And then there’s gymnastics: Even after the scores are in and the competition is over, most athletes wait in uncertainty. It’s a subjective sport and a subjective decision. The gymnasts go to a private room and wait to find out if they have earned a spot on Team USA.
This year, with competition once again fierce, especially for the final spots, the room will be filled with tension Sunday night in Minneapolis, when an opaque process will determine which gymnasts will represent the United States at the Paris Games.
For two decades, the selection process has followed a similar pattern. The top all-around finisher—and the top two in some years—earns an Olympic berth. The rest of the team is chosen by a committee, based on broad and vague criteria.
Previous regimes — Martha Karolyi of the Olympic Games from 2004 to 2016, then Tom Forster for the Tokyo Games — had adopted different approaches. With the arrival of new leaders at the Paris Olympics, it is unclear how this committee will choose the five gymnasts who will represent the country this summer.
One method favors overall rankings during selections. The other favors gymnasts who have complementary strengths that maximize the team’s score. The two approaches often do not result in the selection of the same five gymnasts.
Karolyi put together teams that valued team scores over overall standings. Since three athletes perform on each apparatus in the team final, gymnasts don’t have to be strong in every area to be valuable. For example, Madison Kocian, who finished eighth all-around at the 2016 trials but excelled on bars, and McKayla Maroney, who finished seventh all-around but was the nation’s top vaulter in 2012, earned Olympic berths. Both U.S. teams won gold, and Kocian and Maroney won individual silver medals in their signature events. Compared to the Tokyo Olympics, where teams were limited to four members, Karolyi’s teams had five, giving gymnasts who excel on one apparatus a bit more room.
Forster, who became high performance coordinator in 2018, was part of a three-person committee in 2021 that chose to name the top four all-around finalists for the Olympic team.
“As much as possible – this is just my personal preference – I wanted a ranking order,” Forster said, referring to the overall standings. “It just seems the fairest.”
A slightly different combination of gymnasts would have slightly increased the team’s scoring potential, but Forster said at the time: “We just didn’t think it was worth changing the integrity of the process by just a few tenths.”
Forster said in an interview this week that the difference between those hypothetical team scores would have had to be about one point to convince him to deviate from the overall standings.
No recent U.S. women’s Olympic gymnastics team has so accurately replicated the trials results.
An Olympic team has not been chosen based solely on overall ranking since 1996. This method generally means that all gymnasts have well-rounded skills and can likely compete if necessary on any apparatus. With four-member teams in Tokyo, all gymnasts competed on each apparatus in the qualifying round and only one athlete sat out per event in the team final. This made the overall capacity larger than usual. With a five-member team, Forster said his approach could have been different.
Grace McCallum earned the final spot on the team with her fourth-place finish in practice. However, MyKayla Skinner would have boosted the team a little more with her strong jump. Skinner received a place to compete in Tokyo as an individual rather than as a team.
Explaining the selection, Forster referred to the team’s wide margins of victory at the 2018 and 2019 world championships and said: “We’re so fortunate that our athletes are so strong that I don’t think it’s going to come down to tenths of a point in Tokyo.
But the Russian Olympic Committee took a more than one-point lead in qualifying after the U.S. team’s shaky performance. Forster said the team’s low execution scores were a surprise. In the chaotic team final, when Simone Biles’ vault went awry and she couldn’t compete on any other apparatus, the Russians won the gold medal by an even larger margin.
A team with the higher potential score might have more room to resist mistakes. But a team with additional options on each tackle could be seen as the safer choice, especially when considering scenarios like a last-minute injury. It is reasonable to consider such cases, especially when the difference in scores between several gymnasts is minimal.
In 2016, the team’s score would have been maximized by selecting Kocian and Ashton Locklear, another standout on bars. But two gymnasts contributing on a single apparatus would have been risky. Karolyi selected Kocian, who outperformed Locklear on bars at trials, and rounded out the team with Gabby Douglas, the 2012 Olympic all-around champion.
Douglas fell on the balance beam both nights of competition at the trials and placed seventh in the all-around. Despite the mistakes, Douglas’ scores gave her a slight edge over fourth-place Skinner in a simulated team final. Karolyi said at the time that she thought Douglas would improve during the pre-Games training camp. She was right: In the Olympic qualifying round, Douglas scored more than a point higher than she had at nationals or the trials.
This summer, the United States should win the team finals by a wide margin, especially given Russia’s absence. There are plenty of five-gymnast combinations that would likely be strong enough to win gold. But because these decisions have life-changing implications, the strategy raises questions: Is a gymnast who finishes seventh but has strengths that maximize the team’s score deserve One Olympic spot more or less than the fifth-placed athlete? The unclear selection procedures only underline the importance for the committee to explain the reasoning behind its choices.
Chellsie Memmel, the high-performance staff’s technical director, said recently that the team final is “our number one priority,” and she pointed to the format that requires only three gymnasts to perform on each apparatus. Memmel is not on the selection committee, but Alicia Sacramone Quinn, another high-performance staff member, is one of three on the committee. (Quinn’s voice on the committee is meant to reflect her and Memmel’s perspective.) Quinn earned an Olympic berth in 2008 when she excelled on vault, beam and floor but didn’t perform on bars. She wouldn’t be an Olympian if the team had been selected based solely on overall standings.
The recent world championships provide insight into how the Parisian team could be chosen. The top five overall finishers from the 2022 and 2023 selection camps received spots on the team, but Quinn said that was a coincidence and not a preferred method.
“It’s still a headache, and that’s how we talk about it,” Quinn said. “It’s a combination of our best all-around athletes and our best event finishers. It happened like that, but there are other things we take into consideration during this time.
Sunisa Lee, the all-around champion in Tokyo, was fantastic on bars and beam, but the U.S. team likely wouldn’t use her scores on vault or floor in the team final. Lee, who finished fourth in the all-around at nationals, has continued to improve this season. But if the focus is on all-around results, a gymnast could make a mistake on an apparatus she may never compete on in Paris and that could hurt her Olympic chances.
Asked if he thought Lee needed to finish in the top five to earn an Olympic spot, Lee’s coach Jess Graba said, “I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Really, I think our goal is to be top five all-around and top three on bars and beam. That would probably mean Lee makes the team, regardless of how the gymnasts are selected.”
The competition for the final spots could be tight. The selection procedures leave it up to the committee members to decide how they will approach it. And how they will make their decision will not be clear until the Paris Olympians celebrate in the arena after their names are announced.
News Source : www.washingtonpost.com
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