This Olympics is no different, save no one expected the rules would change the face of the sport for teams and individuals in little over a day. To begin, Jordyn Wieber was caught in the two-gymnast only web. Two athletes per country are allowed to advance to the all-around finals. Because Gabby Douglas and Aly Raisman on Sunday scored higher than their teammate, Wieber, the reigning world champion, was shut out of a chance to fight for the title.
This began a storm of protest. Everyone from the U. To penalize an athlete or country for being outstanding is not in the spirit of sport and certainly not the spirit of the Olympic Games. Karolyi blames the floor exercise lineup as a major gaffe in the U. Here's an earlier competition , where you can see there's not really continuous movement between the tricks:. Wieber did better than that Sunday.
But she didn't get credit for her connections, so she got only a 6. By contrast, both Douglas and Raisman had D-scores of 6.
Look how Douglas connects her tricks Sunday night, keeping continuous movement:. And Raisman has a difficult Patterson dismount -- that's two flips with a very early half twist:. Further, Wieber, who doesn't have a balletic style, struggled with her leaps. Last night, the obvious mistake on this leap is the huge wobble.
But her split was sub-par too, as you can see in this slow-motion gif. After she finished her beam routine, you could hear her coach talking to her about "making it up" on floor. NBC's commentators thought he was talking about event finals, but he meant the all-around. She'd lost four tenths of a point on the last two skills alone, he said.
After beam, he knew it would be close. Look at his face:. Here Wieber has powerful tumbling. But it's not close to Raisman's, who qualified first for floor finals and has the hardest tumbling out there. And where Raisman used to be weak -- dance -- she's improved. Like in this leap, her split hits degrees, and she throws her head all the way back:.
Douglas bounced out of bounds and got a Weiber stepped out of bounds too, after a slightly-off leap out of her tumbling run. She got a That put their all-around totals at Wieber is very talented and a hard-worker. She's been working her whole life for this. Sure, there is plenty of outrage out there. He continued:. Aside from the fact that the last sentence is directly contradicted by those preceding it, this statement is wrong for several reasons.
The "entitlement generation" seems like a reference to Millennials -- but it's old farts who are making the rules. Also, saying that a personal defeat is a sign of everything that's wrong with the world is not the dictionary definition of dignified. Then again, maybe he means entitlement in the Medicare sense? Gymnastics is not an outlier in how many athletes get to attend the event.
Only one team from each country qualifies to men's and women's synchronized diving, for example. Surely the Jamaican Olympic trials for sprinting left some talented runners behind -- only three athletes from each country get to go to the Olympics in those events. Jeneba Tarmoh, who tied for third-place in the U. But she failed to qualify for the finals in the all-around because only two Americans were allowed to advance.
If your country has the top five gymnasts, they should be competing. She practiced in the morning, by herself, before the UCLA team. And then she worked as a manager later in the day. I thought about it for a really long time, but looking back on my gymnastics career, I realized that I reached all of my major goals. Olympian, Olympic champion, world champion. All of that stuff. One of those opportunities is working with a group of athletes trying to bring the Olympic Games to Los Angeles in I kind of have a unique role, being a Bruin and an Olympian.
And while Wieber still returns to Michigan to visit family on holidays, she has fallen in love with California.
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