Post by LFC on Jul 26, 2021 19:30:44 GMT
I almost hesitate to put this thread in Non-Political but fingers crossed.
I will start off with the Simone Biles scoring controversy. We've discussed this before. She's quite probably the greatest gymnast of all time, male or female, but the difficulty of her routines seems to be undervalued and the International Gymnastics Federation has failed to provide a reason for what's clearly going on.
“Simone does something that’s called a Yurchenko double pike, which is misleading because she’s actually doing three complete flips during the vault,” said Dave Lease, who runs the gymnastics and figure skating site The Skating Lesson. “This is something that only a handful of men can do without serious bodily harm. She actually did the vault extremely well. But the judges went conservative on the score.”
The other element, as Lease points out, is her dismount off the balance beam: a double-twisting, double-back.
“The double-twisting double on the floor is what Shawn Johnson and Jordyn Wieber were mounting their floor routines with. Ending this off the balance beam is truly mind-boggling,” Lease said.
Johnson and Wieber were Olympic gold medalists in 2008 and 2012, respectively. At their peak, both were considered two of the best gymnasts in the world and, like Biles, they shined in events like the floor routine, which showcases a gymnast’s power and tumbling skills. Biles has taken their best floor routine move and is performing it on a completely different apparatus, a 4-inch-wide platform.
The other element, as Lease points out, is her dismount off the balance beam: a double-twisting, double-back.
“The double-twisting double on the floor is what Shawn Johnson and Jordyn Wieber were mounting their floor routines with. Ending this off the balance beam is truly mind-boggling,” Lease said.
Johnson and Wieber were Olympic gold medalists in 2008 and 2012, respectively. At their peak, both were considered two of the best gymnasts in the world and, like Biles, they shined in events like the floor routine, which showcases a gymnast’s power and tumbling skills. Biles has taken their best floor routine move and is performing it on a completely different apparatus, a 4-inch-wide platform.
And then there's this. It seems like you can never escape race.
Sometimes that ire manifests itself in explicitly racist ways, like in Biles’s 2013 debut: Italian gymnast Carlotta Ferlito made a comment that she and her teammates should have donned blackface to win. Ferlito’s federation backed her up, with its spokesperson David Ciaralli saying at the time:
Valeri Liukin, who is the former coordinator of the US women’s gymnastics team and current coach of Brazil’s women’s team, said in a 2019 interview that the current scoring system favors black athletes because they’re more “explosive”:
Yikes!
What these generalizations missed are extremely talented white athletes like Wieber and Raisman who preceded Biles and benefited from the current scoring system as well as 2012 all-around gold medalist Gabby Douglas, who beat out the likes of Wieber and Raisman and is considered a finesse gymnast. The comments fit a pattern of how transcendent Black athletes (see: the Williams sisters) are spoken about in crude and pseudoscientific terms — that their greatness stems from blackness as a kind of physical advantage rather than greatness being a product of talent, hard work, and practice.
Carlotta was talking about what she thinks is the current gymnastics trend: the Code of Points is opening chances for colored people (known to be more powerful) and penalizing the typical Eastern European elegance, which, when gymnastics was more artistic and less acrobatic, allowed Russia and Romania to dominate the field
Valeri Liukin, who is the former coordinator of the US women’s gymnastics team and current coach of Brazil’s women’s team, said in a 2019 interview that the current scoring system favors black athletes because they’re more “explosive”:
But yes, gymnastics is changing. In the Code of Points, difficulty is very valued now. Of course, this suits African Americans. They’re very explosive — look at the NBA, who’s playing and jumping there?
Yikes!
What these generalizations missed are extremely talented white athletes like Wieber and Raisman who preceded Biles and benefited from the current scoring system as well as 2012 all-around gold medalist Gabby Douglas, who beat out the likes of Wieber and Raisman and is considered a finesse gymnast. The comments fit a pattern of how transcendent Black athletes (see: the Williams sisters) are spoken about in crude and pseudoscientific terms — that their greatness stems from blackness as a kind of physical advantage rather than greatness being a product of talent, hard work, and practice.
