2023 World Championship Event Finals Day 1: MAG FX, PH, SR & WAG VT/UB (Saturday 10/07)

[arabiandoublefront]

Seems unfair to the women who competed all around less than 24 hours before event finals started. There should have been a day off in between.

Yeah, I’ve never understood this strange format of having women’s AA in the evening and then event finals in the afternoon the next day for worlds.

 

[Hatsumomo]

You didn’t enjoy QQY?
I think Ruby Evans looks more like Pugh

I did! I didn’t go back to edit to mention how I found it adorable how huggy she was with her fellow competitors. I don’t dislike her winning gold, but my favorites are Jones and Nemour.

 

[Livi]

Complaints about medals with falls were happening before anyone had even heard of Simone. It’s not at all unique to her. It’s simply that it hasn’t happened as often lately, especially to people other than her.

Sometimes I feel like what makes vault different from other events when there’s a fall involved, is that a fall on vault (in a final) is essentially 0,5 deduction, instead of 1,0. Because you always tale the average of two vaults.

I think that’s also a reason people with falls have been able to medal in vault finals, but not in other event finals

 

[onodian]

Sometimes I feel like what makes vault different from other events when there’s a fall involved, is that a fall on vault (in a final) is essentially 0,5 deduction, instead of 1,0. Because you always tale the average of two vaults.

I think that’s also a reason people with falls have been able to medal in vault finals, but not in other event finals

There’s the li shanshan silver. But yes it seems to happen more on vt

 

[ArnoldRimmer]

Ellie Black talks about being stuck at the arena last night after the AA until midnight waiting for drug testing to finish, not having enough time to eat or recover, then having to get back to the arena early this morning for the event finals. She says a lot of the girls felt it was not an ideal situation. More thought should be put into athlete safety at competitions

She’s completely right! It was the same at CWG last year and several of the athletes were visibly struggling with exhaustion.

 

[Denn]

and then the FIG said all aerial/saltos should be a D IIRC

This is because their connection rules are based on the values of the elements, not the mechanics.

If they had simpler connection rules based on mechanics, they could make all the values correct, too.

 

[navyblue]

You agree Simone didn’t deserve to win. The only way to make that happen is increase the penalty for a clear fall on vault (not a 1 arm touch down or butt graze, a real fall). It makes sense because a vault “routine” has less possible times to fall than other routines, it’s a proportionally bigger error to fall here.

Yeah, I think the “proportionally bigger” error part is an important point. Perhaps that means that special rules should govern Event Finals in distinction from other rounds of competition, because applying what I still believe to be overly reactionary rules would lead to outcomes like a fall in a team competition or all-around final being way more catastrophic on vault.

 

[Aeris]

A fall on vault should be a higher penalty no matter what phase of competition it is. A higher percentage of that “routine” has been impacted by the fall, compared to other apparatus where many skills are being performed and a higher amount of time is being spent on the routine. In every other apparatus there is also connection bonus and skill credit itself than can be lost from falling. It’s not just a 1 point deduction in other routines.

 

[flappergirl]

A fall on vault should be a higher penalty no matter what phase of competition it is. A higher percentage of that “routine” has been impacted by the fall, compared to other apparatus where many skills are being performed and a higher amount of time is being spent on the routine. In every other apparatus there is also connection bonus and skill credit itself than can be lost from falling. It’s not just a 1 point deduction in other routines.

I’ve often thought the e-score for vaults should be doubled. But I also think that Simone’s over-rotating her vault was absolutely amazing. Andrade deserved the gold, imo, but Simone deserved the silver.

 

[irichluck21]

So what do we think the fall value should be on vault?

1.5, 2.0, 3.0?

 

[MaryClare]

Vault is tricky. Can you fall on vault?

1. Touch the vault and do nothing. Zero
2. Do something that isn’t in the COP (ie bail out and do a timer). Zero
3. Do a vault different from your intended vault. Marked from that vault’s value
4. Insufficiently execute a vault. Downgraded
5. Fail to land a vault. Zero
6. Fail to control the landing. Deductions

Perhaps the landing deductions need to have a larger scale. For instance, 1 point off if you fail to remain on your feet/secure your landing.

 

[ruby]

At least for EF only dividing the D score and subtracting the deductions of both vaults from 10.0 would make sense. At the same time, maybe doing two vaults for AA (same or different) and using the same process, would get E scores more in line with other events and SVs could be brought up again to be more in line with other events.

 

[Denn]

They should just require two vaults all the time and divide all the D-scores by 2 permanently so they can add them together.

All problems solved, and AAers would have to show some stuff.

They can also add a bonus for the “differentness” of the vaults:
+0.3 different block positions (front, side, back)
+0.2 different post-flights (to penalize two Yurchenko fulls or, say, Rudi + Cheng)
+0.2 one multi-salto vault, one multi-twist vault from the same block position
+0.1 one roundoff entry, one direct entry
+0.1 different landing directions

 

[RichardL]

They should just require two vaults all the time and divide all the D-scores by 2 permanently so they can add them together.

All problems solved, and AAers would have to show some stuff.

They can also add a bonus for the “differentness” of the vaults:
+0.3 different block positions (front, side, back)
+0.2 different post-flights (to penalize two Yurchenko fulls or, say, Rudi + Cheng)
+0.2 one multi-salto vault, one multi-twist vault from the same block position
+0.1 one roundoff entry, one direct entry
+0.1 different landing directions

I agree with all of this as a fan, but don’t vaulting specialists already have a clear advantage in the AA? If you make Derwael or Qiu etc do a second vault with these rules in place, she is just digging an impossible hole, while Biles and Andrade are building a literal mountain.

