Women's artistic gymnastics at a turning point - revisited

Elena Produnova, whose powerful gymnastics was performed with great virtuosity

Apparently, Bruno Grandi has been considering his own future, and recently announced that he will not be standing for re-election as President of the FIG following the Rio Olympic Games in 2016.  What a pity, the sport will miss this man who since 1996 has provided such immaculate administrative and creative direction.  Under his leadership, men's artistic gymnastics has gone from strength to strength with strong programmes developing in many countries.   The team, all around and event finals at World Championships were highly competitive and exciting and the sport promises much for the forthcoming Olympics.  There is innovation on every piece of apparatus, and the competitive field is deep and diverse.  The sport is hugely watchable.  Of course, public opinion - the fans, increasingly a mass market rather than the specialist niche that once characterised the gymnastics audience - should guide the direction of the sport - it is, naturally, the only consideration, if maximisation of broadcast income and sponsorship is the aim. 

There is room for criticism, of course: the lack of rhythm in men's floor exercise is one result of a Code that rewards difficulty at the expense of good execution.  On high bar, the spectacular releases that send audiences into paroxysms of delight and prompt judges to give the highest scores, are often performed with rather sloppy technique.  The World vault champion secured his gold medal at the expense of his constantly injured, poorly tended, ankle - but then does that matter when he performs such fantastically difficult and original pyrotechnics?  Gymnastics has always been about stretching the boundaries and in this era of the sport, the boundaries are proving to be very elastic indeed.

For the first time since Olga Korbut sprang to prominence in 1972, men's gymnastics is making the headlines, and women's has become the poor relative. not just in terms of popularity but also the health of the sport itself.  At last week's Arthur Gander Memorial, an annual competition that has been running for as long as I can remember, the only top contender present was world all around silver medallist, Romanian Larissa Iordache.  She looked tired out despite a competition format that allows gymnasts to perform on only two pieces if they so wish.  Her closest rival, Russia's Daria Spiridinova, won the 'all around' with two good bars routines and a competent vault.  The gymnasts do not even compete all four (or six, for the men) apparatus any more in this non-traditional format.  It is a long time since this post-Worlds competition attracted a fuller field of competition-ready champions, and this is not just because of the changing nature of the international gymnastics calendar.  There seems to be an ever-decreasing number of gymnasts performing at the very top level, capable of fuelling deep competition at events of this kind.

Much has been said on this blog about the declining strength in depth of the Russian women's team, but to put that into context a decidedly weak team last month still managed to take a bronze medal at the World Championships.  It was a close match, to within half a point, with a below strength Romanian team, but then again the words 'decidedly weak' and 'below strength' regularly describes women's gymnastics these days, unless you are speaking of the American team.  There is evidently a wider problem internationally in the development of the women's sport than merely a lack of strength in depth on the Russian team; in fact a worldwide lack of strength in depth probably describes it more accurately. 

Looking at the participation in event finals provides a mere snapshot.  Starting with vault, of the 250 competing gymnasts at Worlds (311 for the men), only 28 even bothered preparing two vaults to compete for the eight places in the final.  This is the most athletic piece of the four, with height, power and complexity rewarded royally, and few nations have yet grasped the nettle of encouraging the courage, technique and sheer unalloyed muscle necessary to compete the most difficult vaults.  In the 2012 Olympics the second placed Mackayla Maroney medalled with a fall.  In 2013, the Dominican Republic's Yamilet Pena Abreu qualified to the final thanks to the difficulty value of 7 given to the Produnova vault she competed, but could not land with her full weight on her feet.

Bars is the exception, showing creative and innovative work from many gymnasts and strong competition for places in the final, although even there we see repetitive routines from some of the gymnasts, and as we progress down the ranks an over-reliance on intermediate swings and kips between difficulties. 

Beam has lost its lustre, with staccato, difficulty-filled exercises replacing the languid beauty of the consummate artistic gymnastics we once saw on this piece, that is now long past.  At this Worlds, only two gymnasts were able to complete their work without major errors.  The third placed gymnast, Russia's Aliya Mustafina, won a bronze medal with a routine that missed a requirement but which was still ahead of the rest of the field. 

