Aliya Mustafina and Simone Biles

It’s time for the 249th 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.

Why do you think Simone Biles was chosen to go to Stuttgart over someone who needs the experience? Why would she turn down American Cup for this?

I am 99% confident that both Simone and Aliya Mustafina will be in Stuttgart as a way to promote world championships, which will be held in Stuttgart later this year. The press is going to be insane at the world cup, and the FIG and worlds organizing committees are going to want the absolute biggest stars there. Simone didn’t turn down American Cup in favor of Stuttgart, and this isn’t even a strategic decision on the part of Tom Forster…it’s publicity, plain and simple.

Also, Simone and Aliya are doing the Superstars performance in London a week earlier, so it probably just worked out scheduling-wise for them to do both (and make some money while they’re at it). The U.S. hasn’t officially selected its world cup athletes, aside from preliminarily announcing the American Cup gymnasts, which they always release early. The February camp will both finalize the American Cup spots in addition to selecting the remaining world cup gymnasts. Normally, the Stuttgart decision would be part of this camp as well, and the U.S. national program would likely prefer to wait for this camp to announce the assignments officially, but this is a little different, likely because Stuttgart really wanted Simone there.

What is the ideal height for an elite gymnast?

I think around five feet, give or take a couple of inches, is most common for the majority of elites, though you often do see some who are much taller, especially now compared to like 20 years ago when everyone was under five feet and looked like a small child (the “pixie days” as they’re called). Back in the day, many coaches and national programs would basically scout for body type over talent, similar to ballet, which limited the body diversity we saw in the sport. I remember a magazine article in the 90s that had a picture of Shannon Miller and then listed all of the qualities that a successful gymnast “must have.”

Now coaches can spot talent and work with it regardless of body type or height or whatever and so it’s not uncommon for many top elites to be much taller and still have success. I’ll never forget when I met Aliya Mustafina for the first time in 2011 at the third meet I ever covered (so I was still getting used to seeing gymnasts in person as opposed to on TV) and I just assumed she was going to be this super tiny person, but she actually dwarfed me in height and I was like damn, she actually looks like a regular person as opposed to the stereotype of what a gymnast should look like drilled into my head in the 90s?! It’s crazy to think that someone with her talent who looked like her in the 80s or 90s would’ve been kicked to the curb, and the same goes for pretty much every top gymnast over the past decade or two, almost none of whom fits that 90s “ideal.”

Why do power gymnasts tend to peak later and have longer careers?

I think the majority who end up being known as power gymnasts just tend to have stronger bodies that can withstand more, whether that’s more difficult skills that require a lot of power, or just plain old more longevity in their careers. I’ve seen girls like Aly Raisman, Brenna Dowell, and MyKayla Skinner land on their heads or hyperextend into the floor multiple times and walk away because they just have so much muscle protecting their necks and ankles and knees partly because they’re built that way but also because they’re so well conditioned, it’s not a coincidence none of them has been out of the sport for any significant period of time. Then you have gymnasts like Madison Kocian who can land slightly off and then require a 75th surgery of the year.

Brenna and MyKayla could probably both come back to elite after college and easily get back to their 2016 difficulty at age 24 and be physically capable of handling it without a problem for another decade (Oksana Chusovitina much?) but gymnasts who aren’t built like them or conditioned as well as they are basically are like “please let me go sit in a hot tub for the next 20 years” at the end of college because their bodies are just so done.

My favorite memory ever was thinking Brenna seriously injured her neck after watching her land her beam dismount horrifyingly one summer, maybe in 2015? And when I was like “are you okay” and she was like “lol my head bruised my knee.” I was basically screaming laughing because the same fall for a majority of gymnasts would’ve meant a hospital visit, a neck brace, and six months out of competition. Anyone you can see doing insanely difficult skills over and over like it’s nothing are probably also going to have a ton of longevity in the sport because their bodies can handle it.

Also, to answer why they peak later, it’s because most of the power gymnasts don’t end up showing the true extent of their ability until after they’re fully used to their adult bodies. They do well as juniors, but they wait until they’re fully grown before training the hardest of their skills, so they don’t learn skills, then grow a bunch, and then lose skills and have to work on re-learning them, often unsuccessfully. Pretty much all of the most successful gymnasts in the U.S. over the last two quads have been those that either (a) were still in their kid bodies when their most important competitions came up, or (b) weren’t really threats until they got their adult bodies and then started working on the big skills.

Why is the U.S. WAG team so dominant?

