My youngest kid, the Tiny Tornado, started gymnastics just over a year ago. After his very first class, his coach told us, "I think we have a real gymnast on our hands." In June, he joined the competitive team at his gym as a Level 4, the lowest competitive level, and it looks like he'll have his first meet in November.
So now, we're fans of men's gymnastics. Gymnastics is one of the most popular sports at the Olympics every four years, but most people don't pay any attention to it in between. This is because being a gymnastics fan is hard work. Most gymnastics events, even the big international ones, aren't broadcast on TV. Fans have to get their fix via live scoring updates on the USA Gymnastics webpage, and twitter updates from people in the audience. Often, it's not possible to see video until after the fact. This year, for the first time, it was possible to watch the qualifying rounds from the world championships on a live feed, but even the men's team final was broadcast without commentary in the US. You have to be dedicated.
On the one hand, I think this is too bad: following the sport this year has given me a much better understanding of what's going on with all that flipping and spinning, and I can now evaluate a routine with just a bit more sophistication than, "hey, he didn't fall off, and he stuck his landing!" I look forward to the Rio Olympics in 2016, when for the first time in my life, I'll know who the gymnasts are before they walk into the arena. I'll know their strengths and weaknesses. I'll know that Danell Leyva uses headphones and a towel draped over his head to avoid getting overstimulated with the noise around him; I'll know that it's worth calling inattentive family members to the TV for Donnell Whittenberg's vaults and Leyva's parallel bar routine; I'll know that John Orozco is talented and capable but lets his nerves get the better of him sometimes. I'll know who's not there, but might have been, and why they didn't make it.
On the other hand, I have some ideas about why gymnastics is a quadrennial treat for most people rather than perpetual fandom.
It is Too Far Removed From Our Own Experiences
This theory is not original with me; I read it somewhere, and it stuck with me. Basically, the forgotten writer of the piece I read suggested that fans of most sports that have strong followings, like soccer, baseball, football, and basketball, are games that fans can identify with because they can imagine themselves playing, too. Probably they have played, whether in gym class, a neighborhood pick-up game, a family match during halftime on Super Bowl Sunday, or in a league. What the players are doing on the field is different in intensity, quality, and skill, but it's the same game.
On the other hand, gymnasts of four years old (and even less) are already doing things the vast majority of us will never be able to do, at all. When we're watching gymnastics on YouTube, my gymnast son takes breaks to practice his handstands, presses, hollow-arch-kicks on the pull-up bar. But the rest of us? Ha! There's no gymnastics equivalent of taking a ball out back and tossing it around for awhile, and this, the argument goes, makes gymnastics too distant from our own experiences for most of us to spend a lot of time on it.
It's Repetitive
For the most part, in a given season, a gymnast is going to work up a routine on each apparatus, and stick to it. If you're paying a lot of attention, you might know that they have, say, an upgraded release skill on high bar that they're considering bringing to the competition. A year ago, I saw a short interview in which Sam Mikulak talked about working on his airflair as a skill upgrade on floor. I got to see him compete it (poorly) at a couple of college meets, and then really well at national and world championships. "Yay, Sam!" I thought. But if you're not paying attention, these little dramas and differences won't be apparent to you. "So-and-so took the extra twist out of his Tsukahara on vault today; he must not have been feeling confident" is pretty insider-baseball stuff.
So: you get to see the gymnasts do more-or-less the same things over and over, with variations that you have to be kind of an expert to recognize. I like this! But not everyone will.
There is No Head-to-Head Competition
Sure, the gymnasts are competing against each other, but not directly. Each of them has a routine they're trying to perform as well as they can, and, except for maybe psychologically, nothing any of the competition does can directly affect a gymnast's performance. There's no offense, no defense, no direct confrontation. In baseball, a great hit can be thwarted by an even greater catch, but there's nothing like that kind of drama in gymnastics.
It is Almost Impossible to Actually Watch a Whole Meet
During a men's gymnastics meet, there are athletes simultaneously performing routines on six apparatuses. When you watch on TV, the camera is always ignoring five other athletes to concentrate on the one you're being shown. Even when you're in the stands, you can't see it all. You miss an amazing vault because you're watching a mediocre floor exercise; the dramatic moment when the favorite to win falls off the pommel horse happens in the corner of your eye because you're watching somebody on rings. A meet lasts close to three hours, and to see all of it you'd have to watch it six times from six different perspectives.
Toward the end of a meet, when it's clear who's likely to win and who their competition is, the crowd will get excited and start to focus on those athletes. But for most of the meet, not even the people in the audience are watching the same event at the same time. Some of them are sending up a rousing cheer for a well-executed skill on the bar while some of them are sighing at a disappointment on rings, and some of them are checking their e-mail because their team is out this rotation on a bye. There's no single focal point, so you're always missing something.
Until Near the Very End, It's Almost Impossible to Know Who's Actually Winning
Throughout a gymnastics meet, individual and team scores are posted continuously (this only applies to team and all-around competitions; it's different in individual event competitions, but I'm not going to get into that right now). But for most of the meet, these scores are largely meaningless, except to the extent that you know how a specific team is doing relative to its usual performance.
One reason for this is that scores vary from apparatus to apparatus: the pommel horse is deadly, and scores there are usually lower overall than on other apparatuses. So whichever team starts the meet on pommel horse will very likely end the rotation in last place, but they have a good chance of closing the gap as the other teams rotate through their pommel routines.
In addition, teams and gymnasts have strengths and weaknesses. Teams A and B may both be great on floor, and only OK on high bar. Team A is going to pull ahead if they have an early rotation on floor while Team B is on bar, but that doesn't mean much until they've both finished both apparatuses.
Finally, if there are more than six teams competing, each team will take a bye on some rotations. So, at the end of a rotation, some teams will be far far behind because they've only been scored on, say, three apparatuses, while other teams have already done four.
Predicting the outcome of a gymnastics meet in progress is an exercise in branching possibilities and if-thens that rivals a game of chess.
Scoring is Complicated
It's pretty easy to understand a home run, a touchdown, or a goal in soccer, and to do the math as the points pile up. In gymnastics these days, it takes a slide rule to keep up. I have to admit I don't fully understand it yet, and I may well be wrong about what I think I do understand.
Each routine gets a score for difficulty, and one for execution. The D score is based on the difficulty assigned to various elements in the routine, and the E score starts at 10 and then deductions are taken for various things, like not completing skills, falling, poor form, and so on. This means that the potential score for each gymnast varies; a gymnast with a D score of, say, 5.2 could earn 15.2 points if he executes his routine perfectly (not that a perfect execution ever happens). A gymnast with a D score of 6.4 has a ceiling of 16.4. One reason Japan's Kohei Uchimura is favored to take Gold in the All-Around again at this year's World Championships is that nobody else has D-scores like his, and you can't beat him if your best possible score is still a losing score.
The Gymnastics Code of Points describes skills, and assigns them point values on a scale. "A" skills are worth a tenth of a point—my little guy's Level 4 routines are chock full of A skills. At the other end of the scale are a handful of F skills that are worth .6. When gymnasts talk about an "upgrade" skill, they mean they're working on something that will increase their D-score.
So, to understand a gymnast's score, you have have some kind of idea of their D-score, which determines the ceiling, and how many deductions they got, and how that stacks up in the context of the rest of the competition. Is 14.88 good? Bad? Mediocre? It can be hard to tell. For the broadcast of the national championships in August, the TV network invented a red-yellow-green symbol to cue the audience in about whether the gymnast had few deductions, some deductions, or lots of deductions. Green=Good, they told us, and Red=Bad. Because that's the kind of scoring we can understand.
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