Favorite/Least Favorite: United States Women"s Gymnastics Team Edition

From Phelps to Women"s Gymnastics: America"s Record Breaking Olympic Moments
Favorite/Least Favorite: United States Womens Gymnastics Team EditionJust enough Aly Raisman, not enough pommel horseGetty Images

So far, my favorite quote from the Olympics comes from Aly Raisman, the captain of the United States womens gymnastics team. Its from an NBC Olympics story, and was an answer to a question about whether being such overwhelming favorites meant there was increased the pressure on the team.

She said: Were going in as the best team in the world. So we should carry ourselves that way, not be scared and shaky because we have that pressure. It should be the opposite. You know, you walk in like youre number one and I think thats intimidating to everyone else.

NOT BE SCARED OR SHAKY BECAUSE WE HAVE THAT PRESSURE. That s**t is incredible to me.

During basketball season or football season I always hate when the team I like is the one that everyone says is supposed to win, because then it feels like the only things that can happen are (a) you win the thing, which is [whatever] because you were supposed to win it anyway, or (b) you lose the thing, which is an utter and total catastrophe. Im terrified of that. Im terrified of even rooting for a team that might suffer a catastrophic blow. Id always rather be in the opposite position: where its (a) you lose the thing, and its [whatever] because you were supposed to lose it anyway, or (b) you win the thing, which is an utter and total miracle. Those are the low stakes I prefer.

So when I saw that Aly Raisman quote, it was just like, Oh. I get it. Im a coward. Aly Raisman describing her team as the best team in the world and then saying that considering themselves as such only makes them even more powerful is just such a fantastic and foreign thing to me.

Prior to competing in her first Olympics competition in London in 2012, Raisman was the subject of a documentary called Aly Raisman: Quest for Gold. It was filmed from 2011 up until the Olympic trials. Do you understand what that means? She literally had them make an entire documentary about her wanting to win a gold medal at the Olympics, the most pressure-stuffed contest a gymnast can enter, and she did it BEFORE she was even on the Olympic team, which quadruples the pressure of the situation.

But then guess what she did? Ill tell you what she did. She tried out for the team. Then she made the team. Then she went to the Olympics. Then she won a gold medal. Then she won ANOTHER gold medal. Then she won a bronze one, too, just because. It was more medals than any other gymnast on the American team won in London, not to mention that one was for the floor routine, which no American woman had ever done before.

Aly Raismans confidence is my favorite thing about these Olympics. It has a gravity to it.

My other favorite/least favorite things from the 2016 United States womens gymnastics team:

Favorite: Absolute Team Dominance

Under the current Olympic scoring system, no gymnastics team had ever won as decisively and crushingly as the U.S. women did this year. Here are the scores for the first- and second-place teams in that event from the past four games:

2012, USA: 183.596, Russia: 178.530

2008, China: 188.900, USA: 186.525

2004, Romania: 114.283, USA: 113.584

2000, Romania: 154.608, Russia: 154.403

Mostly, when a team wins the competition, its by a point, maybe a little more. The 2016 U.S. women beat Russia, the second-place team, by more than eight points. Thats like if the Spurs won a game by 160, or like if the Sixers won a game at all.

Least Favorite: No Pommel Horse

They dont have the pommel horse in womens gymnastics. Thats very unfortunate because its very tense and so much fun to watch due to how difficult of a thing it is to navigate. (Im a big fan of high stakes when its someone elses well-being in play instead of my own.)

The pommel horse is my favorite kind of gymnastics apparatus and also my favorite kind of horse in general, really. It goes:

• Pommel horse: the most challenging of all horses
• Seahorse: the most elegant of all horses and the most mysterious, too
• Sawhorse: the most practical of all horses
• Regular horse: the most basic of all horses
• Workhorse: the most useful of all horses and also the one I respect the most
• Trojan horse: the least trustworthy of all horses

I wish every Olympic athlete in every Olympic sport had to do at least one pass on the pommel horse. Im sad that they dont. But Im especially sad that the Team USA women dont get to.

