Kyla Ross

It’s time for the 271st 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.

How is Kyla Ross’ bars worth a 10? 

In NCAA, they don’t need a same-bar release, so transitions are considered releases. I think this is where the majority of people come in with “Kyla’s routine is too easy,” because she lacks that same-bar release, but I’m gonna show you why that doesn’t matter, why she hits every requirement in the NCAA code, and why she actually goes above and beyond what’s needed to earn a 10 SV.

This question was from last year, where Kyla did a Maloney + bail + toe shoot, and then a double layout (along with all of the A skills, like giants, of course). She meets all of the A-B-C skill requirements, she gets the two bar transitions (low-to-high with the Maloney, high-to-low with the bail), she gets two flight elements (again, the Maloney and bail), she gets the element with 1/2 turn (the bail counts here; the “turn” on bars doesn’t have to be a legit pirouette in NCAA), and then she has a minimum C dismount, so she meets every requirement to have a 9.5 start value.

On top of the requirements, to have a routine that starts out of a 10, you have to add connections and bonuses. Kyla has a 0.3 connection value for her Maloney + bail + toe shoot series to bring her to 9.8, and then she gets 0.1 bonus for her Maloney (D), 0.1 for her bail (D), and 0.2 for her double layout (E), which is 0.4 in bonus.

Not only does she meet a 10 under the NCAA code, she actually technically goes above and beyond because she has two extra tenths left over. She could do a C dismount and still be at a 10, thanks to those two D elements and the connections.

Kyla’s routine looks easy, but that combined series she does just happens to be worth more than a routine that’s just like, Jaeger, bail, dismount. A Maloney to bail is pretty hard, and I know a lot of NCAA athletes who can’t do a Maloney on its own, so to connect it at this level is pretty badass. I know people want to see Kyla doing inbars and back-to-back releases, but as ‘easy’ as her routine looks, it’s actually pretty great.

Where do judges find deductions in Simone Biles’ vaults, aside from steps on landings and crossed feet in the air? She got a 9.650 E score at classics this year. What else do you think they deducted for?

Her Cheng isn’t quite as clean as her Amanar (it’s harder to get full extension in your body line on a front layout off the table, but even though hers isn’t a hundred percent perfect right now, it’s still the best out there!), but the landings are generally better than her Amanar landings.

I think on her Cheng, she’s generally deducted more for her form, and then for her Amanar she’s deducted more for the landing. If she stuck an Amanar, I could see her legitimately getting a 9.9 E score. It’s that perfect. But her leg and hip form in the Cheng isn’t quite as tight, and I’d imagine that’s where her deductions are coming from. A 9.65 at Classics is still obviously an incredible E score, and her “problems” with her form aren’t big at all…like, a tenth for the feet, a tenth for the knees, a tenth for the hips, and then a little slide back on the landing comes out to four tenths which seems pretty reasonable to me. Since she got a 9.65, it looks like some judges maybe took four tenths and others took three.

Do you think Viktoria Komova at her peak would have been able to challenge Simone Biles?

I think she definitely could’ve gotten close…I feel like Vika peaked at different times on each event and so never really quite had it all together at one time, aside from maybe in 2010, but if you combined all of her different event peaks, I think she could be pretty close to Simone’s level, making up for what Simone does on floor with what she could do on bars. I do think Simone would have the edge overall, but on an iffy day for Simone and a perfect day for Vika, it could’ve been close, and Simone definitely wouldn’t have been able to afford a fall.

Laurie Hernandez is cutting it VERY close in terms of making it to the Olympics. Do you think she risks pulling a Nastia Liukin and just being too late to the party?

Yeah, it could happen that she’s just not able to get there in time, and it’s too bad we didn’t get to see her come back sooner and go to worlds a couple of times, but at the same time I’m really glad she made the decision for herself and got to do something besides gymnastics for a few years. There’s also the fact that Laurie was 16 and growing in Rio, and I honestly think her body just needed that time to grow without also training through the growth spurt, which is how so many athletes get injured. Even though she didn’t get that extra experience or additional time to train which means she’s cutting it close for Tokyo, she did what was best for her physically and mentally, and I hope she has an incredible time doing this for herself even if she doesn’t end up being a top Olympic contender. I do think based on what we’ve seen that she’ll get at least two events back at a really high level, similar to Nastia in 2012. I’m excited to see it, and am just happy to get to see her perform again.

Will the women’s team for Tokyo still have three alternates in addition to the four-person team and two individuals? Would there potentially be nine women traveling to Tokyo?

Yes, there’s likely to be three alternates again, and yes, we’ll probably see them travel to Tokyo. However, like in years past, they won’t be able to train or live in the Village and USA Gymnastics will have to find a gym and housing elsewhere. There could be nine women traveling, but the six who compete and the three who don’t will be split apart from each other.

Are there deductions for mistakes in choreography (anything that isn’t a skill in the code)?

