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Things Are Happening – September 7, 2021
A. Russian worlds teams
Today, Valentina stood atop a bell tower and yelled the names of the worlds team members. It appears some degree of sanity has prevailed with Dalaloyan (as well as Nagornyy and Belyavskiy) not in fact attempting to compete at worlds next month. Only Poliashov from the men’s Olympic squad will be competing, while Melnikova and Urazova from the women’s squad will be there.
Urazova is not slated to do the all-around and will compete only select events along with Yana Vorona. I assume you’d give Vorona a chance to do beam, while you’d want Urazova on bars. The other team members, Melnikova and Maria Minaeva, will go on all four, presenting another excellent chance for an all-around medal and possible victory for Melnikova here.
B. “Please don’t sue us about the Olympics, here you can go to worlds”
Only Becky Downie, Georgia-Mae Fenton, Taeja James, and Ruby Stacey competed at the British worlds trials, while Claudia Fragapane was in action winning the floor title at Koper. A number of competitions are taken into account for selection, so the Olympians didn’t have to compete here, though Kinsella has ruled herself out with an ankle injury and Amelie Morgan is at Utah.
Continue reading Things Are Happening – September 7, 2021
What Happened At the World Cup? Koper Day 2 Recap
Men’s Vault
The men’s vault final successfully fulfilled the prophecy, with half the competitors staying upright and half of them, well…we’ll always have Paris.
The two world-final-level vaulters rose to the top here, with Andrei Medvedev taking gold and Courtney Tulloch taking silver, each showing two 5.6 vaults. Medvedev’s landings proved a little stronger, particularly on his handspring front double pike with only a minimal hop back. Tulloch successfully completed a Dragulescu and Tsuk double pike but was pretty deeply crunched in his double pike landing and wasn’t going to get the execution scores to match Medvedev.
Canada’s Felix Dolci came through with a bronze, completing a solid Kas 2/1 for 5.6 D, a vault that will help his quest to emerge as Canada’s new top all-arounder. He did land a bit lock legged on his double front second vault, but it was fine. The only other real hitter in the final was one half of Romania’s only hope for continuing to have a men’s gymnastics program, Gabriel Burtanete, who performed well, but with two 5.2 vaults, didn’t have the difficulty to get into the medals.
Meanwhile, what you’re really here for with the men’s vault final: Ondrej Kalny squirted sideways on an underrotated Kas 2/1 and slid into the gutter, Riley Loos’s attempt to become the Holy Grail—a US men’s team member with an actual 5.6 vault—hit a literal stumbling block on a handspring 2.5, and William Emard directly connected a handspring double front to butt bounce.
My favorite part is how he still tries to show control on the landing after the butt bounce. Gotta minimize those deductions.
Balance Beam
Hit for the win! As is our only expectation for beam finals at a world challenge cup, staying on the apparatus was the standard for winning a medal in this final as, unfortunately, the majority of competitors suddenly found themselves performing inside the concept of ennui. These things can happen.
Continue reading What Happened At the World Cup? Koper Day 2 Recap
What Happened at the World Cup? Koper Day 1 Recap
One month post-Tokyo, gymnastics is officially back for a competition with exactly equal significance to the Olympics: the Koper Slovenia World Challenge Cup. So let’s find out who earned eternal glory for themselves and their nations on the first day of finals.
Men’s Floor
Despite perpetually looking like he has just been sent to apologize for Chernobyl, Russia’s Kirill Prokopev earned the gold medal (or, at least, the clear circle assigned to the winner) on floor. Prokopev boasted the highest difficulty score in the final and matched that with among the strongest execution performances, showing off his flares-but-make-it-interesting, along with mostly solid landings and just one plate tectonics event on a double double.
That was enough to put him ahead of Canada’s resident Super Ball William Emard, whose relative control on landings earned him the best execution score in the final, though he ended up a tenth behind Prokopev overall. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Ilia Kovtun showed up going, “I’m an Olympian now suckkkassss” and stuck his first three passes. While he was a little hoppier after that, the strength of his early passes afforded him a comfortable margin in third place.
Riley Loos of the US (or “Riley LOOOO” according to our commentator who had a small seizure during his name apparently) took 4th. He was a little lower on both difficulty and execution than the medalists but nonetheless above the all-important 14 mark—and with an original element in tow, a back dive to planche, which was given B value because the FIG hates joy.
In the remaining spots, a human bull named Andrin Frey had some excellent passes but sadly lunged back to his home planet on a piked double Arabian, Krisztofer Mezaros suffered a momentary ice floe on a randi, Mario Macchiati had some OOB trouble of his own, and Lorenzo Casali had an odd mistake where he opened up early on one of his passes and did an accidental back 2.5 that destroyed his composition. The broadcast wasn’t really sure what to do with that because while everyone else got all their passes replayed, the first half of Casali’s was a replay of a crotch close-up while he chalked.
Women’s Vault
On vault, Slovenia’s own Tjasa Kysselef took the title, finishing the competition with the strongest vault of the entire final, a handspring front tuck full that was nearly stuck. The strength of that second vault put her a single tenth ahead of top qualifier Csenge Bacskay, who landed quite lock-legged on her Yurchenko 1.5 so didn’t score as well as she might have there (even though she still got the highest highest score of any vault in the final because nothing is real).
Those two were clearly the class of the vaulters, but Yana Fedorova did hang on for bronze from the first position with her vaults, highlighted by a perfectly acceptable Yurchenko full.
I’ll admit, this final was in danger of getting boring, so it was veteran Dorina Böczögo to the rescue with the most preposterous landing on her Yurchenko full, where everything except her spine tried to scream “LET’S CONNECT A BACK HANDSPRING OUT OF THIS” for some reason.
Canada’s Rachael Riley followed that up by revealing that you could do 50+25 for 75, then 5 plus 3 is 8, take that away for 67, 67 times 9 is 603, and then take away the 2 to get our target, 601. (Americans, please direct your IDGI texts to your assigned cultural liaison.) Also her 1/2 on front fling ended in a body slam.
Continue reading What Happened at the World Cup? Koper Day 1 Recap