Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

I’m reading a post on Twitter that relates Komova’s second place in the AA to her botched Amanar landing.  History often rewrites such stories, forgetting the whole picture - an AA comp is the best of four apparatus, not a vault control duel.  We often see the same arguments about other close finals - was Shushu’s vault in 1988 really a ten?  People forget, or choose to ignore, or never knew in the first place, that the AA comp in those days was a composite score of Compulsory and Optional TF + the AA score.  Silivas had errors on floor in team final and on beam in AA final.  Without those errors she would have beaten Shushu by a country mile in the AA, but Shushu was on fire and didn’t give a mm.  The vault scores don’t say it all. The 2012 quad was a curious point in gymnastics history.  Russia had made their rush for world lead in 2010, but wouldn’t have got the gold in Rotterdam without the help of mistakes from the USA team.  Mustafina was ...