I think if a judge notices that a gymnast stumbles or something during choreography, they can take off, but I don’t think they’d catch it every time, especially if a gymnast is able to artfully cover it up.

If an athlete qualifies as an individual for Tokyo and one of the members of the team gets injured, would the individual be able to fill in? 

Yes. They’d have to follow rules related to alternates, of course…so no subs following the lineups being due, but I think they’d prefer to sub in an individual athlete over bringing in a separate alternate, because then they would be using a gymnast who is already in the Village and they wouldn’t need to boot out the injured athlete/take away her credentials.

If it’s a few days before the competition and they still have room to be swapping, say Jade Carey is the individual athlete who best fits the spot on the U.S. team that opens up, they could move her to the team, but then they wouldn’t be able to bring in an alternate to take Jade’s individual spot because it will be nominative, so only five U.S. gymnasts would compete but they wouldn’t have to remove the injured athlete from the Village. But if they end up using the non-nominative gymnast, they could have her fill in on the team, remove the injured athlete, and bring in an alternate to the non-nominative individual spot so they could still have six athletes competing (though this would mean the bummer experience of kicking the injured athlete out of the Village, which we know the U.S. doesn’t like to do).

Why did Jade Carey decide to qualify through world cups rather than with the team?

I think her dad was really smart in making the request, because if she can win an event, it’s a guaranteed spot for her, whereas coming in and trying to make the team in 2020 with so much depth would be super difficult and might not happen for her…even if she’s looked great all quad and seems likely to make the team, it’s still not a guarantee, and so going through the world cups puts fate into her own hands. Again, it was a great move on their part…it’s not the best situation for the U.S. program as a whole, and the national team staff let her go to the world cups pretty begrudgingly, but for any athlete from a country with a full team who is lucky enough to earn that world cup opportunity and then qualifies that way, it’s pretty much the best-case scenario for them knowing they have the Olympics locked down early in the process and nothing they do — barring a season-ending injury — can change that.

Do you know why Russia didn’t use Ksenia Afanasyeva on balance beam during team finals in Beijing?

Officially? No. I can guess that even though she had one of the top routines in qualifications, Ludmila (Ezhova) Grebenkova was basically at the Olympics for beam and was expected to have the higher-scoring routine if she hit. I personally don’t think she was super necessary for the team with Ksenia looking so good on the event, but Ksenia was also doing the other three events in the team final, so with a beam specialist, I think it could’ve been their way of giving Ksenia a break.

Seeing Ludmila struggle in qualifications while Ksenia looked fab, maybe they could have reevaluated their decision and opted to not use Ludmila at all in the team final, but I think the hope was that she’d stay on and bring in a really big score. She really was an incredibly strong beam worker, and historically her scores were far better than Ksenia’s, so I get why they thought maybe Ksenia’s qualifications routine was a fluke and that Ludmila would do better in the team final…in hindsight it’s easy to be like “Ksenia should have competed” but I think in the moment, it wasn’t as clear.

Looking at videos of Emelie Petz’s bars in 2018, I don’t understand her construction. She has problems with her Pak or directly afterwards. Couldn’t she do a bail instead and add a stalder half?

I don’t think it’s necessarily the Pak she struggled with, but rather the toe-on after it at times. Her Pak is actually quite nice! It’s clean and she’s generally pretty consistent with it unlike her same-bar releases, which tend to give her a bit more trouble. At times she also misses her feet on toe-on skills, including the one after her Pak, but this year she upgraded that to a van Leeuwen, and from the routines of hers I’ve seen in 2019, she’s been more or less fine with that. It would be cool to see her connect the Pak to the van Leeuwen, and I think that’s the logical next step for her in terms of upgrades…and it would also get rid of the handstand deduction she tends to get in the cast out of her Pak.

During a figure skating meet the score is shown live as the athlete is performing and we see it build up during the routine. Do you believe it would be possible to do the same for gymnastics? Do you think it would make the sport more interesting?

Someone had an idea a few posts ago about showing skill ratings on a scale to show people the value and how easy/hard it is on the spectrum, which I think would be really cool and interesting. I don’t think casual viewers will be all that turned on by seeing the intricacies of the code happening in front of them, though gym fans would LOVE it…and because there are always so many discrepancies between what a gymnast is attempting and what she is awarded (especially in terms of connections on beam), it could get really confusing to be have some sort of live digital scoring happening in real time showing a 6.5 and then her score comes in and she has a 5.4 or whatever. Explaining that to casual viewers could get super complicated.

But I do like the idea of doing something. I think what NBC currently does with the triangles doesn’t make sense because they’re like “uh oh, a 13.5 is bad!!!” but in 2017 a 13.5 was like the best possible score EVER on beam at worlds, lol, so while a 13.5 on vault would show that it was a weak event for that gymnast, a 13.5 on beam is basically a 15.5 on vault and it makes no sense to cross-compare between events. I think having a judge working with a graphics team to share the difficulty rating of a skill as it’s being performed would work, though, and then when there are lots of connections (like on bars), they can talk about how connecting those two E skills makes it much harder than just doing the two skills separately or something without getting into the actual CV bonuses and blah blah.

