The 2012 U.S. Olympic team

It’s time for the 247th edition of You Asked, The Gymternet Answered! We apologize if we haven’t gotten to your question yet, but we try to answer in the order in which they were received (unless they are super relevant and need to be answered in a timely manner). Something you want to know? Ask us anonymously by going through the contact form at the bottom of the page.

In this century, which women’s gymnastics Olympic team has been your favorite?

Definitely the 2012 U.S. team because they were the first team I started watching when all of the members were about 11 or 12, and my first time covering a meet happened to be the first elite meet for most of them, so I got to know them really well as they grew up in the sport.

The first two people I ever interviewed were Jordyn Wieber and Kyla Ross after the 2010 U.S. Classic (Katelyn Ohashi was the third!), I remember the shock from everyone when Aly Raisman made the floor final at worlds, I became Gabby Douglas’ biggest fan when I saw her spend about five hours muscling up out of a stalder and refusing to fall (and an even bigger fan when she had a million beam falls at nationals in 2011 and everyone said she was “totally done in Martha’s eyes”), and I fangirled over McKayla Maroney’s first few Amanars she ever competed. I had never been as connected to a team from so early on in their careers before, and the only time I’ve ever really teared up in an arena was seeing the 2012 team named at the U.S. trials because it felt like I had been a part of that journey, from an outsider’s perspective of course, but close enough that I saw a lot of the struggles and triumphs along the way.

I also loved that they were such a young team with so little experience between them, and a year prior in 2011 everyone doubted that they’d be able to win a medal at worlds after Alicia Sacramone got injured, but they proved everyone wrong and truly showed just how mentally strong they were by winning gold. We didn’t even know then what was happening behind the scenes and that all of them had been horribly abused, and yet despite all of that, despite the adults in their lives not doing anything to protect them, despite everything they had going against them, they still managed to shine through it all both as athletes and as incredible human beings. I loved them back then, and with everything that has come out over the past year or so, it’s only added to my overwhelming love and respect for them.

Oh yeah, and I guess probably most important in terms of the Olympic competition itself…but they kicked major ass in London and it was thrilling watching them do it.

How many different kinds of neutral deductions are there? What are they for?

There are a few different categories of penalties. The ones you see most often are those for going out of bounds on vault and floor, or over time on beam. We actually don’t see the others super often, just occasionally, but they’re out there. There are more time penalties, like taking too long to mount again after a fall on bars and beam, there are short exercise penalties for those who have too few elements in their exercises, and there are also behavior faults for things like incorrect attire, missing numbers, being on the podium when you’re not supposed to, talking to the judges during the meet, abusive behavior, and so on. Some of these come from the athlete’s routine, but those that are related more to coach behavior as well as a few attire-related penalties come from the team total.

Even though UCLA won the national title and are adding a great freshman class, do you think they’ll be expected to repeat?

I think there will be a lot of pressure on them to repeat, and I think they’ll be in a great position to do so, but NCAA gym is often way too close to expect the same team to win year after year. When Oklahoma won its first solo title, as my favorite team I got nervous they wouldn’t do it again the following year because there were other strong teams also contending, and I think it’s going to be the same for UCLA this year. They should be a consistent top program once again, but who wins the title will all come down to who looks best on that one day in April. A team could have a 198 average all season long and then count a fall on beam in the final. Or they can average a 197 all season long and have the best day of the season in the final and win it all. That’s the beauty of NCAA! Anyone who watches UCLA this year will see that they’re definitely a contender and they’ll absolutely have that expectation to win it again, but they were also expected to repeat in 2011 after winning the previous year and they ended up in second, so nothing is a given.

Could a gymnast move the bars closer if she wanted to? Some of the old skills on bars look fun!

No, the regulation states that they have to be a specific distance apart. Most prefer them to be wider than they are in elite and love getting to NCAA where they’re set a bit further apart, which makes the transition skills a bit easier because they have more room to fly. The old skills are fun but now that much more difficult transitions are considered basics, those old skills wouldn’t really be worth anything at all so even if a gymnast got permission to put the bars closer together, it would be impossible to build up a start value that would make her at all competitive.