Favorite: Athlete Story Arcs

Look at how the team is put together. Youve got:

• Aly Raisman: The unshakable, unflappable leader of the team. Drop her into whatever situation it is that you think is the most deadly, the most dangerous, and watch her back handspring her way right TF out that b***h untouched. Shes the second-best all-around gymnast on the planet right now, losing out only to
• Simone Biles: Her brilliance is endless. From just 2013 to now, between the Olympics and world championships, she has won 16 individual and team medals, 12 of which were gold. I was watching a trailer for the new Wonder Woman movie for, like, two full minutes before I realized I was actually just watching Simone Biles on the balance beam. Shes unreal.
• Laurie Hernandez: Read this.
• Gabby Douglas: She and Raisman are the only American women in history to have three Olympic gold medals, one of which was for the individual all-around that Douglas won in 2012, which, FYI, made her the first ever African American woman to do so.
• Madison Kocian: The quiet one, yes. But cobras have never been much for talking, you know what Im saying? I watched an uneven bars routine this week where she literally got a 0.0 on the penalties portion of her score. Shes unfuckwithable.

Theres this movie that came out in 1989 called Best of the Best, about a team of Americans that gets put together to face a Korean team in a massively important international martial arts tournament. The Final Five are the real-life version of that, and it makes me so happy.

Least Favorite: My Sense of Self-Worth

On the one hand, the Olympics are dope because you get to watch incredible humans do incredible things, but then on the other hand you realize that you are not an incredible human and cannot do incredible things. I think the closest I ever came in my life to being a gymnast is: One time I dropped my phone but before it smashed on the floor I managed to get my foot underneath it and it absorbed enough of the force from the initial impact that the screen didnt crack when it finally actually hit the floor.

Least Favorite: The Two-Per-Country Rule

To qualify to compete in the individual all-around competition, scores are tallied up from the previous rounds of competition on each apparatus and then arranged from highest to lowest. The 24 highest scores qualify, and anyone outside of that gets to watch. The one sticky part, though, is that each country is only allowed to advance two gymnasts into the finals, even if that particular countrys third-place gymnast scored higher than a different countrys first- or second-place gymnast, which is exactly what happened to the USAs Jordyn Wieber at the 2012 Olympics and also what happened to Gabby Douglas, the reigning all-around Olympic champion, this year (Biles and Raisman scored higher). Its a rule put in place to help grow the popularity of gymnastics outside of already-dominant countries, so I can see the reasoning behind it. But, I mean, I also see the reasoning behind not eating candy for dinner every day, too. That doesnt mean I like it.

Favorite: Aly Raismans First Tumbling Pass During the Floor Exercise

Listen, I really dont even know how to explain exactly what all it was that she did here. The technical description of it is a roundoff, one-and-a-half step-out into a roundoff, back handspring into an Arabian double front into a punch layout. That probably doesnt mean anything to you, same as it didnt mean anything to me when I heard the commentators talking about it beforehand. All I know is that she lined up on one side of the floor, started running, planted, then there was this big, bright flash of light, and then when I woke up I saw that all of my furniture had been thrown through the wall and both of my ACLs were torn.

(You can see the pass in slow motion here.)

The Olympics is full of the greatest athletes in the world doing the most athletic things possible (and also archery). Raismans first tumbling pass, which she did in London in 2012 and then did even better in Brazil, is the number-one thing thats happened so far.

Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&ct2=us&usg=AFQjCNEa37bJL-71JrWeiKHFwrUtyE6uBg&clid=c3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331&cid=52779179248410&ei=RQeuV6CVLcKU3AGYy6mwCA&url=https://theringer.com/united-states-olympic-womens-gymnastics-2016-simone-biles-aly-raisman-3bd0624c0d42

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Olympics Recap: Women"s Gymnastics All-Around Finals

Celebs React to EPIC USA Women"s Gymnastics Team Gold Medal at Rio Olympics 2016

Theres really only one way to describe Simone Biless performance in the womens all-around finaldominant. There could be other words to use, but theyd all mean the same thing. It was a performance that exceeded expectations when expectation might have never been higher for a gymnast. To match them, Biles wasnt supposed to just win, that wouldnt have been impressive enough. She needed to blow the rest of the competition away and thats exactly what she did.

