The podium at this year’s Swiss Cup

It’s time for the 345th edition of You Asked, The Gymternet Answered!

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What do you think about the introduction of a mixed team competition at the European Championships next year and also for the Olympic Games in 2028?

I personally love the mixed team competitions as a way to bring a little something fun and out-of-pocket to an otherwise serious competition. The athletes clearly take it seriously and want to medal so I don’t want to say that it’s not a serious competition, BUT I do think it’s a bit more fun for the audience to have multiple elimination rounds and it’s also nice that with a smaller field and fewer events, it doesn’t last as long and keeps the attention of the people watching, while with one athlete going at a time it gives them more of a chance to focus as opposed to the three-ring circus that is often a team or all-around final.

So inherently for these reasons, I’m always very excited to watch a mixed team competition! But at the same time, I don’t know if it will be the right fit for major international meets like Euros and the Olympics? I think the priority will still be the traditional team and individual finals, and since the mixed team events will require athletes to qualify by name, I fear many top athletes may not want to add another day to an already tough schedule, especially since it’s easy to know where you stand in most of the traditional events in terms of being a medal threat, while a mixed team event is kind of up-in-the-air. A mixed team final nearly always favors the team with a superstar MAG specialist, so often you see a team take gold after the MAG athlete gets a 15+ on parallel bars while the WAG athlete gets a 12 on beam or floor. Occasionally the balance is better, and if someone like Simone Biles on vault or Kaylia Nemour on bars were part of a mixed team it could make things more even, but I think overall it’s too skewed toward MAG specialists to make it a fair competition where both athletes are contributing at the highest level. 

My compromise would be to change the scoring to something like the Bundesliga points system so the scoring differences between MAG and WAG (or even just between the different events within MAG and WAG, as the best parallel bars specialists often score nearly a point higher than the best rings specialists!) aren’t as defining, but even then I think a mixed team event at major international competitions would be more suited to gala evenings than slated as medal events. At the end of the day, MAG and WAG are different sports with wildly different rules and codes, so while combining them for one-off meets like the Swiss Cup or making them part of, but separate from, meets like the DTB Pokal competition is so much fun, I don’t agree with adding them to Euros or the Olympics, at least without a complete overhaul of the qualification and scoring systems.

What do you think about McKayla Maroney? Was she really the queen of vault?

I think Maroney was more like the queen of the Amanar, or more generally, the queen of Yurchenko-entry vaults. She was obviously excellent as a vaulter, but I think the fact that her Yurchenko half-on was never really brilliant and that we never saw her seriously attempt any other entries with high difficulty flight makes me hesitant to consider her the queen of vault in general. To be fair, it’s rare that we see someone who is so versatile on this apparatus that they’re doing every style of entry or flight, and perhaps if she’d tried other families she would’ve been just as fantastic as she was with a Yurchenko, but the different families of vaults require different strengths and I think there are other more well-rounded WAG vaulters I’d consider as vault queens over Maroney, though this shouldn’t diminish what she was capable of and everything she did during her time in the sport!

How common is it for a gymnast to pull a Laurie Hernandez and win an Olympic gold medal without ever having gone to world championships before or after?

It’s so not common at all! The only other athletes I can think of who won Olympic gold medals without ever having attended a world championships over the past 40 years are Guan Chenchen and Daniela Sofronie, who was an alternate for worlds in 2003 but never competed as part of a team. We also haven’t seen 2020 and 2024 team gold medalists Viktoria Listunova or Hezly Rivera at any world championships – aside from junior worlds, which I wouldn’t count in this sense – but I think there’s still time for both of them to make it happen, especially with Russia now planning on applying for neutral status for some athletes.

Prior to worlds being held annually it was more common to see athletes win medals at the Olympics but never make it to worlds, so up until the 80s there are quite a few more names, with the most notable probably being Mary Lou Retton, Simona Pauca, Margit Korondi, Andrea Bodo, and about a billion Soviet athletes across several decades, as well as every member of the Dutch team in 1928 and the German team in 1936, and probably most members of the gold-medal winning Czech team in 1948, since world championships didn’t exist in women’s gymnastics until 1950.