How long do you think it will take for the full Rio Olympics broadcasts to be put online and not get copyrighted?

No idea, sorry!

Shushunova’s 1988 floor had two elements that I don’t understand. One was an asymmetrical cattywampus thing in her first pass, and the second was her last pass where she lands on her calves. What are these skills and where did they go?

Oh, I think you’re talking about her second pass, which was known as a straddled 1¾ side somi with a roll-out. The first flip is done in a straddle position and then the second flip is a forward roll-out, and as for the twists, it’s basically a quarter-in to turn it from flipping backwards to sideways, and then once the side flip is done in the first rotation, it’s another quarter turn into a front roll-out salto.

I’m not sure what you’re talking about for the last pass…she does a double tuck…unless you’re thinking of her dance elements at the end, where she does a cartwheel into her eponymous skill, which is a straddle jump to front support, meaning the gymnast does a straddle jump and lands it in a kind of push-up position on the floor.

All roll-out skills are banned now because they led to very serious neck injuries, so the first skill isn’t something we’d see in a routine today but the Shushunova is still a skill in the code of points. We see them occasionally in NCAA, including a couple on beam where a gymnast will do a Shushunova into a hip circle around the beam (Florida has been known for this series for years), but they’re pretty rare in elite (as an A element, they’re obviously not super valuable).

Why is there a prevalence of males coaching women’s gymnastics? It would seem as if former women’s gymnasts would be the most desired. I’m mostly curious about former male gymnasts coaching women. Is there enough overlap to just ‘know’ how to do it?

It’s definitely changing now. I think in the past, all of the coaches in the great old school programs happened to be male, just like most higher level jobs during the 60s and 70s and 80s ended up being male-dominated while women were often assisting (and probably doing more of the grunt work) but not getting credit for being head coaches.

There were always a few former gymnasts who started becoming coaches at this time, but the big national-level jobs tended to go to men as the ‘leaders’ and not the women who did the majority of the actual coaching, and it was the men who were moving to the U.S. and opening gyms and using their fame as former gymnasts (or high-level coaches from former Olympic medal-winning teams) to attract kids, while women for whatever reason did not.

I think it started changing in the 90s, where even in the U.S. you saw more male coaches of national team gymnasts, but women like Mary Lee Tracy and Kelli Hill started coming into the spotlight more, and now at nationals 20 years later we’re getting to a point where the majority of coaches you see on the floor are women. A large number of top gyms right now are run by women, and it’s getting more and more prevalent as a lot of the guys left over from the old school are retiring.

Yes, there’s enough overlap between the men’s and women’s sides of the sport to make it easy for male gymnasts to coach either side, and really, you don’t even need to be a gymnast at all to begin coaching…I know several coaches who didn’t do the sport but started coaching rec gym and built up careers that way.

Why when gymnasts perform the Memmel is it not actually performed the way Chellsie Memmel did it? Chellsie’s is more of a Y while most people do it in a split position. Which is correct and which would be deducted?

Either is fine. The requirement is that it must be performed with the leg held at 180 degrees. Chellsie’s technique to getting into that 180 degree position was a bit different, and most gymnasts who do it now are a bit more flexible so they hold a true split and stay in it longer than Chellsie would have. In Chellsie’s it almost felt like the first turn was her prepping to get into a split, and then the second turn was in the split, haha. Most who do it now are in a full split well before the first turn is complete.

Could you explain how a WAG gymnast can participate in the Youth Olympic Games?

They have to be born in a specific year (for example, 2003 to be eligible for the 2018 Youth Olympic Games), and their country has to qualify a spot at one of the qualifiers leading up to the Games (in 2018 it was Pan Ams for countries on the American continents, Australian Championships for Australia and New Zealand, Asian Junior Championships for Asian countries, and a special qualifying meet held in Baku for European gymnasts). That’s really it.

What’s gone wrong with the Spanish team? They used to be top eight in the world and now they can hardly manage to keep up. Do you think it had something to do with their own abuse scandal?