Biles went into the third rotation down 0.034, behind Russias Aliya Mustafina. She left the rotation up 1.533 with her best event, floor, remaining. By the time Biles took to the floor for her last routine, she needed just a 13.833 to win. It wasnt the 7+ routine she needed to put up to win the team final, but Biles would be able to hit a 13.8 on floor with a fall, maybe two. She went out and put up a 15.933, the highest single score of the competition and the highest on floor by half a point.

In the end, the margin of victory was 2.1, the greatest win Biles has put up in international competition on the grandest of stages. Previously, Biless biggest win was by 1.083 points at the 2015 World Championships. The competition around Biles has been getting better too, but shes been improving at a greater rate.

Over the past four major international competitions, the runner-ups score was gotten higher in all but one and the average score of all participants has increased in each meet.

But Biles never let herself fall back to the pack, she just keeps improving. She doesnt just continue to win, she pulls herself in front of the competition to lengths never seen before. Her win on Thursday was the most dominant in international gymnastics in the open scoring era (since 2006). To bring back the Z-Scores, which accounts for performance against the entire field, not just the runner up and something introduced here comparing Biles to the best male gymnast Kohei Uchimura, Biless Olympic all-around win had a Z-Score of 2.805, the highest of the 22 individual all-around results from the past eight World Championships and three Olympics.

Theres been so many superlatives thrown at Biles over the past week and its possible none of them are exaggerated. Shes made her case as the best female gymnast ever and shes building quite the resume to put against Kohei Uchimura for the greatest of all-time.

Whats scary about Bilesat least scary for any women with dreams of winning any meet while Biles competingis how much better she can still become. Womens gymnastics is not a sport of longevity. The fact Biles has been firmly on top of the sport for four years is already amazing, but theres even more in the tank.

Biless first pass on floor is a double layout with a full twist. If she wanted, she could add a whole extra twist to the skillshe already does that in a tucked position for her third tumbling pass. On vault, she has the ability to add another half twist to her 2.5-twisting yurchenko. Only one woman is close to competing that, North Koreas Hong Un-Jong who might attempt it for the first time during vault finals on Sunday. On beam, Biles already does the hardest dismount in the world, a full-twisting double back. Shes trained putting another twist on that one too.

Its yet to be known what Biles will do after Rioand she still has three individual event finals before that happensbut it would not be surprising to see her take some time off. But if she decides to continue competing, she wont be trying to make a comeback like some other Olympic champions before her. Theres a good chance Biles can keep getting better.

Biles, though, wasnt the only American gymnast fulfilling an Olympic dream on Thursday. Aly Raisman entered the day with three Olympic medals, all three of them gold, but it was a bronze that escaped her which led to her comeback bid for Rio.

Raisman was the second all-around qualifier for the U.S. in London and she did quite well, well enough to finish tied for third. However, there was a tiebreaker rule that did not allow for duplicate medals to be handed out and Raisman lost the tiebreaker to Aliya Mustafina. Raisman left that competition with nothing, and even though she would win a gold medal on floor a few days later, losing out on an all-around medal is what drove her back to competition.

In qualifying, Raisman finished second behind Biles. Before that round there were even questions about whether Raisman would get the chance to do all around, but she was given the fourth and final spot on bars over Laurie Hernandez, which gave her the opportunity to compete for another chance at an all-around medal.

Its one thing to return to a second Olympics in womens gymnastics, but its another to get better like Raisman did. She, like Biles, got to end the competition on floor and also like Biles needed a score she could easily reach to be position for a silver medal. She didnt have to be perfect, but she was close and the second her floor routine ended, she knew she had accomplished the one thing she had left to do in the Olympics. Raisman finished 1.433 ahead of Mustafina for second, almost as dominating of a victory as Biles in first.

The competition is not over for these two athletes. Theyll get a few days off, but then its back to the floor for event finals. Raisman will defend her her Olympic title on floor during competition on Tuesday. Biles will compete vault on Sunday, beam on Monday and will try to dethrone Raisman on floor Tuesday. Shell be favored to win gold on all three of those events, but as shes proven already, theres no problem in exceeding even the highest expectations.

Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&ct2=us&usg=AFQjCNF2sD7D5rOJPNjUvz4Df5P-iXBFHA&clid=c3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331&cid=52779177676237&ei=Mv2tV9D3B8ON3gGJ0Y7oBg&url=https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/08/olympics-recap-womens-gymnastics-all-around-finals.html

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