Well, at the moment, they have a combination of difficulty, execution, and confidence that no other team has yet been able to match. But going deeper than this, the reason they’re able to find the kids who can do this difficulty, who can execute it so well, and who have nerves of steel to compete it successfully 90% of the time is because with several hundred thousand kids starting gymnastics between the ages of 2-4, they have a much larger pool than any other country in the world.

A few hundred kids every single year start the process of trying to someday get to the elite level through TOPs and compulsory qualifiers and developmental camps, whereas most other countries have a dozen at best, even in Russia and China. With no recreational gymnastics programs in these countries and in many others, kids either start gymnastics with the Olympics in mind, or they don’t do gymnastics at all. I had a mom with a daughter who was a level 7 in the U.S. tell me that they moved to Switzerland and their only option was baby gym (like a Little Gym with a trampoline and a ball pit) or the elite track, and so while her daughter would’ve had superb training at her level in the U.S., in Switzerland there was absolutely nothing for her.

That’s the reality in MOST countries, which is extremely limiting because you’re cutting off 90% of your depth pool before they even have a chance to show their potential for elite-level gymnastics. A seven-year-old in the U.S. who has absolutely zero interest in one day being elite can stick to J.O. gym and have fun for a few years and then one day she and her coaches can realize, hey, she might have what it takes to give elite a try, and bam. This is the reality for SO many U.S. elites who don’t have a clue at age seven that elite could someday be in their future.

In countries like the U.S. where gymnastics has multiple end goals beyond the Olympics – from hoping to someday get an NCAA scholarship to simply just having fun in rec gym – you inherently get more depth right off the bat, and even though a super tiny percentage of those kids will someday have a chance at going elite, it’s only common sense that if you start out with a huge number, you have a better chance of the absolute best kids trickling down the elite funnel, whereas if you start out with a few, you’re missing a lot of potential talent that you might not be able to recognize when a kid is younger.

In what ways do you think Liang Chow is going to turn China’s WAG program around? Do you think he can bring it back to the glory days of 2007-2008?

I think his main priority is getting them conditioned enough to have floor routines that aren’t super weak, and then work on pressure sets and other drills to build confidence so they become more consistent in major international competition. It seems for the younger ones especially, they look amazing in training but then completely freak out in competition, and Chow talked about this and how nervous they were in qualifications. I think he can definitely start bringing it back to a higher level…it’ll take a lot for them or any team to get close to where the U.S. is right now, but I think he can at least get them to a better place so that they’re not tenths away from getting beaten by lower-program teams like Canada and France, which was a real risk this year.

Has Viktoria Komova’s layout Jaeger ever been fully laid out? Is she still trying for one?

Not really. At first in 2015 I thought it was more piked than ever before, especially when she got to the apex of the skill, but I reasoned that this was just because she got so tall and didn’t have the room in the air to flip over in a fully laid-out position to regrasp the bar the way a smaller gymnast would. But I recently went back and watched some of the 2010 Youth Olympic Games and her body position when she rotates over herself is exactly the same as it was in 2015 despite her being like, half the height. I think most gymnasts who do this skill will have SOME hip angle issues when they rotate at the point where they go upside down to rightside up, but while Viktoria’s pike is one of the most severe I’ve seen at that one point in the skill, her body position looks mostly fabulous throughout the rest of it. Most of the Chinese gymnasts are pretty nicely stretched throughout as well, but even they have some slight hip bend at the apex.

Is it a deduction when Aliya Mustafina has one arm in front of her and one on the side when landing her Mustafina dismount on bars? Is it an under-rotation?

It’s always been fully rotated when she’s done that, at least that I’ve seen. Ideally she’d want to flare both arms out when she opens up for the landing, and she starts flaring out her left arm along with her right, but then I think she wants to make sure she has a solid landing and so if she feels a bit unsteady, she pulls the left arm back out in front of her to hold onto her balance. She’d probably get an adjustment deduction for it but she could potentially get more if she were to take a large step forward while fighting for the stick, so it’s the right thing to do, I think.

If gymnasts start learning beam skills by using a line on the ground, how do they start with swing-down elements?

They can still do it on the ground…they obviously just keep their legs to the side rather than swinging them alongside the beam. I’ve seen pretty much every skill trained on the ground, including Tkachevs, and even if they’re not exactly able to be mirrored completely without actually catching and swinging under a bar or straddling a beam, the muscle memory and body positions can usually be replicated in that way so it’s a good way to train for that.

Is it harder for older gymnasts to twist?

No, the ability to twist doesn’t really have anything to do with age.