But agreed that it would be interesting to see in the tier just behind Biles, Andrade, Jones, and Gadirova. Would probably be very stressful for Jones.

 

[Denn]

I agree with all of this as a fan, but don’t vaulting specialists already have a clear advantage in the AA? If you make Derwael or Qiu etc do a second vault with these rules in place, she is just digging an impossible hole, while Biles and Andrade are building a literal mountain.

But agreed that it would be interesting to see in the tier just behind Biles, Andrade, Jones, and Gadirova. Would probably be very stressful for Jones.

Not really, because dividing all the D-scores by 2 and then adding them together puts the D-scores in more or less the same range. The additional spread will come in the E-scores, and if all vaults are judged consistently, the gymnasts who execute will should beat the spread, so to speak.

BTW, Vault can afford more spread anyway: vault scores are still less spread out than bars and floor scores (and I think usually beam, too, but not at this competition — lots of hit beam routines in the AA final!) It’s actually bars that favors the specialists most — or, at least, penalizes the worst.

VT	UB	BB	FX	AA
MEAN	13.629	13.404	13.265	12.900	53.197
STANDARD DEV	0.616	1.051	0.576	0.788

See here to get the whole data set. Oddly, beam was the least spread of the final. I suspect that was a rare fluke!

Biles and Andrade are great on vault, and yes, they would be rewarded for having two good vaults. But why shouldn’t they be, right?

 

[navyblue]

but don’t vaulting specialists already have a clear advantage in the AA

I’m not sure they do? Or tell me more about why you think that’s the case.
It’s a bit hard to quantify… but what I’m seeing is that Bars is the event where being exceptional can add the biggest margin to your score, sometimes as much as a full point separating a merely good bar worker (~14.0) from an event final gold medalist (~15.0). I think this is a big factor in Kaylia Nemour unexpectedly placing 8th AA this year.

I think margins for exceptional single event work are something like 1. UB (~1.0) 2. FX (~0.8) 3. VT (~0.6) 4. BB (??? – beam champions generally being so reliant on combination-derived D scores that can quickly go awry, and susceptible to falls like everyone else probably makes this the least advantageous overall.)

ETA: Probably a good way to quantify this would be to check which event had the most single-apparatus contributors on the team at Worlds – I guess ones who were intentionally selected for that as opposed to some sort of injury or last-minute lineup mayhem. I don’t feel like doing it though heh.

 

[RichardL]

I’m not sure they do? Or tell me more about why you think that’s the case.
It’s a bit hard to quantify… but what I’m seeing is that Bars is the event where being exceptional can add the biggest margin to your score, sometimes as much as a full point separating a merely good bar worker (~14.0) from an event final gold medalist (~15.0). I think this is a big factor in Kaylia Nemour unexpectedly placing 8th AA this year.

I think margins for exceptional single event work are something like 1. UB (~1.0) 2. FX (~0.8) 3. VT (~0.6) 4. BB (??? – beam champions generally being so reliant on combination-derived D scores that can quickly go awry, and susceptible to falls like everyone else probably makes this the least advantageous overall.)

ETA: Probably a good way to quantify this would be to check which event had the most single-apparatus contributors on the team at Worlds – I guess ones who were intentionally selected for that as opposed to some sort of injury or last-minute lineup mayhem. I don’t feel like doing it though heh.

I guess vault and bars have always had this distinction, except gymnasts like Biles (and now Andrade and Gadirova) have shown that floor can be a huge AA asset as well. So maybe I’ll walk back my claim! I do think that requiring two vaults again in the AA, though, would certainly hinder gymnasts on the lower end of vault to an extreme degree. We would start seeing gymnasts whose main vault is a FTY throw layout Yurchenkos while vault specialists would still have two strong D scores to average. But I’m not a maths person like Denn so maybe it all equals out anyway as he describes.

 

[Aeris]

They should just require two vaults all the time and divide all the D-scores by 2 permanently so they can add them together.

I’d love to see 2 vaults from everyone again, but the table of values needs to be heavily adjusted, otherwise difficult vault upgrades become much less worthwhile. Amanar is already only .4 more than DTY and has become practically extinct because of that, it would be only a .2 upgrade if the current D-scores were averaged.

What I’m thinking is rate the easiest vault in the code as .1 (currently it’s 1.6) and then have less separation between the easier vaults, but maintain a high increase for the most difficult vaults, and add the two vault start values together. It would end up as a 2 point D-score advantage for an Amanar + Cheng vault program, compared to typical “Qiu Qiyuan” vault program of Yurchenko 1/1 level vaults.

I don’t think 2 points in D-score is unfair for that level of difference. The best UB/BB workers can get into the 7’s on their D score, while people who are bad on UB/BB are sitting at low 5’s on their D score, so this 2 point separation is already a thing.

 

[Denn]

@navyblue See my post above. Compare to the numbers you listed… Not a coincidence.

 

[Denn]

@Aeris I’m fine with raising the Amanar 0.2 (and maybe the Tsuk double full / Kas full) to make it desirable again. But not more than that. As I was showing with the stats, the spread on bars is TOO high compared to the other 3 events. It’s not something to aspire to. As @RichardL was saying, gymnasts like Qiu Qiyuan are going to get killed, even with the rule as I proposed it. The D-scores for such gymnasts will be low as is — their second vault will be less than or equal to the first vault, so pull them down a little, and they will less likely get lots of bonuses on the D-score. And probably the E-score will get 'em, too in some cases.

We would start seeing gymnasts whose main vault is a FTY throw layout Yurchenkos while vault specialists would still have two strong D scores to average.

But this means that they are really poor vaulters and should be at a disadvantage.