Gymnast Social Media Megathread

[Doug1233]

I can’t.

 

[Yarotska]

Again, a gymnast barely reaching a position for a microsecond in an element is not great quality. When the leg is below horizontal throughout in real time, that is deductible.

Have you seen it at 60 fps or just the youtube videos?

 

[GymBeauty]

I’ve seen Suni from every which way - the judges’ angle, various broadcast angles, and in person. Her rings on beam have never looked non-deductible.

I just went and watched 2019 Worlds from the judging angle again, and her front leg on the ring jump is absolutely too low even when viewing it in ultra slow-mo. Also noticing on her switch ring the front leg is dropping down so fast after trying to get it up (and not going up far enough); the element isn’t cohesively executed. Her front leg is 45+ degrees downward while trying to keep the back leg up.

It has to be stressed again how the Ring Leap in particular is the hardest version and does not go well for virtually anyone; Sun Xinyi is the only person to do that element without deduction. With the current requirements to get credit, most people are not going to get the back leg up far enough unless they do a really bad split position.

 

[Doug1233]

Her rings on beam have never looked non-deductible.

No one ever said they weren’t.

Please go up thread and re-read. Stop gaslighting!

 

[Sasha]

Sorry to disrupt this scintillating discussion, but McCusker did a cross grip Stalder-Endo mashup that’s worth checking out:

 

[Doug1233]

Sorry to disrupt this scintillating discussion, but McCusker did a cross grip Stalder-Endo mashup that’s worth checking out:

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CkCFHqSjLOY/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D

We have a thread!

Weird New Skill Women’s Gymn

totally derailing this but I don’t know where to put it otherwise: What would this be worth? hopefully at least an E? ETA: and please don’t forget to treat yourselves to the turn

 

[Sasha]

Oh thanks!

 

[GymBeauty]

No one ever said they weren’t.

Please go up thread and re-read. Stop gaslighting!

Gaslighting is exactly what you have been doing, not me. The post you just quoted doesn’t claim you said Suni’s rings are never deductible. Do not put words in my mouth.

This exhausting, antagonistic discussion was about ring leaps, and you have kept contorting it and trying to make me look like a crazy person for suggesting Suni would have difficulty with that element. You’ve also kept trying to say there’s nothing wrong with Suni’s front leg on the rings she’s done. I disagree, and pointed out proof that confirms it even when watching in stop-motion, which you’ve ignored.

There is some strange semantic going on here. You simultaneously admit she would be deducted, while acting like the flaws I’m talking about (which would cause a judge to deduct) are not real. I can tell there is something wrong with the element by looking at it; that’s how judging works. We have only a moment to see the element and cross reference it with the mental picture of how the element is supposed to look.

No judge can say for sure the exact degree of angle an element hits; we have to approximate. There is no real difference between a leg being at 90 or 89.5 degrees, but the rules call for a deduction in the latter case and not the former. Posting a screencap of an element being barely at 90 for the tiniest fraction of time is not a “see, it’s unquestionable” trump card. For an element to be unquestionable it needs to have clear duration or go past the minimum requirement, otherwise it may be in a grey area of a judge thinking it was sufficiently done or not.

It’s extra annoying how all this arguing is stemming from your insistence that a 2-pass routine surely must be the best thing possible for Suni, or that she can surely do a 3-pass routine with a Double Layout in the last pass, like it’s no difference between trying to that element on fresh legs or later in a performance. You’re going out of your way to making it sound like the Ring Leap is unquestionably going to best, when there is no such evidence.

 

[rlayt]

[No message]

 

[Doug1233]

Oh that sucks for her . Was she planning on NCAA this season?

 

[RedBirdie]

Poor girl. Yes, she started at Auburn right after nationals.

 

[blake]

At nationals in an interview, she seemed to be planning to petition to world trials. I wonder if USAG denied it or they ended up not petitioning.

 

[navyblue]

Well no, if a position is more observable in real time, it means the gymnast did it better,

You’ve created an indefensible standard in which only the superlative performance of a skill is “correct”. The standard for judging a skill cannot ever be that another gymnast was “more observable in real time”. If the objective measure of execution is achieving some threshold standard (180 degree split), then another gymnast going above and beyond that is irrelevant to the gymnast at hand. Now one here is calling Suni the next Anna Pavlova.

Doug, myself, and Yarotksa are saying Suni’s split position and front leg are correct, or adequate, or deduction free – an observation all of us are able to make in real time. (Additionally, I think we have also all agreed that separate from this, the skill might incur legitimate deduction from say, the meager arch in her back).

I’m all for using replays, including slo-mo replays for determining difficulty scores, but Gymnastics should look good in real time. That’s what we are watching after all.

But… that’s what the 3 of us are telling you, that it does look “good” (deduction-free in these specific, non-exhaustive ways) to us in real time. You essentially are now claiming, that because you can’t see it, it didn’t happen. To which we have deferred to slow-motion evidence only to prove that our observations, which you claim we can’t have had (?), are backed up by what happened in reality.

 

[GymBeauty]

Doug, myself, and Yarotksa are saying Suni’s split position and front leg are correct, or adequate, or deduction free – an observation all of us are able to make in real time.

If that’s what you believe you see, that is your judgement. To me it is not fine and I would ask you to look at her execution during 2019 or at 2021 Nationals, or various other times that I’m not going to spend time checking right now. She’s factually had too low of a leg many times.

You essentially are now claiming, that because you can’t see it, it didn’t happen. To which we have deferred to slow-motion evidence only to prove that our observations, which you claim we can’t have had

I’ve never said anything like that. The issue, as already explained, is how real time observation is the standard, and in close cases there is going to be a question mark where a judge has to make a decision. If an element is a close case in multiple aspects, then it’s fair to take .1 and move on. So for example when you say questionable arch of her back may be deductible, I wouldn’t take that deduction when already taking .1 off for the questionable leg (but in other cases where the front leg has been even worse, then both deductions make sense).

