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Beam heritage

Mustafina's beam at the Antwerp World Championships may well have expressed the Code to its fullest artistic potential in that event final, on that day.

But what has the additive Code, and other progressive changes to the sport, done to beam?

One of the most beautiful beam routines ever can be found here.

Comments

  1. The only difference I see is that gymnasts back then had slower routines because the routines had less elements and they could actually perform everything more delicately and the form is very exquisite, but you don't see so much choreography. You could say Mustafina had more choreography in her 2010 routine than this one.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfeIAsVZJVs

    I think Baitova's beam is better example of what beam choreography should be but her form is not as clean as Mostepanova's routine. Overall her routine is artistically better than Baitova's since it had everything.

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    Replies
    1. The best example is Omelianchik's beam at the European Championships. She had difficulty, perfect execution AND it was an exciting performance.

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    2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sob4ag0X5yo

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  2. What a beautiful and amazing gymnast she was.

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  3. Good point about the length of the routines. Here's an idea perhaps allowing a little longer to allow the gymnast to present and get limited say 0.5 -1.0 maybe of "bonus" marks for what is somehow defined as artistic dance so it is pretty much compulsory to do it. In other words not what I think of as acro-dance ie skills that carry a genuine risk of a fall or other big deduction like a switch leap or multiple spin. Maybe difficulty value would be limited to A,B say but connection bonuses could apply. Say if five moves of lower difficulty were scored on a hit or miss basis gymnasts would always attempt to perform them perfectly and hopefully we'd get some more interesting routines Maybe there could be a moderate deduction for overall lack of presentation/artistry throughout the exercise that no-one can afford to lose (so that gymnasts will overdo it to make sure) in addition to the specifics of execution deductions of the acro - the most difficult however many skills as now that are the D score. I like this kind of concept from the point of view of the progression of gymnasts from beginner up as well. AAAGH the artistry question! Shoot me down happily but I'm waiting for some much better ideas to get some serious discussion because the sport is getting more and more ugly by the minute and so less and less appealing to the wider public. If anything, if nothing changes bars and vault have more potential to remain the more artistic event because they are really a technical performance where execution and successful completion of a skill tend to, or have to, go together - would it be good for execution deductions to be proportional to the difficulty like in diving with its tariff system...??????? Going back to perfect ten is certainly not the answer - it must be demonstrable how any particular judge has arrived at their contribution to the score.

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