I saw that Laney Madsen is vegan and was wondering if there are more elite gymnasts that are either vegan or vegetarian?

The only one off the top of my head was Sydney Laird when she was competing elite…she’s at Arkansas now and I’m not sure if she still follows a vegan diet but there was a cool article some magazine did with her about how to get enough calories and nutrients to train as an athlete while eating vegan.

Do you think beam and floor should have a cap on ‘root skills’ like bars added this quad? For instance, no double AND triple wolf turns, only one version of a ring jump or leap…

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I think the back-to-back wolf turn composition is the worst thing to ever happen to beam, so I wouldn’t mind a composition deduction for that, but I think sometimes skills of the same type can be used creatively throughout a routine and I wouldn’t want to limit that by capping them.

I heard that the team rule is 4-4-4 for Tokyo. Does this mean no specialists?

Correct. For most countries, they’ll want to bring four all-arounders…however, qualifications are still four-up three-count, so it’s conceivable that a team could bring three all-arounders and a specialist, and then just put three gymnasts up in qualifications on certain events and risk having to count a fall. This will only happen in extreme situations, I think…but take Great Britain as an example.

If they have a team of top all-arounders like Amy Tinkler, Ellie Downie, and Claudia Fragapane, they have room for either one more all-arounder whose scores are likely to all get scratched if the first three hit, or they can take Becky Downie for bars and beam, and just hope that no one falls on vault or floor in qualifications. It’s a risk, but if they take another all-arounder who wouldn’t be a top-three gymnast on anything, then they’d basically just use her as a backup for qualifications and not at all for team finals…but someone like Becky would be a risk on two events in quals, though she’d be able to contribute on bars in the team final, and her score there taking the place of Claudia’s score would do more for the team total than the random fourth all-arounder would.

Of course, an all-arounder like Georgia-Mae Fenton with a super strong bars and the ability to do good work on the other events would be ideal, but I think even though Becky is a specialist, they will absolutely consider her as a potential team competitor instead of an individual because she has the ability to enhance their team final score by quite a bit.

I do not know what NCAA gymnastics is. Can you please explain?

Universities in the U.S. have sports teams that compete under the national body called NCAA, or the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Gymnastics is a collegiate sport, and about 82 universities and colleges in the U.S. have gymnastics teams.

Is there a deduction when gymnasts hold the handstand for a few seconds on bars?

It depends. You’re supposed to show control in holding handstands rather than just swinging quickly through the vertical, but sometimes it’s clear that someone is hanging onto a handstand for TOO long because she doesn’t have control and is trying to adjust or realign her positioning. The latter would receive deductions for adjustments. It’s a subtle difference, but judges can tell when someone is mastering the handstand hold compared to someone who is making adjustment.

Given that Laurie Hernandez’s body was on the brink of giving out by the Olympics, how realistic is a comeback for her?

I think it wasn’t so much about her body giving out, but rather that she was training so hard and her body was continuously growing, making it harder for her to keep up with the high-difficulty skills she was doing. Now that she has her adult body, she won’t have to go through that fight again, though of course she’ll basically have to re-learn her skills with a body she has never trained in or competed in before, if that makes sense. I think it’ll be easier for her to stay healthy if she’s not actively growing, but it’s not always easy to get skills back if you’ve taken a significant amount of time away smack in the middle of puberty.

Simone Biles and Aly Raisman, for example, had their adult bodies when they went on hiatus, so it was fairly easy for them to come back and get skills back, but then you had someone like Gabby Douglas or Shawn Johnson who were essentially kids during their Olympic Games, grew a ton, and could no longer do some of their skills when they returned. I think Laurie could probably do a pretty great comeback on beam, since those skills are physically easy to do, and then the rest of her events could go either way.

I honestly want to see Laurie come back so badly, so I hope she’s at least able to get to a good place on beam, but the rest of the events will depend on how much her body will be able to physically handle.

Do you know why Gabby Douglas didn’t bring back her 1½ through to triple full on floor in her comeback?

Fitting that this question comes right after the previous! But going off of the above, growing so much between London and her comeback made it difficult for her to get some of her skills back, especially on vault and floor.

If Amelie Morgan competes her Amanar, would she be the first British gymnast to do so?

Yup! A couple others have trained one occasionally but she would be the first to do it in competition.

What changes would you make to Sae Miyakawa’s floor routine to make her more likely to get on the podium?

I’d probably downgrade one of her later passes to a D pass she was comfortable with so she’d be able to focus the majority of her energy on her more difficult early passes, and then end with something that would feel relatively easy for her.

