Komova v Douglas 2012

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 ready to rule the world, took her gold AA, but was then wiped out by an injury early in 2011 that presaged the fall of her team in 2012.

With Mustafina, Komova and Afanasyeva the Russians had the team but not the confidence to consolidate their leadership in London.  Fights between the coaches diluted the momentum of 2010, one of their best gymnasts (2011 Euro Champ Dementyeva) was inexplicably sent home early from the main training camp leaving the team with a frightened and demoralised lead off, and what should have been a new dawn for Russian and world gymnastics instead proved to be nothing more than a sweet dream.

Komova, however, legitimately had a claim for gold in 2012 - the main one, not the minor prizes.  Having been close to it in 2011, London was her opportunity for a big hoorah.  Sadly, it didn’t happen.

Komova is the most cheated Olympic gymnast of all time.*  Her silver medal in 2011 provoked audible gasps of indignation.  A low landing in her final tumble was judged more harshly than a break in form on UB from her main rival and AA world champion that time, Jordyn Wieber.  It was a close run thing, but Komova had felt like the winner.  Wieber was favoured in the scores though - one of those uncomfortable outcomes that made you feel that the rules were wrong.

In London, Komova was clearly the best AA gymnast if she could deliver.  Not only were her D scores comparable to those of Douglas, her standard of execution was superior.  But the scores on both vault and UB did not seem to treat the two gymnasts equally.  Komova had a flawed vault but a perfect UB.  Douglas had minor errors on vault and a .4 deficit in her UB D score.  This should have left Komova in the lead by halfway, but instead the margins were eroded by what is known as ‘boxing’ in the E scores.  The UB scores had seemed to favour the US team all week, and the AA final was no exception.  An E score on floor of 9.1 for probably the best executed floor work of that quad gave no margin.  Artistry deductions were not applied to Douglas for her lacklustre and unimaginative floor performance.  The judges simply did not discriminate in favour of Komova’s superior work on three apparatus, leaving the vault deductions and Douglas’s generous UB score  as the deciding outcome.

Even the senior judges agreed that the result was wrong.  Their reference marks gave Komova the win.

Yes, there is always controversy and always will be controversy in our thankfully complex, subjectively judged sport.  (Even if robots take over some of the measurement, there will still be arguments about the humanly judged parameters and settings.) But in this case there was more than an ounce of error made in favour of the Russian’s rival.  Controversy often means a difference of opinion.  That’s OK except for when the opinion doesn’t see the whole picture.  And history often rewrites the story in favour of the victor.  So we do not forget.

*well ok, perhaps without considering 2000, where arguably the whole field was cheated of a fair fight.y