The Tokyo Format- Post FIG Q&A

Alright, so FIG posted a Q&A after they dropped the bomb of the new system with NO EXPLANATION AT ALL. So, let's debrief.

Specialists vs. All-arounders: So, FIG seems to be trying to work to advance all-arounders and positions for specialists at the Olympics. It pushes for all-arounders on the team, and so gymnasts from top nations who can qualify teams will be pushed to be all-arounders so a)those nations can have viable teams and b) those gymnasts will want to be on the team. It definitely encourages gymnasts from teams who can't qualify full teams to drop events if they aren't a top all-arounder because getting a top spot on an event at Worlds or a World Cup can get them a spot at the Olympics. I do really like that individual specialists can qualify to the Olympics now. It can be a good opportunity for smaller nations because a top specialist can qualify as a specialist and advance a nation's program.

So... Olympic spots: Yes, we all know the IOC only allocates so many spots. IS FIG LOBBYING FOR MORE? If not, that needs to happen yesterday. It is a tier-one Olympic sport. Track and field had over 2,000 Olympic spots and swimming had almost 950 in London. Shooting and judo both had at least 390. I know gymnastics functions differently than the other two tier-one sports, by why does artistic gymnastic have fewer than 200 spots? FIG did not say they are lobbying, and they need to.

Nominative vs. Non-nominative spots: The spots from Worlds are nominative and those from the World Cups are non-nominative. I suppose it would be expected gymnasts who make Worlds finals deserve a straight-ticket shot to the Olympics. Also, the World Cup system is where team nations can qualify specialists, so perhaps FIG is thinking team programs will have more options for specialists. To bring up the ever-popular ASac example, she would have been able to go even though she couldn't compete in the World Cups because the spots are earned for programs, not individuals.

Specialists on the team: So the team is 3 up, 3 count and not 4 up, 3 count like I thought from what I first read (that's qualifications). I doubt any of the Big Four will take anything other than 4 all-arounders for their team, but lower-ranked nations will probably be more likely to be willing to risk bringing a specialist.

The qualifying system: Alright, so there are aspects of this part I love. But first, let's talk about how the teams qualify. I don't know how I like that. All the medalist teams from the 2018 Worlds will qualify a team to the Olympics, and then the top 9 teams excluding those 3 will qualify at the 2019 Worlds. I don't know what I'm so hesitant about for this, but it just seems... off to me. Alright, the aspects I love. First, any country who wants can send a full team to the 2019 Worlds. Thank goodness! I hate the trickle-down aspect of it in several ways. First of all, a team that doesn't qualify for the pre-Olympic Worlds could very well have a team that places higher than the teams there that year. Secondly, I hate how it makes Worlds competition just pre-Olympic formalities. Each year's Worlds should be a competition in its own right. Also, I like how there are 3 spots from each event final at Worlds and how they have a down-the-line method. Anyone who makes a Worlds event final should be in the running for an Olympic spot. This could definitely make specialist spots more open.



Questions I Still Have

• In the 2011 Worlds, not a single gymnast who qualified to the bars, beam, or floor finals was from a nation who didn't qualify a team. Where do those 9 spots go? I would assume they shift to the World Cups. Do there still have to be 12 specialist spots from teams that haven't qualified a team or can those spots be up for grabs for team nations? Has FIG even realized this has happened?
• How many events are gymnasts in the specialist spots allowed to compete? To go back to the ASac illustration, would she have to have competed vault only or would she have been able to compete both vault and beam?
• Are the gymnasts who earn spots at Worlds allowed to compete on more than one event or can they only compete the event on which they qualify?
• Are the non-nominative spots earned in the World Cups open specialist spots or are they event-specific? To use ASac again, would she have been allowed to fill a spot Anna Li earned or would it have to have been filled by a bars specialist?
• Is there a limit on how many individual athletes a non-team program can send? If, for example, say, Mexico had and all-arounder in qualifying position each at Worlds, continental championships, and World Cups as well as two specialists, would all five be allowed to compete at the Olympics?
• Why did changing the qualification system and opening more specialist spots have to come at the cost of four-person teams? What made that strictly necessary?

I'm sure I'll think of more, but that's it for now. I'm still not on board, but this definitely did a lot to improve my confidence in the new Tokyo system.

Why I Hate the Tokyo Team Format (and some aspects I'm kinda down with)

Bruno Grandhi decided his exit from his tenure of misadventures in charge of gymnastics was going to be a final glorious implosion of great competition. Now, only four gymnasts are on a team who must all be all-arounders. BUT- the nations qualifying full teams may also qualify two event specialists. So- we're essentially going back to 2008 for the Big Four (if none of the other top nations), at least in terms of numbers? And- well, anyway, lets get started getting my points out.