I think it mostly had to do with the fact that they were at their best before the code switched to open-ended scoring and they had trouble creating high enough difficulty routines to keep up with countries that were excelling under the open-ended code. A lot of countries that were strong as teams prior to 2006 definitely regressed a bit after the code changed, because while they had super talented gymnasts and performed well enough to get high scores at that time, once they had to become more competitive with more difficult skills, that was kind of it. Then you had a country like Italy completely take advantage of the new code with so much difficulty Vanessa Ferrari was able to win a competition with a fall…it was a lot to get used to for countries that really relied on clean and solid performances and haven’t been able to fully make the shift and add competitive difficulty. The open-ended code really separated the best from the rest because the gymnasts had been on a much more even playing field with everyone more or less coming in with the same start values, and then suddenly you had girls that were once equals now separated by a TON when the gymnasts who could do the most difficult skills were suddenly starting two points ahead of others. Of course, abusive situations can also cause a downfall in a program, but I think in this case, the timing suggests that it was more about the code changes.

Can you please explain the super low E score for Maria Holbura?

In this video, the angles are awful for most of this and some of her elements are cut off in the air but the obvious deductions are…

• all three of her back handsprings have bent knees and leg separation
• bent knees and leg separation in piked full-in
• piked full-in landed with feet apart and chest below horizontal
• leg separation in tucked full-in
• tucked full-in landed with feet apart and chest at horizontal
• legs on the switch ring are both low
• split ring leap is better but the back leg could still be better
• hip angle, bent knees, and leg separation in 1½
• hip angle, bent knees, and leg separation in front full
• front full landed short, and then two steps back as well
• bent support leg in Memmel turn, hop/adjustment on landing
• leg separation in double tuck
• double tuck landed with feet apart and chest below horizontal

Adding these up quickly, I’m getting about 2.7 points in deductions if I take the minimum for everything that went wrong. On top of that, there are probably some artistry deductions as well, but these can differ based on the judge so I didn’t bother with that not knowing that the judges did or didn’t do here. Of course, with everything I noticed on a video, judges in real time might not see or might decide it’s not severe enough to take. If they have a side view of her back handsprings, for example, they wouldn’t be able to see how weak they are, but if they’re seeing them from a front-on kind of angle, they’d see at least two tenths of deductions in all three that she performed.

Given the current state of affairs, if you had a daughter who is quite talented in gymnastics, which gyms would be your top choices and why?

Many gyms would be good choices. I think most people only know the top elite gyms that have gotten bad press, so really, none of those…but a ton of other gyms would be realistic options and really, it depends more on geography than anything else unless in this hypothetical scenario you’re picturing me as a billionaire who is willing to uproot my entire life so my kid can do gymnastics with a 0.00000001% chance of making it to the Olympics.

I’d probably find the gym closest to me that had a good record for producing top level 10s, and I’d use my judgment to determine whether the coaches would put results over my child’s physical and mental health/well-being…but I probably wouldn’t go to a big name gym or uproot my life or my child’s life for a sport. I think most of the top gymnasts over the past few years have proven that if you have the talent, you’ll get there, and it’s better for you mentally to stay home with your family and the gym you’ve known rather than moving to a big name gym. Simone Biles, Aly Raisman, Laurie Hernandez, and Madison Kocian were all gymnasts who stayed with their same gyms since they were just starting out, and I think all four benefited from the strong family and community systems behind them, which is vastly more important than what gym they’re at.

Do you see Chris Remkes as a potential threat on vault this quad?

I think he has to clean up a bit and get more consistent to really be a threat. It’s crazy that he can do so much difficulty but so many of his vaults end up being a bit scary because he doesn’t have great control over them. It’s great when he wins a major medal, like at Commonwealth Games last year, so he clearly has it in him to make big things happen, but with a ton of guys all at a similar level of difficulty that he’s at on the world stage, he’s going to need to rely more on form and consistency to stay in the mix with the top guys.

Will Australia qualify a team for Tokyo? Does Georgia Godwin have a chance at the all-around final if she makes the team?

