Beijing Olympics: Nastia Liukin Wins Female All-Around Gold in Gymnastics

Nastia wins gold!

Congratulations to Nastia Liukin for winning the coveted Olympic All-Around Champion title!  She was rock solid throughout the competition, and her near-perfect vault in the first rotation basically put her on the path to the gold right away.  Add to that some questionable judging for Shawn Johnson’s beam routine (more on that later), and a very well deserved gold medal for Liukin is the result.

Highlights of the female competition, both individual and team:

(1) Liukin’s uneven bars routine. The pirouettes that she does on the top of the high bar are both artistic and (apparently) difficult, and when she sticks the landing, that routine gets her a very high score, often in the high 16s. I’m guessing we’ll see a lot more female gymnasts pumping difficulty into their uneven bars routines because that seems to be where a lot of points are easily obtained.  Especially if they’re judged the same way they were this year (again, more on that later).

(2) He Kexin’s uneven bars routine (Chinese gymnast). She may not be 16, but her uneven bars routine is phenomenal. That release move she has at the very beginning, where she flips then twists to catch the bar BACKWARDS… even in slow motion, it just doesn’t seem possible.  It really is too bad that she fell in the qualifications, because she deserves to be in the event finals.

(3) Ksenia Semenova’s floor exercise. Now the fact that I can pull that name out doesn’t mean that I follow gymnastics – only that I watched the all-around on television and finally got a chance to see another team besides the US and China perform.  Those Russians really did choke away a bronze medal, based on what they showed during the all-around.  I don’t know why, but Semenova’s routine just had more artistic aspects (not that that matters) and a very sharp feel to her tumbling (which probably really really matters).

Now, the judging.

As a guy who plays lots of tennis and basketball, and who grew up playing baseball and soccer, and who is a devoted fan of the MLB and NFL, I think the one thing about professional and competitive sports that is an ABSOLUTE NECESSITY is fairness and validity in how the games are decided.  Every run is one run.  Every layup is two points.  Every touchdown is six points.  We know what a double fault is. The ball just need to cross the threshold to be a TD.  Etc, etc, etc…

But there was a major problem in these olympics with the judging of the gymnastics.  Namely, the scoring was absolutely ARBITRARY, and that is a big big problem that must be fixed. Again, obviously, I am not a gymnastics aficionado.  I really don’t know much about the technicalities, except what I see on television and what Tim Daggert tells me. But there simply are times when an absolutely perfect vault (according to Tim Daggert) gets a 9.45 on the execution, meaning the judges found 0.55 in deductions!  Or you see two gymnasts on the beam get the same scores for two completely different qualities of routines. This happened time and time again, with no clear definition of what constituted a deduction, aside from the big ones like stepping out of bounds or failing to hold a handstand.

I think this hurt Shawn Johnson a little, but again, Nastia Liukin won the gold running away anyway.  So congratulations to her again!

Now, let’s go Tyson Gay!