The standard for judging a skill cannot ever be that another gymnast was “more observable in real time”.

Of course it can be. That’s already what it is, in any close case scenario. A gymnast who holds a handstand perfectly in vertical will unquestionably receive no deduction, whereas another gymnast who hits a 10 degree angle will be in the danger zone of being deducted. The gymnast who went beyond the minimum requirement is going to score higher on average.

If the judging system was actually measuring quality accurately, then there would be better separation between elements than what we see now. For example, the rules for high bar releases - there is currently about a 6 inch differential in the height of a release that determines if it will get 0, .1, or .3 deduction on that aspect. Someone who does an “okay” release that catches slightly above the high bar gets 0 deduction. But now look at someone who does a massive, sky-high release that goes an entire 12 inches higher in the air over the person who did a “0 deduction” release. The person who showed vastly superior, exemplary quality is receiving no benefit, despite the differential they are showing in that skill being far greater than the differential of what can cause a “0 deduction” release to become a “.3 deduction” release.

 

[navyblue]

I’ll skip ahead to the ending of your comment to focus on where we agree, which I think is on many things, including that the judging system ought to do a better job distinguishing gymnasts. But, at the same time, there is a fidelity to the rule book which says that every such distinction is not technically permissible – at times, certain JO codes have rectified this by offering things like “virtuosity” bonus so that rather than operating strictly from a negative calculus of deductions, you can also add… (I like this concept applied to stuck landings moreso than for D dismounts, to throw out an example).

For all the snowballing complexity the current Code has accumulated for itself – for better or worse – it’s wild that we’ve basically ended up in a scenario where a very broad swath of variety in performance ends up clumped into a 7.5 E - 8.5 score range, the former essentially representing a mediocre routine without a fall, and the latter a very excellent routine with only de facto errors (the kind a casual gymnastics viewer might yell “PERFECT 10” at their TV screen for).

 

[KristyJ]

In reality, there are some entirely adequate performances of a skill that should receive zero deduction under the code even if they’re not performed to the excellence that another gymnast demonstrates. To treat it as otherwise would be to disregard the rules with which the gymnast must work in preparing their performance for competition. I will say that judges are more likely to take the borderline deductions if they’ve seen a more exemplary performance, but there’s just not room in the current code to take the extra step of making things that are clearly defined into a relative (though some criteria are more relative).

It’s why many of us have played the mental game of what gymnastics would look like with a GOE-style system similar to figure skating, though it would be a very big shift in scoring.

 

[GymBeauty]

Gymnastics does essentially have a GOE system already, the range is just smaller and has nonsensical gaps (.1, .3, .5) between each possible mark that can be given. If the range was improved to have closer gradients and more common sense (we shouldn’t be giving .5 on bent elbows or pirouette angles), and if we could also give .1 bonuses to things like held handstands, exemplary amplitude, unbelievable flexibility, etc - then it would be great. I think focusing on deductions is better overall because it provides clarity on what is missing; in figure skating the GOE’s are frequently arbitrary or political, and the lacking qualities are often overlooked.

 

[KristyJ]

I agree that the figure skating system is arbitrary in ways that make it non-transparent, and that is certainly one of the larger issues with it. I don’t, however, find deductions to be fully analogous to GOE, because “free of deduction” does not actually imply “performed better than everyone else,” because there are some perfectly adequate performances of a skill as per the rules wherein it would be criminal (and against the rules) to deduct, even if the performance is less stellar than that of another gymnast. What I like about GOE is the ability to say “this skill is adequate as performed and you get base value,” “this skill has these enumerable faults and so the GOE is negative,” or “this skill has at least one if not more of these enumerated desirable traits and as such deserves a plus in GOE.” In gymnastics we basically have the one, and everything baseline and above is free of deduction. As the rules currently are, baseline should be free of deduction because those are the rules presented to the gymnasts and to do other than the rules is unfair to the entire field as those are what they have to work with in preparation for competition.

I 110% agree that the increments given are ridiculous. Judges should have half tenth increments with which to work from .05 up to .5.

 

[GymBeauty]

Doing a 0 deduction element in gymnastics right now is basically the equivalent of doing at least a +4 GOE element in figure skating. It’s mainly a different way of framing things; the figure skating GOE system for example could be -9 through +1. That’s mathematically no difference from what it currently is, it’s just a difference in mental perception between how people look at negative vs. positive.

Either way it depends heavily on what the rules are for the system to be “accurate”, and it’s always tricky to convert all of these details into a mathematical system. There’s probably always going to be a flaw somewhere where the numbers won’t completely line up with how we would objectively evaluate two elements or routines.

Any bounded system is also always going to have an upper limit, where two elements receive the same maximum GOE score, but might still vary in quality from each other (which is why the goal should be to make it extremely difficult for an element to receive the highest score possible; it’s unlikely there will be a significant difference in quality between two “perfect” elements at that point).

 

[KristyJ]

Almost noone gets close to perfect GOE in skating, though. Amazingly an example of someone who did deservedly get above a 4 out of 5 was Ilia Malinin with his quad axel last week (deserved too, it was a gem). Of course, few people get the disaster of -5 GOE either.

In a way you could say “no deduction” is “perfect GOE,” but really they measure different things. The deduction system measures flaws vs. adequate technical peformance. The GOE system allows for virtuosity in performance, which gymnastics hasn’t measured since the old ROV days. The gymnastics system essentially calls base value and +5 GOE style performances, and everything in between, the same thing.