Miyata Shoko

It’s time for the 344th edition of You Asked, The Gymternet Answered!

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What happened to the fifth member of the Japanese WAG team at the Olympics? Why was she removed from the team, and why wasn’t she replaced with an alternate?

Japan is really strict with its laws as they related to underaged drinking and smoking, and apparently, Miyata Shoko – who was 19 over the summer, just a month shy of the legal age – was caught doing both in the lead-up to the games by one of her teammates who then reported her. In addition to being illegal for Miyata, smoking and drinking while “on the job” for the Japanese team violated the code of conduct, so Miyata was forced to withdraw from the Olympic team.

The team did have an alternate – Sugihara Aiko – and though the coaches wanted her to step in so they’d have a full squad on the floor instead of just four athletes, they weren’t allowed to because Miyata wasn’t withdrawing due to an injury or other medical reasons. A very unfortunate situation for any athlete, but especially for Miyata after her incredibly successful quad, as well as for the entire team, which definitely would have been in the medal hunt with Miyata in the mix.

Lately I’ve noticed that you’ve posted meet results with points like (+0.1) – are these bonus points? Is this now the new standard for scoring?

Yes, whenever I add tenths in parenthesis with a plus sign I mean to say there are bonus points included in the total score – so a 13 with a +0.1 in parenthesis is actually a 12.9. This is not an FIG standard, but many national programs have started using bonus systems as incentives, sometimes to encourage more difficulty, sometimes to encourage execution, so I try to include all bonuses when I share results to make it clear that the scores you’re seeing aren’t completely accurate in terms of what the athlete would receive internationally. 

For the most part the bonuses are minor, but some programs – France with its espoir-level athletes, for example – reward multiple points in bonus, so obviously it’s a huge difference when you see a 13-year-old with a 60 AA that’s really supposed to be a 51 AA or something. When I update athletes’ profiles or the top scores database, I also use only the real scores and not the scores with bonus so again what you’re seeing is an accurate representation. Some national programs don’t specify when a score includes bonus, so it’s not perfect, but in these cases it’s often really obvious when bonus is used (e.g. a junior with a 6.5 D on floor two weeks after getting a 4.0 D internationally) so I’ll just make a note on the results and don’t include them in any top scores lists.

Regarding the 2000 all-around final, if they had done what everyone thought they should have done – stopped the competition and had a do-over on a different day – would that have also had an impact on Andreea Raducan’s situation? Could that have changed the entire trajectory of Romanian gymnastics in the 21st century?

It definitely could have changed the course for Raducan, since she tested positive for pseudoephedrine only on the day of the all-around competition which is the only medal she had stripped – she was allowed to keep both her vault and team medals because she did not have any issues with doping on either of those days, so had the all-around competition been postponed due to the vault issues, it’s absolutely possible she wouldn’t have tested positive here.

I don’t think it would have changed the trajectory of Romanian gymnastics, though – I think the quality of their gymnastics started to change with the introduction of the open-ended difficulty, as their coaches and athletes simply weren’t able to keep up with other countries that figured out how to work the new code for their advantage. This was an issue for many top programs in the early 2000s, where we saw teams like Spain, Australia, and Ukraine in team finals, but then with the open-ended code, they started to fall back as they couldn’t keep up with other rising nations that learned how to thrive under this new code, like Great Britain, Italy, and Canada. Romania was able to rely on some top talent to keep them going a bit longer – like Catalina Ponor and Sandra Izbasa – and there have been the occasional newcomers who have been super talented and able to work with higher levels of difficulty, but I think for the most part their decline was more due to their coaching and the inability to progress talented young athletes from more junior-level skills to the level that became necessary to compete well against other senior athletes. It’s clearly something they’ve been working on, but compared to nations like the United States and Russia, they still don’t have anything I would consider to be depth at the highest level. They’re again relying on a few really strong individual athletes as opposed to learning how to train athletes to transition successfully from talented juniors to high-level seniors, and I don’t think Raducan keeping her all-around title would have had any impact on this.

What do you think about the Paris 2024 women’s floor final drama? My unpopular opinion is that Jordan Chiles’ inquiry should never have been accepted and that Sabrina Voinea did not step out-of-bounds. I think it should have been Voinea in third, Ana Barbosu in fourth, and Jordan Chiles in fifth.

Not such an unpopular opinion I guess, because this is word-for-word what my opinion has been since the very first day! Had Voinea not been given a penalty for absolutely no reason, she would have been the clear and rightful winner of the bronze medal despite everything that was going on between Barbosu and Chiles. It’s wild that the judges made such an egregious mistake, and also unfortunate that Voinea’s coach/mother did not think to submit an inquiry for the penalty until long after the fact.

I think it’s unfortunate that line judges often make such obvious errors at ANY point in any competition, but for it to happen repeatedly in the floor final at the Olympic Games is absolutely inexcusable and makes me think there should be automatic review of all OOB penalties in major international finals going forward. In a sport where so much is subjective and hard to judge in real time – like Chiles’ leap, which was not credited at first – I can be a bit more forgiving, and there are always going to be questionable skills that could go either way depending on who is reviewing. That’s the nature of subjective sports and we have to live with it. But in this case, Voinea being docked a tenth for no reason is absolutely not something that should have happened at this level and it’s infuriating that this one “little” mistake caused so much drama and heartache that ultimately affected three athletes.

In your opinion, is the start value for the Yurchenko double pike in WAG correct? There’s nothing to compare it to, so I wonder how the FIG came up with the difficulty value.

