The latest from China’s best hope for gold on the floor exercise has been highly anticipated. Cheng debuted this routine at the Chinese Nationals, which are going on now.
Cheng Fei, 2008 Chinese Nationals Team Finals, Floor Exercise:
How does it compare to her other routines?
The usual suspects — including Fabian Hambuchen, Yuri van Gelder and Nikolai Kryukov — all did very well during team qualifications at the Men’s European Championships in Lausanne, Switzerland, International Gymnast Magazine reports.
Going into team finals, the picture looks like this:
1. Russia 273.175
2. Germany 268.000
3. Ukraine 267.025
4. Romania 266.275
5. Belarus 265.150
6. Switzerland 264.800
7. France 263.300
8. Italy 262.950
Russia seems likely to win the team title, but some good races are shaping up for event finals, particularly on rings, where would-be Olympic rings contender van Gelder will go up against Jordan Jovtchev. 2007 World high bar champion Hambuchen will go up against 2001 World high bar champion Vlasios Maras of Greece in event finals as well.
Some surprises though: Veteran among veterans Kryukov is leading on parallel bars and pommel horse. I think of Kryukov as the veteran among veterans not because he’s 28, but more because he’s been around since 1996, when at 16 he was the youngest member of the gold-medal winning Russian team in Atlanta.
The best male gymnasts of the past 10 years — Li Xiaoshaung, Alexei Nemov, Ivan Ivankov, Alexei Bondarenko, Li Xiaopeng, Yang Wei, Yevgeny Podgorny, Rustam Sharipov, Marian Dragulescu, Hiroyuki Tomita, Paul Hamm — Kryukov’s gone up against all of them. And the 1999 World Champion has proven that he’s among the best too.
In other news, the Russians appear to have let Maxim Devyatovsky back onto the team after his stint of bad behavior at the 2007 World Championships.
Devyatovsky competed all six events and was the top individual, though the all-around will not be contested in Lausanne.
In which Inside Gymnastics Magazine calls out the media for not knowing enough about gymnastics:
The media was anxious to ramp up the rivalry between World Champs [Shawn] Johnson and [Nastia] Liukin. When the duo maintained they were friends, really—“We text each other all the time,” Johnson insisted—one particularly persistent reporter asked, more than once, “But there’s gotta’ be a down side to having two of the world’s best all-arounders on one team, right?” (To paraphrase the most popular answer: Umm, not so much.)
For a second it looked like Johnson had opened the window to a wished-for war within the team when she told reporters that she and Liukin had different, quote, “lifestyles.” But, when asked to elaborate, Johnson, looking a bit bewildered, said: “Well, she’s 18 and I’m 16. I’m still in high school … but we’re both teenage girls. We love shopping.” Hardly tabloid-worthy trash talk. Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie these two are not.
NBCOlympics.com is going to broadcast and archive a lot of its Olympic footage from lesser-broadcast sports, NBC Vice President for Digital Media Perkins Miller said in an interview published earlier this week.
NBC intends to broadcast and archive 17 days of the Olympics on the site, resulting in 2,200 hours of video which users may watch live and call up on-demand for free.
Miller sees this as a complementary repository to what the broadcaster will air on TV. “We’re talking about doing 25 sports online that we aren’t really doing on broadcast. There will be significantly more content online than on air,” said Miller, adding that he has observed strong demand from fans for on-demand content.
Gymnastics is one of the lucky sports that gets a lot of airtime, so it might not be one of the 25. (”The figure skating of the Summer Games,” a friend aptly called it recently.) Still, who knows? What would be amazing would be to chroicle every routine performed at the Games, not just the top five or so on every apparatus.
NBCOlympics.com’s Gymnastics Section is quite impressive — by far the best roundup and comprehensive profile of individuals in contention for Olympic medals. It also has excellent coverage. One of its latest newsflashes: Chellsie Memmel has a tattoo on her foot.
Barring injury, the Japanese men’s team competing for gold in Beijing will be Hiroyuki Tomita, Kohei Uchimura, Koki Sakamoto, Takehiro Kashima, Makoto Okiguchi, Takuya Nakase.
