This time I’m ready with tab open for writing down all of Olly’s puns (I’m…fighting an impulse here. You can fill in the blanks, I’m sure) and probably even inventing some where they don’t exist! (Such as: yesterday the other commentator, Dr. Lisa Gannon, referred to a male gymnast’s dismount as “the culmination” of his high bar routine, and I was certain she was hiding a pun on “Kolman-ation” in there (Kolman is a very difficult but fairly common release move, and there had indeed been one in the routine…)
Today we have the women’s vault and uneven bars, and the men’s floor and…um…oh! Pommel horse and rings. The less interesting ones, although pommel horse is sort of the men’s beam equivalent and does at least lead to falls that result in the athlete standing atop the horse as if he’s lost, and rings has a whole set of elements that are not included in the actual score but which are for cool points only, namely opening one’s palms to show that you’re so strong you don’t even need all of your fingers and giving a quick nod of the chin to show that you aren’t screaming in agony inside and have energy left to demonstrate your chill.
So my attempted difficulty was 5.4, but in reality I watched all of the day 1 event finals from bed, without typing, and then fell asleep during the rings final. So I lost all of my difficulty but had a good Z score. But – highlights: Simone nearly sticking her Amanar. Sunisa winning bronze on bars. The whole bars final was pretty impressive, with only one fall. Pommel horse had the medal stand right but in the wrong order. And Yulo Yolo-ed all over floor for Phillipines’ first gold medal in gymnastics ever. Can we petition – er, inquire – for YULO to stand for You Ultimately Live Once? Usually? Uber-ly?
Special award: The interaction between David Beliavsky and his left hand when it forsook him and slid right off the pommel horse. Definitely the look of a man who suspects alien hand syndrome.
Day 2:
This day I had to watch in shifts. I slept through the entirety of the competition, actually, because I thought it started at 10 EST like Saturday’s. I had an hour to watch the men’s vault “Watch me descend like a cannonball from the sky” final and women’s beam before going to work. SIMONE. Breaks the record for most medals won at world championships, of all time, male or female (noteworthy because the men have six apparatuses – apparati? Apparatchiks? – and thus two more changes for medals ever year), and breaks a score of 15 for the first time this year (I think. I’m approaching these statistics with the same approach the men’s vault finalists take, that is, fling yourself as hard as you can and pray).
Then I had four hours of work followed by a break to watch men’s parallel bars, an event I had to strenuously avoid working into my discussion of geometry with a ninth-grade student. It’s also an event for which the men have their own personalized upper-arm guards, because that’s where they’ll be landing. Sun Wei of China has a pair with cartoon chickens draw on them (by member of the Chinese women’s team, Chen Yile, I hear). Only one tenth of a point separated the top 5 finishers on parallel bars, which meant my personal favorite Ferhat Arican of Turkey missed out on a medal, but I can’t help loving it when the gold medalist doesn’t quite expect it and cries happy tears, so I was glad that Joe Fraser of Great Britain ended up on top, and I was sad for Lukas Dauser who ended up on top of the bars and at the bottom of the standings in front of his home crowd.
Can we discuss the choices of music on women’s floor? Since the quadrennium beginning in 2008, “vocalization” has been permitted in floor music, even though music with lyrics is still prohibited. In practice this means that a gymnast can compete to a background of a man basically singing the text of “Jabberwocky,” as long as it sounds like nonsense, or that we’re treated to Lilia Akhaimova (RUS) dancing to the strains of a woman who sounds like she’s being held at gunpoint and forced to endure key changes until she’s screaming.
Also, please no string quartet versions of Ed Sheeran. I’ll take back Melnikova’s somber “Despacito” cover over this.
The floor final was really lovely overall. No one had a mistake bigger than a step out of bounds, and most of the finalists were artistic in their own ways. And, of course, Simone’s fifth gold medal of the championships.
This ceased to be a live blog at some point.
