
The format *deep breath* *get stenographer* *expire*
Sixteen national pairs qualified for the mixed team final based on their day 1 scores on WAG vault, beam, and floor and MAG floor, parallel bars, and high bar, with the best-scoring WAG and MAG on those events from each country automatically making up their national team.
In the first round, each gymnast selected one of the eligible apparatuses on which to perform. The teams were then ranked by the combined score for each pair, with the top 8 pairs advancing to the second round, and the bottom 8 pairs eliminated.
In the second round, the scores were wiped clean and each gymnast again selected one of the eligible apparatuses—not repeating the same apparatus as the first round—with the top 2 pairs advancing to the gold medal match, and the 3rd and 4th pairs advancing to the bronze medal match. Pairs 5-8 were eliminated at this point.
In the final round, the scores were again wiped clean and the gymnasts performed on the one remaining event they had not used in the first two rounds, going head-to-head in the gold and bronze medal matches to determine the ultimate podium.
………………..
In the end, the host German pair of Timo Eder and Karina Schönmaier won the gold medal match by a single beam tenth over the British pair of Jake Jarman and Ruby Evans, with Eder and Jarman both recording 13.333 on high bar, while Schönmaier went 12.233 on beam to Evans on 12.133.
The Germans and Brits revealed what appears to be the winning strategy for the mixed team event: utilizing their best events in round 2 in order to get into the gold medal match, and then just rolling the dice and seeing what happens once they’re in the final. As teams only need to finish in the top 8 in round one, the best countries can waste a weaker event there and rely on their overall quality to still be in the top 8, but they really need to go big in round 2 to get into the gold match.
The Italian pair of Lorenzo Casali and Manila Esposito were actually the top qualifiers, favorites, and obvious best team here but appeared to miss it on the strategy. Italy used Esposito’s weakest event, vault, in round 2, which saw the pair relegated to the bronze medal match, which they then won handily over the French pair of Anthony Mansard and Morgane Osyssek-Reimer (who I thought were excellent today and deserved a medal for their efforts).
If Italy had switched the order of Esposito’s events and had her do beam in round 2 and either floor or vault in the final, they would have been in the gold medal match against the Brits and would have won. But still a bronze, so Italy just saved itself from disaster.
Remaining thoughts:
- We only had one withdrawal, which beat expectations. The Romanian duo of Ana Barbosu and Nicholas Tarca, who qualified in 15th, pulled out of the final, presumably because the women’s leadership wasn’t actually aware that Romania still had a men’s team that could participate.
- Norway’s pair of Peder Skogvang and Keisha Lockert nailed it on the strategy for lower-ranked teams. They were never really going to challenge for a medal, so they put up their best events in round one to get into the top 8 and advance to the second round, ultimately finishing 7th (!), ahead of much more accomplished countries like Switzerland and the Netherlands. A huge deal for Norway. Also Keisha Lockert’s round 2 beam routine was sublime.
- #4 qualifiers Hungary took a big swing in round one by having Greta Mayer open on beam, but it didn’t pay off as a fall put them into 10th, failing to advance to round two.
- Sweden was the only other team that took the risk to do beam in round one, but considering that Jennifer Williams scored 8 billion in qualification to advance to the beam final in first, it was their top-scoring option. Williams was a little shakier today, but Sweden’s 12th-place finish was mostly a result of not having the MAG scores to keep up.
Pros:
- Parts of this are fun. Tracking the mixed team prospects during qualification added an extra wrinkle of potentially messy drama (the best) to proceedings. We got to follow who was going to make it into the top 16, how the national strengths in men’s and women’s gymnastics complemented or hurt each other, and who was going to get per-countried out of a mixed team spot and medal opportunity. Or at least Spreadsheet Johnny did. Spreadsheet Johnny is me. Karina Schönmaier now has a European gold medal and Helen Kevric does not (yet…give it a day or two) after they tied on VT/BB/FX totals during day one and Schönmaier got the mixed team spot in a tiebreak.
- Elimination in stages is good. Sports and whatnot. Stakes. It makes for a more dynamic and interesting event—one that separates itself from the other phases of the competition—compared to just having all the pairs perform their three events and then seeing who wins. It’s a different look and helps semi-protect the mixed team event from seeming like a weird unnecessary appendage that you tacked onto a normal competition for no reason. Which is a main theoretical issue with this meet. …Why?
- The strategy aspect is a twist. It forces teams to be more aware of what’s going on at any given moment, their own strengths, and where they should put which events in order to maximize their chances. If Italy had simply changed the order of their routines and did all the same performances, they could have won gold.
Cons:
- The events are wrong. Having the women do all three legs events while the men do two bar events and one leg event is off balance. If they insist on limiting to three events apiece (which already feels incomplete and sort of like a fake half-competition), the women need to do bars, beam, and floor, and the men need to do vault, floor, and high bar. That would only require switching out the PBars for the uneven bars on that chunk of podium, which seems doable in terms of arena layout practicality.
- This meet really requires a live scoring/standings graphic on the screen to track who’s in and who’s out and what scores everyone needs. And we didn’t have that. It’s very easy to get lost.
- Finishing with gold- and bronze-medal matches has the potential to be an entertaining format, but seeing 3rd-place Italy and 4th-place France score better than 1st-place Germany and 2nd-place GB in the final round is…jarring and un-gymnastics. Italy was the best team, and the best-scoring team in the final round, and shouldn’t that be…gold medal?
- This thing is too long. NBC would get so bored by this during the Olympics they’d have to cut to a feature about a swimmer who got a dog or something. We need to get this into a tight 2 hours. The obvious solution would be to have fewer teams qualify, but I sort of like having a lot of teams, and it did seem like we had an excessive number of warmup groups and pauses in between phases of the competition and could work on that.
- When you have the MAG and WAG going simultaneously on different events, or going in different parts of the subdivision, it doesn’t really feel like a team event and feels more like…random people doing portions of random gymnastics randomly? This was more of an issue in the first round and was better in the second round when there were fewer teams going and the pairs could at least perform back to back and then sit in the Cringe and Wave together to get their scores. This may be NCAA Stockholm Syndrome, but you want the teammates to be able to watch each other’s routines (close by…) and cheer them on.
- Also, like, you have to work with a boy.
