Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

Many thanks to Liz McOsker who has contributed these fantastic photo collages comparing various skills - back flip (Komova/Wieber), Tkachev (Afanasyeva/Raisman) and split leaps (various) as performed by the American and Russian gymnasts. Words fail me.

First impressions, lasting impressions. The Tokyo World Championships were certainly a talking point this year. For me they were perhaps the most political championships we have experienced in some years. In this age of social media, talk was all important, and it began well before the competition started. I expect it will go on for some time to come. I will take a considered look at all the national level exchanges in due course, but in the meantime I wanted to record a few thoughts. And, lest we forget, put into relative permanence a few observations from the world of social media and broadcast about a controversial all around result. This World Championships was all about the power and precision of the American girls. They did dominate the team competition and were without question the best prepared team at this event. We also witnessed the continuing, rather surprising rise of a depleted yet determined Russian team. The developing discourse of the battle between the wom...

And finally, the judges did some judging. As a result, we have a world champion - Afanasyeva - who is worthy of the honoured title 'artistic gymnast'. At the end of the day, Afanasyeva won because the judges chose her routine as the best. At last, I like to think, artistry influenced the outcome. Only the judges could tell you, though, whether this was actually the case. The top 3 gymnasts all had the same difficulty value - 6.1. They all made errors and so all had deductions. It was very close indeed. Discussing artistry is difficult. It is a concept that is not easily articulated as it is largely intangible. It's also rather contingent on matters of taste. A shared understanding of the vocabulary would be a good starting point though. 'Choreography' as understood by many of us is a synonym for 'dance composition' and yet there is so much more to the art of choreography, including but not limited to ideas of balance, line, rhythm, amplitude....