Gymnastics
- Rebecca Andrade’s floor music seems to be a Beyonce medley. Well, not seems: is.
- The availability of live streams for qualifying rounds is <choose one of the following cliches> an embarrassment of riches, a mixed blessing, likely to reduce both my socialization and my iPhone step count for the next few days.
- Yesterday I watched men flip for about 5 hours, mostly while I was soaking my foot in a tub of water because I inexplicably ground some glass into it while walking to my living room. (Glass was surgically removed with the assistance of two pairs of tweezers, needle, knife, my bedside lamp, and kind temporary surgeon.)
- I started to really worry during the men’s qualifications that there was something wrong with the vault. More crashes than would reasonably be expected and one horrific injury (which made my glass-in-foot seem even slighter), which I’m going to hope they didn’t replay in primetime coverage (the vaulter is okay, but has broken tibia and fibula both).
- This wouldn’t be totally unheard of, given that the vault was set too low for the women’s competition in Sydney in 2000…but so far the women have been looking normal on vault, so it could just be a normal-ish difference in equipment (specifically that this vaulting table is not as hard/has more give than the vaulting tables most of the athletes practice on, causing some to get less push off the horse and thus crash).
- I am not particularly interesting in my choice of favorites in my chosen sports. I like Federer and Serena. Uchimura and Biles. You know, four of the greatest of all time. And that’s part of it; the greatest-of-all-time story is one of my favorites, and it leads to sidebar conversations about goats, which is never unappreciated.
- It’s probably as much the narrative that gets me as it is the individual–though maybe not; Roger and Serena and Kohei and Simone are all pretty fantastic personalities–and another narrative that I (everyone? Like I said, not very left-field in this) favor is that of the newcomer underdog.
- On that note…my other favorite in men’s gymnastics is Manrique Larduet of Cuba, fondly known as “Mandrake” by the gymnastics world after one of the commentators at the Glasgow world championships pronounced his name like he came from Harry Potter. Larduet was second all around in 2015, but he had one of those vault crashes…no injury, but whatever happened caused him to get so confused in the air that he didn’t even get credited for the vault he normally does, since he just sort of flung himself through the air. Fortunately, he still made the all around final.
- There are still no lyrics permitted in women’s floor music, but since 2008 or 2010 they’ve allowed “vocalizations,” the result being that at least one gymnast has a piece of floor music during which some guy sings “Dah dah dah dah dah” the entire time.
