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Sunday midnight, or rather, for about 30 minutes in the middle of the night, my It was midday in Paris. The gymnastics world was in a state of horror, and flashbacks of Tokyo were playing out in real time. During the second part of the women’s qualifying round to determine who would advance to the team and individual finals, Simone Biles appeared injured. For a moment, she left Bercy Arena. here we go again!
Then it got even worse. Jade Carey, looking pale, missed her final tumbling pass on floor exercise, falling backward and tumbling off the mat instead of the planned two. Not only did Carey, the defending Olympic floor champion, miss the floor final, she qualified with a score of 74.Number 1st out of 75.
And thankfully, there was hope! With her leg taped up, Biles delivered a surprisingly difficult floor exercise. But it didn’t last long. While warming up for the vault, USA’s next event, Biles briefly Unable to walkcrawl off the podium, stand up and jump. While most gymnastics fans were reaching for their Xanax, Biles smileAnd right after that, she Drilled She earned the highest score on any apparatus in all five qualifying subdivisions on her eponymous vault (the Biles 2, or Yurchenko double pike).
Biles overcame a tough qualifying round to win by just two points over her only rival, the brilliant Rebecca Andrade of Brazil.There is no pain in this dojo!) Was this all a hallucination? Who cares? By the end of the meeting, everything was fine.
Well, not really. all It’s OK: Carey later explained that she’d been sick for the past three days and hadn’t been able to eat, which is the human equivalent of accelerating from 0 to 60 on no fuel. But there was an upside: Carey’s slump gave Jordan Childs the competition of her life in the floor exercise final, which means we’ll get to see Childs’ mesmerizing Beyoncé routine twice: once in the team final and once in the individual floor exercise final.
But it was a bit disappointing for Chiles to miss out on the all-around final in what was easily the best tournament of her life, thanks to defending all-around champion Suni Lee, who finished with a total score of 56.132, just 0.067 better than Chiles’ 56.065.
Therefore, although Chiles finished the qualifying round in fourth place overall, AmericanAnd this is the moment that comes once every four years when Olympic fans learn (or re-learn) about the “two players per country” rule.
The International Gymnastics Federation enacted this rule back in the primitive, muddy days of 1973, limiting the number of gymnasts per country who could compete in any given individual final (and therefore compete for medals). Essentially, the world was tired of seeing Soviet (women) and Japanese (men) gymnasts dominating the podium (and sometimes making up more than half of the finalists), so in the name of both fairness and viewership, the International Gymnastics Federation wanted to give thinner teams a chance to make it onto the world stage.
No one in the US disputed this at the time, when American gymnasts had no hope of winning a medal in a fully competitive Olympics. And we didn’t hear much about it from the US even after 2000, when the then three-gymnast limit per country was reduced to two after Romania swept the podium in Sydney. But now that the US has been the Goliath of world gymnastics for over a decade, every Olympics sees a new chorus of American anti-two-per rhetoric when an American loses a “two-per” in the final. But did you know? All the elite gymnasts in the world, including the big names, are against the US. Know these rules And I’m happy to oblige. And it’s okay! Four of the five Americans who qualified (including Carey on the vault) made it to at least one individual final anyway, and they all have a good chance of bringing home a medal. (16-year-old Hesley Rivera struggled on the balance beam, her specialty, but was able to pull out of the gold in her first senior international competition at the Olympics.) you If you went first and had to start on the balance beam, you would struggle too!
Chiles, though no doubt disappointed, endured the result as the best team player and champion he could be. And despite Carey’s balk, and Despite Biles’ mysterious injury (her coaches say it’s not serious, but goddesses in Greek drag queen heaven, we hope it’s not), the mood for the U.S. was upbeat after the qualifying round, for a number of interesting reasons, but in the words of the team’s most famous fan (and there are many!), Beyoncé, “This isn’t Tokyo.”
The first reason is the absence of the Russians, which meant that the U.S. had no worries about coming out of the qualifying round in first place. (It was clear at this point in Tokyo that the U.S. was not in first place.) The absence of the Russians means that the U.S. more or less won the “hit and run” and is leading by a large margin of 5 or more points. As a result, all else being equal, Biles and her team have a good chance of winning. Five Waterfalls In Tuesday’s team final, the difference between the second- and fourth-place teams was 0.362, meaning they could fall five times in a row and still win the gold medal. To put that difference in perspective, the difference between the second- and fourth-place teams after qualifying was 0.362. But after qualifying, all scores are restarted from the beginning. Five falls is not at all impossible, so the deal is off.
But if the U.S. maintains its strong form, the team silver and bronze medals will likely come down to individual 0.1 points on leg form, chest position and so on. landingThe women’s team final will be thrilling and uncertain, and with no home team to root for (sadly, reigning World silver medallists France completely collapsed, losing every final), the fan favorite remains Brazil. Jade Barbosa’s Britney Spears-esque performance is all it takes to prove this true for all of us.
But what was the biggest thing that made this qualifying round different from Tokyo? Despite Biles’ strange calf injury and Carey’s odd balk, at no point did the U.S. make me seriously wonder: Is this team okay? Yes, they are the strongest right now, but more importantly, apart from a few minutes of uncertainty, viewers were watching this team in person for the entire game. teethSure, it’s OK. Under new leadership, they ate pizza, they made TikToks, they enjoyed being in the Village with everyone else, they smiled and laughed, they rocked their nine billion Swarovski leotards, and they went out and did their best. But more importantly, they seemed more than OK with doing it.
You’ll hear the term “Redemption Tour” a lot over the next two weeks. It’s a term the team came up with themselves, and they have a right to wear it with pride. But in my eyes, everything that should be redeemed has already been accomplished, if we just look at their mental state. As a result, thankfully, the U.S. team will go into the impending finals, including the all-around battle between Annerade and Biles, in a decidedly different mental state than the anxiety and uncertainty of 2021. They’re not going to be held back by their past experiences, you could say. It was done.
