Jordyn Wieber has not qualified to the AA, Gabby and Aly qualified ahead of her. I didn't get why she was crying at the end, until the commentators copped on. This is a tad unbelievable..whatever about the world champion not winning the AA, not even qualifying is an extreme blow for her to take. Now, I am delighted for Aly who has cleaned up bigtime- her floor scored very high and deservedly so. Her amanar wasn't even that scary, she kept her form through her legs more than she has done in ages. Her floor in particular really was spectacular, with very clean leaps and landings.
Where did it go wrong for Jordyn? Her bars had a form break, overarched handstand. Her floor was perfect, amazingly well done considering she performed against the backdrop of Beth Tweddle nailing her impossible bars on home soil. Vault was off direction to the side, she would have scored higher with any of her other amanars this year. Beam was a little slow on those connections, and she was credited with 6.0 difficulty- so clearly the judges thought they were too slow as well. Beam has been judged very harshly all day and unfortunately Jo fell victim to it. Overall, a combination of her small mistakes not being enough to combat Aly hitting everything and Gabby's higher difficulty overcoming her own big floor mistake. Devastated for her. USA have lost a top AAer- and so has the Olympics.
Hey it's the_alba from TSR here. I can't believe what just happened. It makes me very angry at the two-per-team rule: it's deeply wrong and bad for the sport that gymnasts who couldn't possibly touch Jordyn - who compete only FTYs and 5.0 D-scores - now get to compete in the AA, ahead of the world champion, who doesn't. It is grossly unfair. It is bad for gymnastics. I was never the world's biggest Wieber fan, but that was relative: I prefer Komova, etc. I don't prefer Gymanst X from Random Country Y. This rule needs to go: if the best gymnasts can't compete at the Olympics, what is the point of the competition?
ReplyDeleteHi! Yeah it's absolutely gutting. In a way, I like the 2 per country rule, it works well in getting obscure gymnasts into event finals. But with the AA it does more harm than good. I'm not sure about taking it away entirely..but perhaps modifying it is the answer, if the third gymnast's score is within the top 5/top 8 of all of the AA scores, then they get in. Something like that. There will be a HUGE outcry about this, there is already of course- but I'm not sure if the FIG will change it, or even consider it.
ReplyDeleteYep, modification is key. I would say that the current world champion gets some sort of special compensation - the same way a Wimbledon champion would be allowed a wild card into the main competition. This not only spices up the competition, but makes it an awful lot more fair. The current system has just been proved irredeemably flawed. Whoever wins the AA final will wonder whether they would have beaten Wieber on the day. It's the shittiest thing to happen in gymnastics since the Raducan debacle.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about just allowing the world champion, that would screw over spectacular new seniors. Maybe just top 5 finish, though the FIG would not like that at all. Hmmm. 3 up 3 count is ridiculous too, ooo you fell and lost it for your whole country. We need 6 member teams, 4 up 3 count and a 2 per country modification.
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