Any thoughts on why uneven bars seems to always be the lowest scoring event for newer/lower-tier elites?

At its core, bars are kind of the odd-man-out of events because vault, beam, and floor all have similarities that make it easier to apply something learned on one event to another event, but then bars is totally different and it’s often the most challenging for a majority of gymnasts to master in terms of putting a full routine together.

In addition to that, in J.O. gymnasts are doing two or three bigger skills with maybe a pirouette and a dismount also thrown in, but routines basically double in length once a gymnast makes the move to elite, and simply having the endurance to get through eight elements can be super hard. A new elite might have a beautiful Hindorff to Pak or double layout dismount when done on their own, but then when it comes time to put them into a full routine, they don’t have the stamina to get through, and so they generally either do simpler skills, which means lower difficulty and lower scores, or they’ll chuck their bigger skills, but take hits from the E panel.

Jade Carey, for example, was excellent on bars in J.O., but then she got to elite and while she was able to put together elite-level vault, beam, and floor sets in a matter of months, it took her another year to put bars together, and while she does her routine well, it’s still not anything amazing by elite bars standard. People always ask me why Olivia Dunne is constantly training the most elaborate, beautiful bars combos without ever competing them, but this is pretty much why – on their own, she can do them amazingly well, but in the context of a full routine, it’s hard to make them competitive.

Would Anna Pavlova have been more successful in the all-around if she had a slightly better bars routine?

Probably. I honestly don’t remember her bars even a little, which is rare for me because I usually at least remember a skill or how they looked, but hers are a blank to me so they can’t have been all that memorable in a good or bad way? Like I also don’t remember her looking a mess on them. Going back to watch her 2008 all-around routine, she’s clean and performs them well enough, but they were kind of unmemorable in a field where many gymnasts had the most insanely dynamic routines and difficult routines, and though the rest of her events are comparable to those at the top, she’s a full two points behind on bars, so yeah, it’s safe to say a better routine would’ve made her a more competitive all-arounder.

Do gymnasts punch out of a tumbling pass because they’re short on it?

Not always. Some will punch out because their pass is so well executed, they have room to add another skill to increase their difficulty, like Aly Raisman with the punch layout out of her first pass on floor. Most who punch out of a blind landing will actually want to be fully upright or even a little over to make sure they can safely punch out of a pass, though a few who are always back on their heels might try to punch because it’ll almost force them to try to not be short.

As for those who punch out of skills like triple fulls, where you are tumbling backwards and then have to punch forward out of it, I think some will try to punch here because they know they’re going to be forward on the landing and a punch kind of hides a low chest position or something…you see this mostly from the Chinese, who are not strong tumblers in general but try to add tenths wherever they can and this is a way to do it that kind of kills two birds with one stone.

Additionally, a rule in the code says that a gymnast who punches out of a pass gets her full intended skill credited, so someone who comes up a quarter short on a triple without punching might only get credit for the 2½, but a gymnast who is a quarter short on a triple but then launches forward to kind of cause-correct the landing would get the triple credited because the theory is that if she had been short, she wouldn’t have been able to punch out. A wacky loophole that makes no sense, but hey.

Any tips on attending worlds next year?

Look into buying tickets like, now, because I’ve heard it’s selling like crazy, and if it isn’t sold out already, the promos we get out of the Stuttgart World Cup are going to be insane and finish the job.

How does going pro work in terms of advertising and money?

You’re able to accept payment for appearing in ads for brands. Some brands are sponsors of national programs, and so those brands will often then be able to use a professional athlete’s images in their ads from that point on (and pay them for it), and then the athlete generally also gets an agent who finds endorsement opportunities for the athlete to take advantage of.

If a gymnast fell 11 times in a routine, would the E score be 0 or -1?

Most international judges will just give a courtesy score of 1 to a gymnast who either doesn’t have anywhere near the elite level of difficulty or who falls so many times they get into the negatives. Nationally, though, I’ve seen a few scores in the negatives, though it’s usually related to a combination of low difficulty and short exercise penalties in addition to mistakes. A gymnast with a D score of 1.0 who gets a short exercise penalty of -8.0 and then falls twice and gets a 6.0 E score would technically get a -1.0 for her score. Again, internationally they’d probably just give her a 1 as a courtesy, Greece has a lot of bare-minimum bars competitors at nationals and they usually get courtesy scores around a 0.1, Colombia has given a 0 to gymnasts in the past, and then Egypt has given negatives.

