[ad_1]
This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here.
They came, they saw, they flipped, and they conquered! Olympic gymnastics is, after a breathless week and a half, in le rear-view mirror at last. Simone Biles is, deservedly, babysitting her medals as we speak. Stephen Nederoscik is, I would hazard a guess, solving a Rubik’s cube on the plane home, eager to reunite with his orange cat. The women’s Italian and Brazilian teams are, I hope, drunk somewhere and toasting their respective historic podium finishes, both team and individual.
Whereas the Tokyo Games’ gymnastics portion was first scary and then deeply sobering, Paris has been all about redemption, sportsmanship, and, mostly, joy. But just as the Olympic athletes themselves represent but an infinitesimal fraction of the regular gymnasts around the world, the athletes who won both hardware and the news cycle have understandably eclipsed some of the quieter heroes of Bercy Arena.
This made me sad, until I remembered that technically, I am the news cycle, and I can rectify this injustice forthwith. For example, while I assume Nedoroscik has inspired Manic Pixie Glasses Guys around America to register at their nearest gym, you can bet something similar is happening in China, thanks to what commentator John Roethlisberger called “the greatest routine on any event, by any male gymnast, ever,” from Parallel Bars Guy Zou Jingyuan. Not only is Zou’s execution the closest to perfect I have ever seen, but the release he does mid-routine flies so unusually high that, like commentator Justin Spring, I forgot he wasn’t on the high bar.
While no American man came close to medaling in the all-around, it was a thrilling and unexpected contest even for us egocentric Yanks, largely thanks to a series of unfortunate errors by gold-medal favorites Zhang Boheng and defending champion Daiki Hashimoto. With Hashimoto out and “King” Kohei Uchimura several years retired, it looked like Japan’s gold medal four-peat might be dust, but then 20-year-old Shinnosuke Oka said not today, and had the meet of his life.
Oka also happened to be one of the only men who both stayed on the high bar and dismounted onto their feet in apparatus finals, taking his third gold of the Games (after the Japanese men also kicked everyone’s asses in the team final). Also, our current love affair with the color bronze eclipsed the small fact that another Pommel Horse Guy (also the original Anti-Sex Bed Guy!), Rhys McClenaghan, secured Ireland’s first ever gymnastics medal (a gold!), yet more redemption after he became a Tokyo casualty of the sport’s most evil event.
Finally, while Nedoroscik’s pommel horse clinch will always remain a highlight of these Games, it wouldn’t have clinched jack squat without the small fact that our friend Steve’s four teammates went lights out, hitting literally every routine they competed before those glasses finally came off. This is especially true for the American program’s current best all-around gymnast and greatest hope for its future, Fred Richard, who also won all-around bronze at the 2023 world championships.
Richard parlays his substantial internet presence to create the usual charming meme-type things for young people, but also to create hype about gymnastics aimed at young Black gymnasts. He is by all accounts a phenomenal athlete, and just as importantly, just the absolute quintessential Nice Young Man you want your kids to know about, and he deserves his flowers, as they say. Had Richard stuck his landings—and stayed on the dread pommel horse—in the all-around final, he would have finished quite a bit higher than 15th and possibly even glimpsed that medal stand again. But at 20, he is still at the beginning of his career. Provided he stays healthy—and, more importantly, that the NCAA doesn’t keep decimating its men’s gymnastics teams, which are and have always been the primary feeder to the elite program—I expect to see him return as a serious medal threat in 2028.
On the women’s side, it’s going to take many years for a single image to capture the absolute pinnacle of what the Olympic spirit is ostensibly all about more than this one, of Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles bowing to Rebeca Andrade as she prepares to be crowned queen of the floor exercise. However, the women’s competition provided so many thrills and heartbreaks that most of them just did not have the spatio-temporal ability to cross your timeline along with everything else. Just like three of the best American gymnasts of 2024 injured out before they could qualify to Paris at all, many of the women onto whom I’d like to throw some much-deserved shine are talents who barely missed out on that podium.
Chief among these is the entire team from Romania, a nation once so synonymous with the sport that besides the small matter of a li’l dictator, the West knew Romanians for very little else. For a conflation of reasons—changes in the Code of Points that no longer favored perfect execution; a dearth of Iron Curtain–inspired funding—the Romanian program had essentially been in a tailspin after the London games of 2012, and this was the first year since 2016 that Romania actually qualified a full team, much less one in serious contention for a medal.
And that brings us to both the saddest and most controversial moment in the Games: the inquiry during the floor final that knocked Ana Barbosu off the podium, which is currently causing furor among Romanian fans, the nation’s prime minister, and the sport’s queen, Nadia Comenici herself. After Jordan Chiles’ score came in, putting her in fifth place behind Barbosu and her teammate Sabrina Voinea (with Barbosu’s execution score breaking their 13.7 tie), the American coaches submitted a scoring inquiry, a routine process in the sport that ends poorly for the inquirer as often as it ends well. (Yes, you can inquire about your score, and the judges can say, well, we looked closer and now this is happening, and hand you back a lower one, which is then final!)
While coaches are forbidden from questioning an exercise’s execution score, they are allowed to inquire about its start value. In Chiles’ case, she completed a dance element that she didn’t get credit for, and on inquiry that credit was restored, returning a tenth to her score and putting her into third place. This all happened as Barbosu had the Romanian flag in hand literally ready to take a victory lap around the mat. And as enthralled as I am for Chiles, and as legitimate as the inquiry was, we must validate Barbosu’s heartbreak. (As I write this, there may also be an official appeal pending about Voinea, who was penalized for an out-of-bounds that is now under dispute.) Regardless of this controversy, however—which I also cannot emphasize enough is not Jordan Chiles’ fault!—I want to make sure as many people as possible understand that the entire Romanian program is on the upswing again. Expect them next Olympics, back with a vengeance.
As much as I also validate Biles’ extremely legitimate gripe with the phrase what’s next for you, I do think that after these Games have stoked general-public interest in what is usually considered a niche sport, many spectators do wonder what the future holds for gymnastics. Will Biles and Andrade return for another admiration-filled throwdown in 2028? Is Pommel Horse Guy coming back for gold? Absolutely nobody knows. What I can safely predict, however, is the following: There will once again be revisions to the dastardly Code of Points, possibly devaluing the “power events” more, with the aim of creating parity between events, encouraging artistry, and thus encouraging the sport to return to its more elegant roots.
Speaking of which, there will likely also be a major reckoning in the Chinese women’s program, which in Paris produced some truly dismal results considering the program’s history as a juggernaut. I would hazard a guess that this team will either finally select some stronger vaulters and better tumblers—thus welcoming a body composition with considerably more mass and musculature than their current beam and bars specialists—or face relegation to bars and beam specialists forever. Then, of course, comes the biggest question of all: Will Russia find itself in a geopolitical (and doping-free) position favorable to returning to international sport?
And finally: If 2016 and 2021 are any indication, the American stars will likely take at least the next year off, if not forever off, busy touring the country and perhaps building their medals a special little castle to live in forever. (At least that’s what I’d do.) If the two years after Tokyo were a reckoning, the next two will be a rebuilding time for the American program, where the new and now proven-better system of prioritizing health over medals may be put to the test, when there aren’t as many veterans around to haul in medals. Gymnastics careers last longer now than they used to, so we may see many of these same faces in 2028—faces I hope will get the recognition they deserve amid a new and as-yet-unknowable whirlwind of international competition, heartbreak, and joy.
[ad_2]
Source link
