Olympics, womens beam final

[ssd]

Whats going on, they are almost all falling off, they must be gutted

She played it too safe. Her difficulty was only 5.7 and she had a lot of tiny wobbles that deducted from her execution score. The only finalist with lower difficulty was the other Brazilian.

Floor exercises now. My least favourite.
Very odd about all the falls but nice to see someone different winning.

👀

I think that is such a good point-I knew that different judges looked at different things-like difficulty etc but didn't realise that the difficulty score was so important.
I think Rebeca is a beautiful athlete and her performances do have more grace and flow compared to Simone who is more power. Obviously Simone is fantastic to watch but now that you have said that about the difficulty score I understand that they have to sacrifice some of the artistry for the score.
I think it is still thrilling to watch but def different.

The commentator said that Simone said "the crowd were shushing and it distracted me!"

Totally agree - I love watching Rebeca Andrade because she's so graceful and smooth, it's relaxing to watch her - whereas Simone Biles (I'm not saying she's not brilliant) is all "bang, bang, bang!" and you've got your heart in your mouth the whole time.

Back in the day they used to balance grace & beauty with technical brilliance - in the late 80s and early 90s the soviet and Romanian gymnasts were sublime to watch.

The brand of equipment will have been announced years ago. The richer federations will have the Olympic brand installed into training centres and had their gymnasts using it for ages.

There is a standard in terms of measurements. But differentials in some of the materials used.

I found it painful to watch gymnastics back in the day. The often very young females looked malnourished, sad, abused and dead in the eyes. Painful.

You're totally right about that too of course - I was under 10 then so it passed me by at the time. They look far healthier now, and their careers aren't over by 20 because their bodies are broken. All that is to be celebrated.

Simone was saying her team (or at least her teammate) was cheering her on and the crowd were shushing and it was unnaturally quiet in the arena which was off-putting.

Yes, I didn’t see this, but the Irish Times coverage suggested similarly — that the gymnasts were feeling the lack of background music which is usually played to cover the noise of applause etc for other gymnasts on different apparatus, so that sudden shushing or mobile ringtones disrupted performances on the beam…

The athletes do usually attempt higher levels of difficulty in the apparatus finals, as they usually need to do so to in order to have a chance of medalling (this year's bars final is a good example - anyone with a difficulty score below 6.4/6.5 ish was always unlikely to be competitive).

Also, they are tired! Many of them have competed the qualifying round, the team final, AA, vault and/or bars finals in the past week. Any of those is a big undertaking on its own, so they will be shattered.

Yes it feels as though the sport is moving in a positive direction, and the result is greater longevity for the athletes. I'm over the moon to see gymnastics podiums that are mainly populated by strong women in their prime, rather than malnourished young girls.

It used to be if a girl's first olympics as a senior was when she was 19, she was viewed as unlucky, because of course she'd be decrepit and incapable by then - run into the ground by overtraining from a young age coupled with lack of nutrition.

I wonder why Louis Smith isn't commentating, esp for the men? Ex competitors seem to be wheeled out for everything, sometimes not even their own sports (Nicola Adams doing a piece on kayak!), but he's nowhere to be seen. Must be quite lucrative as well...

Really glad Andrade won the floor - she's so lovely to watch.

I find the idea of elite athletes being judged on "beauty and grace" disturbing and I'm really glad the sport is moving away from that.