Do all of the gymnasts work out together in the days leading up to national meets in the U.S. or do they work out doing their own thing with their coach?

A couple of days before nationals competition begins, they have scheduled practice times for the different sessions, but not everyone attends these (some get to nationals like two days early, others don’t arrive until podium training), and those who do attend will generally do the national team warm-up as a group together on floor, but then they break off into their own club groups and train the way they would at home.

Will the 2019 Superstars of Gymnastics be an actual competition or more of an exhibition?

It’s more of an exhibition or performance, not a legitimate competition with FIG scoring, though they might still find a way to score routines in a way that other gymnastics exhibition meets have done in the past (like, this person who did a better Jaeger than the other gymnast gets one point and the other gymnast gets zero). Looking up the info now, it looks like the O2 is calling it a “showcase” but there’s no other mention of what that will entail…I’m guessing more like a performance than any kind of competition though.

Why do you think Brenna Dowell’s 2015 floor routine didn’t inspire the audience and her teammates to clap along? Why didn’t she get to start over?

I think there was something with Martha Karolyi not knowing that they could’ve started over and so Brenna was on floor like, what should I do, and Martha was basically screaming at her to go because the timer had started and she was freaking out that they’d lose points for going late or something? I’m sure her teammates didn’t clap along because Martha would NOT have approved, and tbh, conspiracy theory, but I honestly wouldn’t be shocked to find out that Martha caused this to happen on purpose. I just have a feeling about it being one of her mind games to see how Brenna would respond to pressure. Part of me is like “that sounds crazy” but most of me is like “but really though, would it REALLY surprise me at this point? NOPE.”

No way can Trinity Thomas do NCAA and attend camps for worlds. How would she be able to miss all of those classes? Is she going to nationals? How will it impact NCAA?

She wouldn’t be the first to double-team NCAA and elite, and she won’t be the last. In the fall, she obviously decided not to go to the worlds camp because her chances for making the worlds team were pretty low based on how she scored at Pan Ams, who the locks for the team were at that point, and what the gaps were that they needed to fill, but going forward if she does make it to worlds camp and onto the team this year, she will be able to work with her program to do school work outside of the classroom, and she can also probably take some online classes as well. Additionally, since the elite season mostly happens during the summer in the U.S., she can pretty much finish her spring semester and then spend the next three or four months focusing on nothing but elite so that aspect won’t impact NCAA at all.

Shallon Olsen took a couple of weeks off from school this fall to go to worlds, and she said she just spent the whole plane ride doing homework and tried to do as much work as she could in her off time so she wouldn’t get behind. Often universities are more than willing to work with exceptional cases because it brings prestige to the school to have someone doing big things on the side. I went to college with figure skater Sasha Cohen and I wasn’t allowed to miss a Friday quiz when I was working full time and was asked to sub in for a sick coworker, but she was allowed to essentially travel the world and never be in a single class. NOT BITTER AT ALL. Actually I had an Italian professor my sophomore year who said we were allowed one absence that semester, unless we were one of the football players in my class, in which case they could miss as many classes as they wanted for “doing a service to the school” (considering we had the actual worst-ranked football team in DI, I disagreed). You’d be amazed to hear just how universities will bend over backwards for athletes, from the most impressive like Shallon and Trinity down to the “how are you even here?” like my football player classmates. I’m absolutely certain Trinity will be fine.

From what I gather a mixed connection of three D skills on beam is worth 0.5. Does anyone currently have a connection like this?

Depending on the skills used, yes, a D + D + D mixed series could be worth 0.5 in connection value. I can’t think of anyone who does a D + D + D mixed series, however. Most tend to have skills in the B-C range with maybe one higher-level element. I’m thinking of someone maybe doing a front aerial + side aerial + ring leap or something like that? Actually, Marine Boyer does a split leap to side somi to transverse split jump half, which is a B + D + D and that’s the closest I can come up with off the top of my head…if she did a front aerial to side somi to transverse split jump half she’d get the D + D + D. Unfortunately most of the D leaps don’t lend themselves well to being connected to things, but Marine could also start her series with a ring leap into the side somi to transverse jump and that would work, but with the head thrown back in the ring leap, it probably doesn’t end up being a super consistent connection into a subsequent acro skill.

Have a question? Ask below! Remember that the form directly below this line is for questions; to comment, keep scrolling to the bottom of the page. We do not answer questions about team predictions nor questions that ask “what do you think of [insert gymnast here]?”

Article by Lauren Hopkins