Gymternet correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that first transition (high to low) is a Bhardwaj, named for the great Mohini Bhardwaj who competed at the elite level, then went to UCLA, then came back to elite (which is rare!)
Okay quick explainer! "Elite" gymnastics is a specific category as defined by a few things (here's a chart) usagym.org/PDFs/Women/Eli…
Collegiate gymnastics is not elite gymnastics -- elite gymnasts compete full-time at the international level, while college gymnasts are competing for their universities and are bound by NCAA rules on practice length, etc.
College gymnastics also still uses the 10.0 scoring system, and the difficulty in NCAA gymnastics is lower than in elite gymnastics (which is not a knock on NCAAs!)
For example, here is Michigan winning a national title this year because of this beam routine:
And here's the gold medal beam routine from Rio:
A few days ago I tweeted about this routine and today the great YouTuber sporteverywhere put together this video with the names and scoring values of every skill!
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
According to the book "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes," Fong pushed Gomez to perform that vault, and argued after her death that it was imperative to teach the Yurchenko to younger gymnasts in order to beat the Russians. chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-19…
There is a poisonous idea within women's gymnastics (and track and field) that if your athletes don't have severe eating disorders and train with broken bones they don't "want it" enough.
As a side note, it's interesting who was asked to be a knowledgable source on how American gymnastics got so good pre-Rio. (This is before any allegations were published widely).
The only comparison to be made is "hey these are two great athletes"
Again: Kerri never competed again, she was carried off the platform by a sexual predator, and Bela Karolyi made her vault a second time by saying, "you better do it" (when mathematically her second vault wasn't necessary for the US to win gold).
I don't think people truly understand what the Karolyis did and permitted a rapist to do. This is testimony from Aly Raisman and former trainer Melanie Seaman: washingtonpost.com/sports/olympic…