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!