For my next trick, I shall attempt a preview of the Olympic beam competition. Because I am a fool, who does fool things.

Rules – Each athlete will count her 8 most difficult skills, including the dismount, of which at least three must be acrobatic elements and three must be dance elements. Routines must also include a connection of two dance elements, a turn, an acrobatic element series, and acrobatic elements both forward (or sideward) and backward.

TIER I

Simone Biles (USA)

Biles has been world champion on beam on three occasions, most recently in 2019, and enters the Olympics as the favorite for this title, even if her favorite status is not nearly as clear cut on beam as it is elsewhere. In the all-around and on vault and floor—as long as Biles does anything even remotely close to what she is capable of—she will win gold. On beam, however, Biles could hit a strong routine in the event final and still not win, mostly depending on which athletes from China make it into the final and how they do. Here, Biles will not necessarily have the most difficulty in the competition, and she does not own the highest score in the world, so the outcome is less securely in her hands.

I do still consider Biles the favorite, however, largely because her difficulty is the most predictable and reliable among the select handful who have potential difficulty in the high 6s (i.e., she’s always going to get credit for her dismount and the combination bonus there). Save for a dance combo or two, her beam difficulty is not too subject to hesitations or how strictly the judging panel has been told to evaluate combination speed. For Biles, she has to make a big error not to score well on beam. A bunch of slight hesitations or nervous moments isn’t going to be too disastrous.

The issue of whether she will perform her eponymous beam dismount is sort of moot when it comes to the beam final because the additional one tenth makes it not worth performing—but even if she did, the landing tends to be comfortable enough that it shouldn’t materially change her chances.

Ou Yushan or Guan Chenchen or Lu Yufei or Zhang Jin or Tang Xijing (CHN)

Brace yourselves because the fight to see which two Chinese athletes make it into the beam final will be an existential crisis biopic, with five very realistic contenders for the two spots.

Today, let’s talk about bars, which should feature the highest profile, most exciting gold medal battle of the women’s competition at the Olympics. At least as long as everything goes to plan. It is bars after all.

Rules – Each athlete will count her 8 most difficult skills, including the dismount, for her difficulty score. Routines must also include a flight element from high bar to low bar, a same-bar release skill, the display of different grips, and a pirouetting element with at least a full turn.

TIER I

Nina Derwael (BEL) and Sunisa Lee (USA)

Derwael is the two-time defending world champion with the 2nd-highest difficulty score in the world. Lee owns the highest difficulty in the world as well as the highest score recorded on bars in 2021 with a 15.300. It should be a good one.

The 6.8 peak difficulty score for Lee is a very slight check in her column because it looks like Derwael is planning to go for at best a 6.7. Still, that’s just one tenth, and it’s going to get more complicated than that with both athletes facing some fraught composition decisions.

Lee performs that 6.8 difficulty only when she is exactly on, and if she’s not, she will adjust to her backup composition, which should put her at 6.5. It will be an interesting strategic conundrum for Lee because she’s still capable of winning Olympic silver with her backup 6.5 routine but is probably going to need to lean on the 6.8 to win gold, all things being hit.

That said, Derwael has decisions of her own to make with her potential composition. After missing on bars on the first day of the FIT Challenge, Derwael removed the new and slightly controversial Nabieva 1/2 from her routine in the event final to go down to a 6.6 difficulty. That’s a safer and probably more comfortable routine for her, but one that also has to introduce more skills and more cast handstands to get up to a 6.6 difficulty and is therefore risking a lower execution score as well.

Using every athlete’s average score on each event from all competitions in 2021, the 12 national teams in the women’s competition at the Olympics are given a team total based on how the four gymnasts would do in a 3-count competition.

As we get news of the Dutch gymnastics delegation having a positive test in its midst just two weeks out of Olympic competition (all tests today were negative), I have decided to ignore that and start previewing the competition as if everything is normal.

Phase 1: The vault preview. Why? Because two vaults are required to advance to the event final, vault presents the least deep of the four events with the most predictable slate of contenders. (The beam preview is basically going to be a shrug emoji and we all know it.)

Rules — To both qualify for and participate in the vault final, gymnasts must perform two vaults, each from different groups among the five options (Non-salto, handspring, Tsukahara, Yurchenko, and Yuchenko 1/2). The two vaults cannot feature the same flight, so both vaults cannot be back layout double twisting vaults, even if they are from different groups.

TIER 1

Simone Biles (USA)

Biles enters vault—among others—as the heavy gold medal favorite. Her current plan is not to perform the Yurchenko double pike (6.6 difficulty) in the vault final because no warmup is allowed for event finals and it is not safe. Score another win for the gymnastics brain trust. But even Biles’ “little guy” slate of vaults with the Cheng (6.0) and Amanar (5.8) should tie for the most difficult pair in the vault final, and her superior amplitude, distance, and body position should see her execution score rise well above that of any other contender.

There is the chance that she could also pull out the Biles I (6.4), but since we haven’t actually seen that vault since she fell on it in the world all-around final in 2018, I have a feeling that one has long since been taken to a farm upstate.

TIER II

MyKayla Skinner or Jade Carey (USA)

One of the biggest storylines of the US women’s qualification performance will be which athlete ends up joining Biles as the second and final American competitor in the vault final. Both Skinner and Carey have the same peak difficulty on vault with the Cheng (6.0) and the Amanar (5.8) and are likely to score about the same for them, with Carey perhaps enjoying a slight edge (all else being equal) because of her amplitude.

Carey played things conservatively vault and floor at nationals and trials with her Olympic spot already locked, so we don’t have a great sense of her current level on vault (particularly with the Cheng, which we haven’t seen since February) compared to Skinner, who has been excelling with both vaults at recent meets. When they did perform the same vault on the same day—both doing the Amanar on the first day of trials—Carey scored 15.200 for it compared to Skinner’s 15.133, pointing to a very close race.

They’ll even put some pressure on Biles if all three gymnasts perform the same difficulty, but Biles has such an execution buffer (really should be at least five tenths per vault, if not more) that the threat of Biles missing out shouldn’t come into play the way it did in qualification at 2019 worlds when Biles bounced to Mars for a 0.3 out of bounds deduction.

TIER III

Giulia Steingruber (SUI)

Among those who should also contend for a medal, the defending Olympic bronze medalist owns very comfortable handspring rudi (5.8) with a predictable landing that can be relied on for very high scores that should outshine the other 5.8s in this tier. Her stumbling block has actually tended to be her theoretically easier DTY (5.4), which is what kept her out of the vault final at the last worlds. At this year’s European Championships, however, Steingruber’s DTY looked strong, helping her to an ultimately smooth gold medal finish. If she vaults like that again, she should be considered a frontrunner for the non-US medal.