It’s hard to say what is “correct” when there is little source of comparison, and in this case, even the FIG had some issues coming up with the “right” value, as they had originally came up with 6.2 and it was only after Biles and her coaches submitted a petition to change it to a 6.4 that it landed at its current value. 

I think one way of looking at it is seeing the value of a Yurchenko vault without a salto compared to a Yurchenko vault with one salto, and then determining what then makes sense for a Yurchenko vault with two saltos. Similarly, the women’s technical committee can look to how these vaults differ in the MAG code, which isn’t quite the same in terms of how different vaults are valued in relation to each other, but it can give some guidance, especially in terms of looking at single-salto vault compared to a double-salto vault. I also think the technical committee can look at the values of other similarly difficult vaults – the Produnova, the original Biles vault – and reasoning how difficult the Biles II was relative to these. I’m sure there are lots of discussions that revolve around all of these methods and that the ultimate decision is made once everyone is in agreement on what makes the most sense, but I think they also open it up to petition because I’m sure there are always going to be people – especially the athlete who introduces the skill – who disagree.

McKayla Maroney said she trained the Yurchenko double back in the tucked position. What would that be worth in terms of start value? 

I believe that the tuck would be a 6.2 based on something I read in 2023 after Biles and her coaches petitioned for the 6.4 for the piked version? I don’t think there should be a full four tenths of difference between a tucked position and a piked position, so I can’t imagine the technical committee going as low as a 6.0, but also don’t think the two positions would be rated the same, so a 6.2 is a solid middle ground in my book.

Had McKayla Maroney competed the Yurchenko double tuck, would that mean she would not have been able to compete her famous Amanar in vault finals?

Yes, since both vaults are in the same vault family – a Yurchenko entry with no twist – it means Maroney would have been able to do either one or the other in vault qualifications or finals. Of course, she could’ve done the Yurchenko double tuck in prelims along with her ‘Mustafina’ second vault, and then swapped to the Amanar with the ‘Mustafina’ for the finals! And I’d imagine they’d also have her do the Amanar and not the riskier double tuck in the team final as well.

Why doesn’t Stephen Nedoroscik strap his glasses on like Morgan Hurd used to? I know he’s able to compete without them but it seems like that was almost a last resort. Why wouldn’t a strap be an option?

Maybe it’s just a preference? I’ve tried the glasses strap for ballet/theater (my glasses have flown from my face mid-pirouette on MANY occasions) but it simply annoyed me and I didn’t like the look, so I instead don’t wear them for classes or performances, and it’s not ideal, but it works for me and I don’t need them for these activities. He did wear his lucky goggles for years for good luck, so I guess the strap wouldn’t have bothered him, but I honestly feel like if I was wearing my glasses to do something super athletic, even with the strap I’d be worried about them slipping or falling off or something so that could be the reason!

In London, Jordyn Wieber qualified fourth in the all-around, in Rio, Gabby Douglas qualified in third, and in Paris, Jordan Chiles qualified in fourth. Isn’t the two-per-country rule just silly at this point? An athlete qualifying third or fourth could easily win a medal.

Yeah, I’ve never been a fan of the two-per-country rule, especially because the FIG’s reasoning is that it opens up more opportunities for “smaller programs” but the athletes who make it into a final when a higher-level athlete is kicked out for being third-best on their team almost ALWAYS end up being athletes from larger, well-established programs who simply made lots of mistakes in prelims and couldn’t qualify in their own right. I did the math in 2012 and the only format that allows for both top talent and greater opportunities is three-per-country in a 36-person final. 

Despite my feelings here, I do find it funny that the U.S. fought hardest for the two-per-country rule in the wake of Romanian dominance in 2000, and now is the country complaining the most about losing opportunities due to this rule. The entitlement!

Why don’t they make the floor larger to accommodate the difficulty of the current routines? It seems out-of-bounds penalties happen more and more frequently.

I guess it’s just one of those set-in-stone things that isn’t yet a priority to change? Like, there were legitimate safety concerns with redesigning the vault and the widening of the uneven bars came with the invention of big release skills for the women, but while there have been advances in the skill level on floor which are due to athletes bringing more power into their tumbling, none of it has been ‘innovative’ in the same way I guess? Yes, there are steps out-of-bounds that result from these bigger skills, but not always, and not in ways that create massive issues if the FIG does not increase the size of the floor, so I’d again just guess that it’s not a priority. And given that the technical committees for both MAG and WAG tend to be a bit more conservative with how they undervalue a lot of bigger skills using safety as their reasoning, they’d probably fight against making the floor larger to limit the number of athletes who go for bigger tumbling runs.

Why did Marta Pihan-Kulesza attempt a quintuple pirouette if it’s worth the same as a quadruple pirouette?

There are a few skills that athletes tend to go for despite there being a difficulty cap or limits that would make the skill the same value as an easier skill, but I think athletes like showing off their talent and ability and even though it doesn’t benefit them in terms of their score, it’s still worth performing because it makes their routine that much more fun and exciting to watch. If I could do a quintuple pirouette well, I’d do it even if it was the same value as a single pirouette, just because it’s awesome. I think a lot of smaller program gymnasts who might not necessarily have the difficulty to medal sometimes bring something ‘extra’ into their routines – especially on floor – because they want to show that they can still stand out as top athletes even if their scores might not suggest it.

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Article by Lauren Hopkins