1. My favorite part of following gymnastics and the team competition...

is figuring out the puzzle. How do we best take this pool of gymnasts and cut it down to a team (six or five?) which has as close to the top three highest-scoring gymnasts we have on each event competing? It's the biggest strategic question of the sport, and it's so much fun to follow every gymnast's path through all the competitions of a year to put all the pieces together and predict the team! The strategy all goes out the window now. Suddenly it's become dictated to every team: take the top four highest-scoring all-arounders from the trials process and the top two highest-ranked specialists on their specialty event(s). The only place for real discussion now becomes do we pick the highest scorers regardless of their record in competition or do we allow for administrative discretion?

2. The "Screw you, specialists" aspect

First of all, to treat specialists as second-rate gymnasts completely disregards their importance to a nation's program and gives off a "your achievements don't mean as much because you don't do all four events" vibe. Secondly, the US is pretty much the only team which isn't up a creek if you take away their specialists. China needs their specialists to fill out the vault and floor lineups. Admittedly, it's not so dire now that Wang Yan is a senior and they can eek out a DTY and a not-sub-5-D-score routine on floor from Chen Siyi, but there would still only be two routines at international par on each event except bars. Look at Russia's Euros team. They were the most successful of the championships, but Daria Spiridonova was their second-best all-arounder and she placed thirteenth in the final and scored 53.516. Romania would probably be the least affected by this, but that's mostly because they have such a dearth of gymnasts at this point.

3. The "But if a gymnast gets injured during the competition" aspect

Lauren at The Gymternet made a really good point about this in her post on the subject: Let's look at the 2008 US Olympic team. Under this format, the team named would have been Johnson, Liukin, Memmel, and Peszek. Both Memmel and Peszek were injured before the Games and so could not compete all-around and the other members of the team had to fill in the gaps. For Memmel, an alternate likely would have stepped in under the Tokyo format (assuming there's still an alternate? there would have to be, seeing as the team competitors are all all-arounders and the specialists are specialists?), but what about Peszek? She was injured right before qualifications started. Assuming four scores counted on each event (which I'm going to do, because more scores usually count for qualifications, though I haven't found any information on that format), the US wouldn't have been able to qualify for the team final. There could be a silver-winning team who couldn't even compete because the format is unforgiving for injuries.

4. If FIG hates the US, WHY DO THEY KEEP WRITING RULES THAT HAND THEM MEDALS?

FIG is always crying foul at how the Americans are ruining the sport by doing what FIG supports in their rules, and this is but another example.Were this format to be implemented for Rio, it would turn the US's probable team gold into a lock. At this point, there is NO OTHER TEAM with the all-around depth to be able to challenge. Yes, there is another quad before this becomes the law of the land, but ultimately, Tokyo is five years away, and how much really can be done? Yes, gymnastics is a sport where everything can change in a month, but there also has to be a foundation. Sure, skills can be learned, execution cleaned up, technique perfected, but can an entire program be able to shift its training enough to produce all-arounders in the way it will be needed for some of the countries? Will Romania be able to whip bars into shape in five years now they can't have the Catalina Ponors to rely on? China body type filters, we know this, and their vault and floor specialists are rarely also top gymnasts on bars and beam. Shang Chunsong has floor but not vault, and Cheng Fei and Wang Yan both had/have beam but not bars. Yao Jinnan has been their only strongly balanced all-arounder since the Yang Yilin-Jiang Yuyuan duo. Can they fix this problem in five years, or am I being too quick off the fire to cry doomsday?

5. So... diversity...

I can't have been the only one who noticed this is reversing the five-person team diversity by giving the top teams the old six-person contingents, just in a different arrangement, can I? And so- not creating meaningfully more diversity anyway? More diversity could have been created by reducing the number of teams who qualify to the Olympics from twelve to ten, and keeping five members per team. Yes, twelve spots are created with the Tokyo format vs. ten by deleting two teams. However, more actual spots for new gymnasts are created by deleting two teams. Two of the ten new spots from deleting two teams would be taken by those countries' representatives, leaving eight spots for greater representation. Let's compare this with the twelve new spots created by the Tokyo format. This is where the two extra specialist spots for the team nations muddies things. We can probably safely assume at least eight of those spots will be filled by team nations. The Big Four can of course be expected to send a sizable pack of individuals, but even if they don't all utilize both spots, there's still eight other countries who could fill in potential gaps. That leaves at most four spots, which is, of course, half as many as the "real" spots from the ten team format.

