US Women’s Gymnastic Team Wins Silver

Yes, I stayed up too late again last night watching the Olympics. I would hate to miss any of the gymnastics! It has always been my favorite summer Olympic sport. The new scoring system is taking some time to get used to, but I guess I understand why they have changed. Instead of scoring on a 1 to 10 basis like before, now they have two scores that they add together. The first score is the “difficulty” of the routine. It seemed like most of the routines ranged from 5.8 to 7.7’ish. So, gymnasts have to decide whether to play it safe with a less difficult routine, hoping to score really high on their execution, or to take a risk with a higher difficulty and hope they nail it for a super high score. The execution score is the second score, and that is the normal 1 to 10 score that we are used to from previous years.

Last night, primetime really only showed the teams from China and the United States. I wish they had shown more of the other teams, but they only showed a glimpse of Russia and Romania. The battle for gold seemed like a battle until the third event.. the balance beam. Sure, a chinese girl fell off, but so did one of our girls. We were a full point behind when the floor exercise started. It was the final event of the team competition and the Americans pretty much fell apart. Everyone stepped out of bounds, Alicia Sacramoni fell… again. They were definitely still good enough for a silver medal, but gold was just too hard against such an amazing team from China.

So, after both men and women have competed, China wins everything so far in gymnastics. The commentators were telling us that the gymnasts are chosen from daycares and nurseries when they are about 3 years old, and are taken from their families to train and live with other gymnasts. The girls only get to see their parents once a year, if that. One of the Chinese girls (Cheng Fei? maybe, but I can’t be sure) actually wrote home years ago telling her parents that she wanted to come home. She did not want to be a gymnast. Her parents told her no, that she needed to “stick with the program.” I can’t imagine what it would be like to have no choice in the matter. Those athletes have an entirely different kind of pressure put upon them than American athletes. For the Chinese girls’ sake, I am glad they won.