And on floor - oh, the horror - only Biles, Ferrari and Fragipane could conceivably be considered for top honours, and at least one of them was bound to win.   In the end the best - Simon Biles - did win, and at least she makes a virtue of the power that has become her trademark by performing with verve and confidence the incredibly difficult things that she makes look easy.  Biles is the only true protagonist of the new acrobatic gymnastics that now rules the world, her audacious and spectacular acrobatics at the centre of a unique style that exploits her daring and explosive movements to the full.   This form of the sport will die out after she retires because there is no one else who can emulate her.  There are no other established leaders who can compete on level footing with her, because the Code - whose fundamental premise is, falsely, that artistic gymnastics scores can be calculated objectively - does not have the flexibility to reward alternative styles of gymnastics or give the judges the scope to judge.

While Simone should definitely be rewarded for her extraordinary work, it is worth remembering that similarly talented gymnasts in the past - the indomitable Elena Produnova for example - have had to match their acrobatic talent with artistry to be able to win competitions on such a grand scale, without an over reliance on the tumbling to get across the message.  Under today's Code, with a .7 difficulty advantage for her handspring double front vault, Produnova could easily have won the all around competition of the 1999 World Championships, despite the low landing she took.  In the team final of the 2000 Olympics she performed a floor routine full of original tumbles and outrageous leaps, complemented by fine artistry and a deep musicality.  She was able to hit 180 degrees in her leaps, her toe point was perfect, her posture immaculate.  Yet the 4.9 D value which would be awarded to her work today would see her ranking decline to around 60th in the World.

The aesthetic of such work as Produnova's cannot be explained by a difference in body type.  Both Produnova and Biles share the same powerful body type, lean with strong legs and visible muscle mass.  It is the basic training that made Produnova both powerful and artistic, and since the Code required artistry she had no choice but to provide it if she wanted to contend for medals.  The Code that marked down the execution error on her double front somersault was right, even if it deprived a World Champion standard gymnast of gold.  The Code we work to today - the one that has encouraged the growth of amazing and occasionally reckless difficulty at the expense of the aesthetic - has, meanwhile, wrecked the sport.  Even if the deductions are right, it lacks the appropriate language and scales to facilitate the judgement of the aesthetic, and so the aesthetic has disappeared.  We have been left with a generation of gymnasts who are powerful at best, and ugly at worst.

Not only has the over emphasis of difficulty proved to be problematic.  Because the Code attempts to calculate rather than to facilitate judgement, execution deductions have become the only way of differentiating routines from the perspective of quality.  The prescriptive nature of the deductions renders judgement impossible and means that judges no longer have the opportunity to evaluate routines as a whole.  In both 2011 and 2012 Viktoria Komova, universally acknowledged to be the finest technician in the sport for many years, lost out in the all around to gymnasts who were technically and artistically her inferior, but who avoided error.  Even the International Gymnast, an American based specialist magazine that normally maintains a stolidly obedient stance to the FIG's marking, remarked that the score for her floor routine in the all around, the best routine of the competition in many people's eyes, was simply 'a joke'.  Komova's unique qualities remain unacknowledgeable under the current Code, while the solid dependability of a well practiced, but rather unexciting gymnast like Kyla Ross can earn her all around and apparatus medals.  This Code is not appropriate for the task of judging a multi-faceted, complex sport like gymnastics. It is like trying to weigh up the difference between an artist and an accountant using a calculator. 

The Code has robbed gymnastics of depth and diversity.  In 2000, Russia alone had Produnova competing on the same team alongside Lobaznyuk, Zamolodchikova and Khorkina; four completely different styles on one team, without counting the merits of such gymnasts as Raducan, Amanar, Karpenko and Yang Yun.  In 2014 the World could provide only three gymnasts with a genuine chance of making gold on floor exercise, all of them with the same gut-wrenching level of difficulty in the tumbling, but only one of them with anything approaching good technique - Simone Biles.  Ferrari and Fragipane in particular could provide the Soviet team choreographers of old - Elena Kapitanova, for example - with many years' work, correcting all that indescribably poor posture, line and harmony.  Both the silver and bronze medallists - Iordache and Mustafina - would probably acknowledge that their performances in the final were not the best of their careers, but they profited as they failed to make errors in their routines, while others erred. 

Yet many of the most memorable gymnasts of the last century - Yurchenko, Ilienko, Davydova - were terribly unreliable and error prone.  They surely only medalled when they pulled out that final, heart-stoppingly perfect performance that made them immortal.  Their perfection was not outlined by the absence of error, however; there were other, more special qualities that marked them out - a level of perfection that could be described as virtuosity, by one way of thinking.  Unlike today, also, there were others - Filatova, Mostepanova, Bicherova, Szabo, Gnauck - who could have taken their place.  