The women’s team, announced at the same time, is Kyoko Oshima, Miki Uemura, Yu Minobe, Koko Tsurumi, Yuko Shintake, Mayu Kuroda.
Japan is the first country I know of to announce its Olympic teams, although it’s been speculated that China’s women’s team will consist of Cheng Fei, Yang Yilin, He Kexin, Jiang Yuyuan and two others. The Japanese men were second to the Chinese by a sizeable margin at the 2007 World Championships. The Japanese women grabbed the 12th and final team berth to Beijing.
Cheng Fei: 16.1 on vault (Fei)
Jiang Yuyuan: 16.1 on vault (Amanar)
He Kexin: 17.3 on bars
Yang Yilin: 17.05 on bars
Pang Panpan: 16.15 on bars
Li Shanshan: 16.95 on balance beam
Granted, this is from an internal meet. Makes one think that we’re going to be seeing some similiar scores come U.S. Nationals in June.
Wow.
Jiang Yuyuan, 2008 Chinese Nationals Team Finals, Vault:
More videos of this competition are available from Youtube user Fanbutterfly.
(via relatively new blog Gymnastics and Stuff)
Someone isn’t happy that 2008 Olympic hopeful Kristina Vaculik is training Nansy Damianova and Elyse Hopfner-Hibbs in the points competiton that will partly determine who makes the Canadian Olympic team.
A petition to Gymnastics Canada Gymnastique, the governing body of Canadian gymnastics, has been set up here.
The fairly complicated Canadian selection process was explained well by Hopfner-Hibbs’s coach Carol-Angela Orchard in an interview with International Gymnast Online last week.
Athletes also receive points for their previous World Championships experience.
A minimum standard has been set by Gymnastics Canada for each event: 13.600 on vault (average of two vaults); 15.300 on bars; 15.100 on beam; and 14.300 on floor.
The gymnasts are given Olympic Qualifying points when they hit the minimum standards in meets they are sent to around the world, plus Elite Canada and Nationals. The higher their score, the higher number of points they receive.
Related post: Nansy Damianova, Olympic hopeful
Rick at Gymnastics Coaching thinks so. The debate is raging on his blog.
Jennifer Sey is a liar by any definition of the word. Even if every word in her book is true as she remembers it. (And that’s been contested by some of her teammates from the time.)
If you disagree with me, buy her book. If not, encourage everyone you know to boycott Chalked Up. You can read it, but don’t purchase even one more copy.
If Jennifer Sey wanted to exorcise demons from over 20-years-ago as a memoir, she could have done it on her blog. That she chose to release an inflammatory book in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics smacks of opportunism.
Certainly there are athletes who have had a bad time with coaches, with training, battled eating disorders and the like. What seems to be bothering Rick is that the media, abetted by Sey, is using one person’s experience to paint the whole sport black.
But is gymnastics “weird and creepy”? - NO
Are all middle-age men coaching gymnasts “shady characters”? - NO
Much misinformation like this has been generated around the recent release of Jennifer’s book. I believe the author is a willing participant in this game of generating controversy during a book launch.
Polish-101 Gymnastics editor MRR published their take on the book here.
Ever wondered what your favorite gymnasts looked like when they were really, really young? Up until now, we’ve gotten snippets. Brief home videos can be seen in fluff pieces networks put together at competitions.
There was Shawn Johnson doing a handspring vault at a competition maybe eight years ago when she was profiled as ABC News’ person of the week last fall. NBC showed us Vanessa Atler doing backhandsprings and press handstands at age four when they profiled her for the 1997 American Cup. Limited footage of Lilia Podkopayeva, Elena Zamolodchikova, Dominique Moceanu, Dina Kotchetkova and Shantessa Pama training and competing as youngsters is also available.
But this Youtube generation will likely provide us with a lot more than that. We have, for the first time, the opportunity to follow a gymnast basically from level five onwards — if, of course, videos are posted. So we’ve been introduced to the likes of Yevgenia Ugretsova and Nica Hults.
The first example I saw of this was actually Ashley Priess, shown here in the gym at age five, working on her basics, in what must have been 1995 or 1996.