Do you think Zoé Allaire-Bourgie has a chance at making the Canadian Olympic team?

I do! I think it could be tight…right now it looks like Ellie Black, Ana Padurariu, Brooklyn Moors, and Shallon Olsen are the “preferred four” and at their best, they should all be top three on multiple events. Zoé needs a bit of a difficulty boost on her strongest events, which I’d consider bars and beam, if she wants to fit into that mix, but I could see her challenging for sure, especially given Ana’s recent struggles on the two events Zoé happens to be strongest at. Right now, Ana is absolutely the better gymnast on both, but she’s also been pretty inconsistent on beam, and her growth spurt has given her lots of problems on bars, to the point where she wasn’t even used in the team final at worlds this year…even though Brooklyn’s bars are weaker, she had the more confident set and they went with that instead, which is pretty telling. I really hope Ana can stay injury-free and figure out how to mentally get her bars skills back to where they should be, and I think at their best, Ana will get the spot over Zoé, but I do think Zoé will ramp it up going into 2020 and make herself a legit threat.

I know that when a gymnast tries to save a skill upon landing and falls anyway, they typically only get a one-point deduction. But can this also apply to form errors in the air? If a gymnast starts tucking her legs during a layout skill and falls, would she get more than a point off?

She’d get the deductions for the form in the air in addition to the deductions for the fall. I think the reasoning for not deducting for the million wobbles before a fall is because essentially, that deduction is only about the landing, so since the landing had a million wobbles and attempts to save and then resulted in a fall, all of those wobbles were part of the fall. But if she has form errors in the air, that’s separate from the landing, even if those errors in the air could have been partly responsible for the bad landing.

Is it better for a gymnast to have short or long legs? I’ve noticed Kara Eaker’s legs are short in comparison to many other gymnasts. Does it make a difference?

I think generally, short limbs are preferred for gymnastics. They fight inertia less, so they’re easier to move quickly, and they are more stable because they lower the body’s center of gravity. There are lots of long-limbed gymnasts now, and that makes for a great aesthetic on bars and on leaps, and obviously in today’s era, gymnasts with all body types are finding success at the highest levels compared to just a couple of decades ago where things like short legs were specifically sought out in children starting out in the sport. But I think scientifically, short legs are “preferred” and make some things easier, especially in terms of tumbling and landings.

Is it true Kara Eaker and Morgan Hurd were adopted from the same orphanage in China?

I’ve heard that they were adopted from the same city but I’m not sure how accurate that is? All I know about Kara is that she was adopted from Jiangxi province, but Morgan was adopted from the city Wuzhou, in the Guangxi province, so these are obviously different. I’m not sure where the same city/same orphanage rumor came from, but I can’t confirm if it’s accurate.

When Rebecca Bross does her beam dismount, she kind of walks into her roundoff, whereas other gymnasts have a much faster pace. Did that cause her Patterson dismount to be even more difficult?

It could have created difficulties in that walking into a roundoff doesn’t give you as much momentum as running into it does…but perhaps when she ran into it, she got too much power and maybe some of her reasoning for always being a bit short and sitting it was because she was afraid to put too much in? I think gymnasts do hold back sometimes in an effort to keep from overrotating, especially on skills with blind landings, and sometimes that holding back gets them exactly where they need to be…but it seemed like she just never got that timing quite right.

I saw on Instagram pictures of Olivia Dunne and Haleigh Bryant at the LSU gym wearing leos. Could this mean they’re going to join the team early?

I believe both were just there for a visit and photo shoot…neither has plans to join the team until the 2021 season.

What would you do to change vault? It’s almost harder than the other apparatuses because so few people have two vaults. You can also fake your way through bars (like Aly Raisman did with a routine that worked for her and was still difficult) but you can’t do that on vault.

Well, Aly’s situation for bars (and anyone else’s situation for beam and floor) is a bit different because she wasn’t trying to make a final for bars; she just wanted to get through a routine that she could feel confident and consistent with. Her bars are basically the equivalent of an FTY on vault, which almost anyone can do at the highest levels of elite (except Ksenia Klimenko and Shang Chunsong, haha). In the current code, it’s much easier for a weak vaulter to still get a 13.3-13.6 total or around a 4.6 SV than it is for a weak bars gymnast to get a similar score. Yes, having two vaults is difficult, but the only ones who need two vaults are gymnasts hoping to make the event final, in which case you usually get the strongest vaulters attempting it anyway because only those with the strongest vaults are going to challenge for the final.

For vaults or for twisting skills on floor, how do gymnasts distinguish between doing a double or a 2½? Is it just timing?

Yeah, timing and knowing when to open up and land. Sometimes you do get those who overrotate, but I think often when gymnasts start showing too much power on something like a double on floor, then you know it’s upgrade time and that’s when they start working on the more difficult version of that element.

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