Each one of these gymnasts had her own unique, unrepeatable style and sense of innovation.  They led the Code, painting their own routines freehand from within their own sense of creativity guided by their coaches and choreographers, and their work was judged accordingly.  Today, sadly, gymnasts are forced to follow the limitations of a Code that is constrained by the rather colourless imagination of the administrators who wrote it, as if they were shopping for rather dowdy clothes from a catalogue.  No wonder so many appear to be wearing the same 'uniform'.  There is no free will or democracy allowed in gymnastics any more.  I know I am mixing my metaphors here, but it is as if the Royal Academy of Arts had outlawed free expression, and dedicated themselves to encouraging the world's artists to develop accuracy and precision in the completion of a limited range of painting-by-numbers projects, chosen by their office manager.

I am not the only one who has noticed that women's gymnastics is at a low point in its history, though I don't know exactly what it was that led the soon to be retiring, normally optimistic, Bruno Grandi finally to capitulate so soon after the last World Championships, and to make an announcement to that effect too.  I read it on the All Around's Facebook page on the 12th October, and I am quoting it here verbatim:

'Grandi calls for change

At a press conference this morning during the World Championships in Nanning, FIG President Bruno Grandi called for a radical change in score calculation.  He proposed dividing the difficulty score by two to increase the importance of the E score.  'We need to have artistic gymnastics and now we are penalizing artistry', he said.  'It is not what I wanted when we changed the ... Code of Points.  We have the tendency to perform acrobatics but without the artistic part.'  Grandi repeatedly stressed the importance of execution over difficulty.  'We need to have movements that are well done, not just done.  We need to introduce more detail for deductions - instead of .1, .3, we need .1, .2, .3.  It's not a change of the Code of Points.  It's a change of mentality.''

I am glad to see an acknowledgement of a problem with the Code, and a superficial attempt at problem definition, but what Grandi describes as the solution is far from adequate.  His language also reveals that he has little awareness of his deeply held assumptions about the nature of judgement, which have served gymnastics so poorly over the past years.  This blog has published on the subject of artistry, the aesthetic and the process by which cultural forms develop in response to changes in the environment fairly extensively to date.  I have written critiques of the Code.  This is all work in progress and I do not pretend to have developed anything like a full construct of the ideas as yet, as if that would be possible anyway.  But I would hope that the FIG attempt to analyse the problem in more depth than is suggested by the above statement, and that they don't rush into any sticking plaster solutions that might only make things worse in the long run.

I am providing this introduction here to what I hope will be a useful thread of discussion on the blog about the future of the sport.  I know that many people may not agree with me in what I say, but I would hope that we might explore the problem in a structured and reasoned way.  Please note, this is not an argument about whether Biles is a wonderful person, whether Mustafina should have won bronze on beam, whether Produnova wasn't the best gymnast ever or whether Komova or Douglas should have won the Olympic all around competition.  It is an argument about the form that the sport is taking at present, and how change might be made to improve the aesthetic of the sport.  It is my assumption that the artistic has suffered in the past few years, even to the point of disappearing, and the President of the FIG seems to have agreed too that things have taken a turn for the worse.  You are welcome to disagree with this assumption providing you can do so in an appropriate and well argued manner. 

My personal circumstances are such that I am struggling to find time to blog at present but I am determined to come back to this and write something that I hope will be meaningful, in the next months.  This is only a start.  In the meantime, please find time if you can to revisit some of the links below.  If you would like to contribute to the discussion, please do post a comment. 

I promise to update the blog with the post worlds interview translations in due course, but I think this is actually a far more important discussion at this stage of the game. 

Thank you for reading this far, and I'll look forward to reading your comments!

Just a few of the related postings on this blog:

What is this blog about?  Gymnastics at a turning point

Is Gymnastics Art?

Can judging ever be objective?

Evaluating the artistic - ambiguity and the FIG

Is Gymnastics still Russian?  Includes an interview with coach Vladimir Zaglada about the state of gymnastics.

Artistry and body type - some interesting observations by choreographer Elena Kapitanova

Gymnastics - The State of the Art 2013 - http://rewritingrussiangymnastics.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-state-of-art-gymnastics-in-2013.html

And some really interesting comments on IG's Facebook page ...