Of course, there's also the whole World Cup issue with the new format. Ultimately, with any diversity being less efficiently achieved by this system than by a simpler avenue, it's not too far a jump into conspiracy to say that the strongest motivation behind this change is probably actually bringing in a more competitive roster to the Worlds Cups and continental championships. Some people are crying that this will cause injuries because gymnasts will be competing more and, more specifically, more times out of season. However, I'd say we don't know enough about the qualification process yet to judge it properly. The US has been pointed to as an example of a strong team which only competes in season, but the US already competes in Attack, Jesolo, and Pac Rims in the spring for an Olympic year. The European nations will already be at Euros, which apparently will count, and so, assuming it's reasonable, I don't think it will be too much of an issue. It will be interesting to see what happens about Euros, however. The Olympic-year championships is a team competition, whereas this qualifying would seem more suited to an individual competition, so that will be interesting to see what happens. Increasing competitive attendance at the World Cups is a good idea, but it could have been done in a way that doesn't ruin the Olympic team format. Instead of having the single Olympic test event, teams that don't qualify at Worlds and individual representatives could have qualified through the World Cup circuit. Or, the test event could be used to qualify the teams, and then all individuals have to qualify through the World Cup circuit. However it was done, the World Cups could be made to attract a better cross-section of competitors without sacrificing the Olympic team composition.

Alright, so I promised you some things I'm down with about this whole four-person sad excuse for a team. One thing I would be willing to embrace would be if this actually pushed programs to address the areas they've been neglecting. They need to have all-arounders, and so Romania can't rely on a gymnast who can perform an acceptable bars routine on only that event and then pad their strengths and China can't rely on its Cheng Feis. Will this finally push them to stop body type filtering? It's just ridiculous and hurts their program. Also, this 4-4-3 format is intriguing. The three-up-three-count system has come under scrutiny from many people because all scores count. I'll be very interested to see what happens when the lowest score is dropped again. Ultimately, whatever happens, this format should be exciting!

NCAA Bits and Pieces

Unfortunately, I never got around to doing an NCAA Nationals post (or a Euros post... *sigh*), but the NCAA world is making it up to me by giving us a ton of post-season news to pore over!

Florida
Rhonda has left Florida, in case you live under a rock and haven't heard about it yet. She's now Senior Vice President of the Women's Program at USAG. There is some speculation that her role is putting her in place to take over for Martha when she eventually decides to retire, and I would really like to see that happen. With all the broken athletes he coached at WOGA, the idea of Valeri taking over makes me cringe. I'm already panicky that he's been given athlete development. The program Rhonda built at Florida definitely shows promise for a future NTC. They have difficult, precise, and aesthetic gymnastics, and they have a well-rounded distribution of talent across all four events. In other words, in case you can't tell, I really want Rhonda to be next in line for Martha's role!
Florida's new head coach will be Jenny Rowland of Auburn. This I'm not as happy about. Sure, she's great, and Florida's in good hands but- I wanted Auburn to break into the national champions pack (and LSU, and Stanford, and a bunch of others but those three for now) and so I'm a bit leery of what that might do to them.
The thing I'll be most interested to see is if there will be a watershed of gymnasts leaving for other programs. So far, the army of future elites looks to be secure, but I'll be keeping my eyes peeled.

Tabitha Yim is my new least favorite person
She's now at U of A, which means we are now enemies. Not much else to say really. Rene's skill on beam will be a big help to ASU's future, as will gymnasts not being injured this season. And they have some good recruits. Grrr, down with U of A.

Elites are responding to my desires
As in, they are going to schools other than Florida and UCLA! Polina Shchennikova is going to Michigan, which honestly kind of surprises me. I don't know, I just don't think of Michigan as a Polina team. I would have picked UCLA or Oregon State for her. But I like Michigan better than both and I like Polina, so I don't mind too much. Or at all. I'm definitely looking forward to her bars and beam with NCAA perfection. And, more excitingly (for me, at least), Alexis Vasquez has committed to Denver! All the good things! The sadness for me here is she's retiring from elite. I personally prefer Alexis to Norah (and Rachel, for those who are Rio-eligible), and I was really looking forward to seeing her this year, especially seeing as Martha seemed to like what she saw from her. I get that Worlds was likely to be out of the picture, but she definitely could have made a PanAms team! But on to the good, DENVER! Denver is one of my favorite teams and I love the progress they're making. Yes, Alexis is going to Denver! Not necessarily a team I would have picked for her either, but that's not what I care about when a gymnast I love is going to a school I love.