At this point I doubt they’ll be a team contender based on who their current seniors are and the fact that none of their upcoming juniors look like they’re going to immediately turn things around, at least not by October when they’ll need to qualify. They have a shot at being in the top 16 again, and considering everyone got injured last-minute before Doha, I thought they did a really strong job at worlds and ended up ranking better than I expected…but unfortunately for them, there are a lot of great teams right now and Australia would need them to majorly implode in Stuttgart.

Do you know why so many men do a double twist as a side pass? Is there a requirement to do an easy pass?

They can do a harder pass if they’d like…but they just don’t have the room to really run into it, so they lose power, and for most a double full is like, the most difficult they can do cleanly. A few will do more difficult side passes, like an arabian double front or something, but I think the double full works for a majority of gymnasts, so we see it most often for that reason (and for weaker floor gymnasts, we see a 1½ or a full as well).

Is there a deduction for legs apart on arabian dismounts off of beam? Or are they ignored based on the difficulty of the skill?

Yes, there is a deduction for leg separation on arabian dismounts.

Do you think gymnastics was ruined for fans when they got rid of the perfect 10?

Not at all. I think the actual fans of the sports wanted an open-ended code because they saw how difficult the sport was getting and how impossible it was to separate the good from the great at major international competitions under the old code. As for more casual viewers, sure, it’s maybe a little bit confusing to see scores like a 13.75 and not know whether it’s good or bad without any additional context, but it’s not like it’s rocket science. It’s still the most popular Olympic sport in the U.S. and I think that’s because the skills and performances transcend the scoring.

Do you think the lunge finish after tumbling on floor should be reinstated?

I think if it’s proven that the stuck feet-together landings are leading to more injuries than we saw before, then yes, it should be concerning that the code opts for aesthetic over safety. I for one prefer the stuck landings, but not at the expense of athletes who are injuring ankles and knees by trying to stick. For the men, they now allow them to stick with their feet apart, which is safer than feet together, and as long as their feet are close enough to click their heels together, they don’t get deducted…so maybe something like that can also be a compromise for the women?

The only difference between a straddled Jaeger and the Comaneci is the starting position, right?

Basically yes. A Jaeger is a front straddle salto out of a front giant, and a Comaneci is a front straddle salto done from a cast (generally a gymnast will cast to handstand, but for a Comaneci salto, about halfway through the cast, the gymnast releases the bar to complete the salto).

Why do side pirouettes like those Tourischeva performed and the underbar pirouettes like Comaneci performed no longer in the code?

Both of these are actually still in the code of points! However, since they’re not done in handstand, they’re not very valuable at all, with both rated at a C. I believe the skill Tourischeva performed is known as the Burda twirl, and the one Comaneci performed is the Caslavska, but since pirouettes like the toe full or stalder full are worth more, these have become more common over the years with these horizontal and below-the-bar release pirouettes mostly getting phased out.

In uneven bars, can you stand on the low bar and then dismount? Are they allowed to dismount from the low bar?

No, the dismount has to be done from the high bar, but there are a couple that involve the low bar, like the hip circle hecht that Nadia Comaneci did.

Do you think McKayla Maroney would’ve competed in the all-around if she was still competing in 2014? Would she have done the TTY?

Her goal was to continue doing the all-around, and she was also regularly training the triple in 2013 according to her mom at the time so I think she would have planned on attempting it at some point, but obviously I can’t say for sure.

In the 2008 and 2012 quads, a lot of gymnasts did a front aerial connected to a back handspring layout stepout, but I can’t recall anyone doing it more recently. Has it been devalued?

Yeah, it used to get a special bonus to do the front aerial into the flight series, so literally everyone on earth did it, but then the code took out that specific front to back acro connection in 2013 so it stopped. Last year one or two girls in NCAA did this series and it completely threw me back to those quads where it became almost compulsory in elite.

Why do some double layouts like Emma Malabuyo’s look low but get great distance? Is it a stylistic issue or a technique issue?

It’s more about how she technically performs the skill, not a stylistic choice. Anyone doing any skill wants to get great distance and great height. I would call Emma’s double layouts “low and long” and would love to see her get a better set so she can get a bit more height.

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Article by Lauren Hopkins