Do you think there’s any merit that the FIG put a rule in place requiring each gymnastics team to use all of its members in a team final? It was disappointing to see the U.S. decide to drop Hezly Rivera for the final this year.

I think the FIG gets frustrated when teams don’t use each and every member, which is part of the reasoning for why they limited teams to four athletes at the Olympics in 2020 – they were like, we’re giving you spots for five athletes, but you’re just bringing someone for no reason and only using four?! I wouldn’t be surprised if they made it a rule that all athletes on a team must compete in a team final barring injury, BUT I personally wouldn’t agree with it.

Part of leading a team is to strategize, and even if you go in with the best intentions to use all five athletes, if qualifications show that one athlete would not be a good fit in a three-up three-count situation, I think it’s the coach’s right to decide to leave that athlete off the final roster. It sucks and is disappointing when athletes are left out – Rivera is far from the first to have this happen! – especially when a team is so far ahead. It likely would not have made ANY DIFFERENCE to the end result had the U.S. used Rivera in place of Jordan Chiles on bars, even if she fell! Part of me is like, she’s 16 years old, she kind of shockingly made the Olympics after not really being expected to get here, give her a chance! But the other part of me feels that spots on teams have to be earned, and while she earned her spot on the Olympic team, she did not necessarily earn a spot in the team final. It would have been nice, and as a softy, I probably would’ve thrown her a bone if I were leading the team. But I also understand and respect why the U.S. wanted the best possible team despite how far ahead they were expected to end up, especially after missing gold in Tokyo.

Is there an updated list for WAG injuries and retirements after the Olympics?

I don’t really keep injury lists because statuses change so often in terms of where athletes are in their recovery, but in terms of retirements, I think the most notable were Olympians Maellyse Brassart of Belgium, Filipa Martins of Portugal, and Becky Downie of Great Britain, though I don’t know if Downie ever announced and think hers was more implied? Hmm. In the U.S. we’ve seen many athletes – including Olympians Jordan Chiles and Jade Carey – return to NCAA programs, but whether they’ve retired from elite or will continue on while competing in college is still not official. I believe I also heard Marine Boyer of France is retiring? On the MAG side, the biggest losses to retirement are probably Max Whitlock of Great Britain, Igor Radivilov of Ukraine, and Lukas Dauser of Germany.

When a gymnast does a toe-on skill on bars, do her feet have to be together? I just realized that Nastia Liukin’s legs were more straddled for her toe-on skills. Would a straddled toe-on be a deduction in the code today?

No, feet or legs don’t have to be together for a toe-on! Both the straddle and pike positions are allowed for toe-on elements, and Liukin’s straddled toe-ons would not be a deduction in today’s code.

Why was Kaylia Nemour given such low E scores on beam and floor in Paris? To the naked eye, what components were the main sources of her deductions? I thought she would be at the top of the field on both based on other recent international results and was surprised at her scores in Paris. Will she look to fine-tune her current routines, or is her routine construction holding her back?

Her beam connections specifically were a bit slow and I think worse than her execution, the judges absolutely destroyed her anticipated start value. The skills she performed should’ve had her at a 6.4 D, but instead in the all-around final she ended up at a 5.6, and I think that’s because they didn’t credit her switch leap to switch half, and then also likely the front aerial to split jump. The connection value for the former is only a tenth, BUT if she missed that series, she also lost five tenths for the leap connection requirement because she didn’t make up for the lost connections elsewhere in her routine.

Maybe she didn’t realize she wouldn’t get the leaps credited, or just wasn’t thinking on her feet? Often when gymnasts realize they’re slow, they’ll add in a simple split jump to sissone or something elsewhere in the routine to ensure they get the requirement in, so I assume Nemour just didn’t expect that something like this would happen. Slower and tentative elements also usually affect the athlete’s E score, and I don’t think her switch half really looked as tidy or exact as it did in other competitions where she scored higher.

I feel like her floor was fine and again she didn’t have any glaring problems that would’ve taken her E score down dramatically, but in the all-around she had landing deductions on every tumbling run, including a really short finish on the triple that would’ve resulted in a chest-down deduction as well as several tenths for the steps, and then she also came up short on the double tuck at the end, taking a three-tenth step forward. Those two passes alone were probably responsible for nearly half of her E score deductions, so while it wasn’t BAD, it’s just a bunch of things adding up.

