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A. American Cup

USAG announced the first entrants for the American Cup, revealing that Morgan Hurd and Sam Mikulak will grace us with their presences—with the second US gymnast for each division to be named later. Presumably, the selection of Hurd is designed specifically to shut up those of us who still aren’t done talking about the worlds selection process. Nice try.

The sub-announcement here is that Simone will not be competing at American Cup, because otherwise…they would have announced her. I’m guessing Simone will end up going to the Tokyo one because of Olympic host and whatnot.

This American Cup will be different from any other American Cup because of its status as an Olympic qualifier. It’s the first event in the series to determine which three countries on the women’s side and men’s side will earn an additional +1 Olympian to go to Tokyo along with their already qualified teams of four.

All 12 nations that qualified teams to the Olympics are eligible to send athletes to AA world cups this year, so with the extra wildcard spot that the US receives as host, that means we’ll have 13 men and 13 women competing at American Cup rather than the traditional nine. Because of that, the competition has had to make a slight format change.

Instead of the usual system—where the men would start with floor and horse and then the women (and NBC) would join the competition in the third rotation—the men and women will be competing in two entirely separate sessions, with the women in the usual time slot and the men competing later in the afternoon. This is absolutely necessary because American Cup is already wayyyy too long, and now you’re adding a bunch more gymnasts. It needed to be split up. For my sake, if no one else’s.

This is also a win for dedicated MAG fans because they’ll see more routines than the usual 3.75, though probably a loss for men’s gymnastics exposure because you know the women will still be on NBC and the men will at best be on NBCSN, if not just on streaming.

I’ll be interested to see the rest of the AA world cup selections for the US men this year because unlike the women (who can send all different people to the different meets and still be comfortable winning the series) the men don’t have that luxury and need to be very strategic about who they’re sending to which meets to try to place in that top 3—without breaking Mikulak by just sending him to all of them.