How do gymnasts qualify for world championships in 2025?

There is no qualification for individual world championships! While teams and individuals will have to qualify through continental championships and world cups in 2026 and 2027, the first worlds of the quad will once again allow any national federation in good standing to attend.

After years of trending towards packing in as many floor passes as allowed, I feel like we’re seeing a lot more three-pass routines this quad. Do you know if there’s a specific reason why that trend seems to have abruptly reversed?

Most athletes try to be efficient with all of their routines, but especially on floor, where endurance can really affect how you perform. Because the code values connections within the same pass, especially with the current requirement to have a true forward element instead of being able to get away with a random aerial as in previous codes, a gymnast would rather pack multiple elements into a single run and get everything out of the way in three instead of four. Many of these gymnasts tend to be strong at dance as well, and with only three passes taking up time in their routines, they can have more time to do more complicated dance elements. Of course, we still have the Simone Biles of the world doing four difficult passes, but for gymnasts who don’t have her power or endurance levels, going for three is a much more sustainable option.

Why would the FIG rate the Yurchenko double pike with a relatively high start value but only add a measly tenth for her double double beam dismount? Donatella Sacchi’s rationale for undervaluing the beam dismount was related to safety issues, but the Yurchenko double pike seems a lot more dangerous.

I don’t think they were able to realistically negotiate anything lower for the Yurchenko double pike than what they ended up giving it. On vault, the Yurchenko double pike adds a whole other flip, which is quite different from simply adding a full twist. Of course, a double double off beam is ridiculously hard and based on the progression of elements below it, should’ve been valued higher. There’s no argument there. But with an athlete adding an entire extra flip, the technical committee can’t get away with arguing it should only be a couple of tenths higher than other difficult Yurchenkos, all of which only have single flips. Even though it’s clearly dangerous – much more so than a double double beam dismount – they also had to consider just how difficult this was in comparison to any other vault basically ever done and rate it with that in mind. Honestly they probably could have gone even higher and likely were being a bit conservative!

Why did gymnasts bother beginning to compete Yurchenko double fulls if both that and a 1½ were both out of a 10? Seems like an unnecessary risk to me.

Since a Yurchenko 1½ has a blind landing, it can actually be easier for some athletes to land a vault with more twists where they’re able to spot the landing than it is for them to consistently have good landings on a 1½, where they are unable to spot. The double obviously takes more power and skill, BUT if a gymnast has both and struggles with landing the blind vault without taking steps, it makes sense that they’d go for the vault that’s ultimately cleaner and easier for them.

Had Aly Raisman not retired, would she have had to upgrade her floor to continue to stand on the podium given the number of H-level elements we’ve seen?

I think she would’ve had to upgrade, especially in comparison to other Americans who came after her, but I still think she would’ve been pretty solidly in the mix with the current group? Maybe the double pike to finish would’ve been ‘too easy’ in comparison (though I’m sure she could’ve been able to add a front full or something into it!), but I also think she was generally so solid with her routine, even if her difficulty was slightly behind, it wouldn’t be by much and she likely could have outscored many of the current gymnasts with H skills thanks to her ability and control.

Can you explain to someone who has never done gymnastics what it means when people say that a gymnast swings bars well?

I always think of a good bars swinger as someone who makes her bars look ‘natural’ in the sense that she’s not showing all of the tremendous effort that goes into swinging. I think it becomes easier to spot the more you watch, but I can generally tell when someone looks labored in their swing, like you can see them doing the work and you can tell that it’s hard. But there are some gymnasts – like Viktoria Komova as a prime example for me – who swing bars like it’s nothing. Basically, they are doing a LOT of work to make it look like they’re simply breezing by completely unbothered. This usually encompasses a mix of tap technique, speed, flexibility, momentum, and control, which someone who has never done gymnastics may not be able to understand at the physical level, but I think the more you watch, even if you can’t see each of these things individually, you can start to recognize when someone has every element of what it means to be a good bars swinger!

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Article by Lauren Hopkins