This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here. If you’re enjoying our coverage from Paris, join Slate Plus to support our work.
For about 30 excruciating minutes in the middle of the night on Sunday—well, the middle of my night; it was noon in Paris—the gymnastics world sank into a collective pit of dread, as flashbacks of Tokyo seemed to unfurl in real time. During the second subdivision of the women’s qualifying meet—where berths in the team and individual event finals are decided—Simone Biles looked injured. She briefly even left the Bercy Arena. Oh my god—not again!
Then it got worse: Jade Carey, looking wan, balked her final tumbling pass on floor exercise, doing a single back tuck instead of her planned double somersault, and then rolling all the way off the mat. Carey, the defending Olympic floor champion, didn’t just fail to qualify for the floor final; she ended qualifications in 74th place—out of 75.
Then, thank goodness, some hope! Biles, leg in question taped, hit a solid floor routine with full jaw-dropping difficulty. Alas, it didn’t last long. During warm-ups for the Americans’ next event, vault, Biles briefly seemed unable to walk, crawling down the podium and then rising to her feet only to hop. As a large portion of the gymnastics fandom reached for a Xanax, Biles—wait, was that a laugh? And then, moments later, she absolutely drilled her eponymous vault (the Biles 2, or Yurchenko double pike), for the highest single score on any apparatus across all five qualifying subdivisions:
Biles beasted through qualifying hurt to finish just under 2 points ahead of her only major rival, Brazil’s resplendent Rebeca Andrade. (Pain does not exist in this dojo!) Was this whole thing a hallucination? Who cares—by the end of the meet, everything was fine.
Well, not all fine: Carey later explained that she’s been feeling ill for the past three days and was unable to eat—the human body equivalent of gunning for zero to 60 entirely on fumes. But, silver lining: Carey’s troubles made room in the floor final for Jordan Chiles, who had the absolute meet of her life. This means we get to see Chiles’ enthralling Beyoncé routine two more times: once during team finals, and again during the individual floor final.
Chiles’ meet of her life, though, makes it a bit heartbreaking that we won’t also see her in the individual all-around finals. That’s because of defending all-around champion Suni Lee—whose combined score of 56.132 bested Chiles’ 56.065 by a microscopic .067.
Thus, while Chiles leaves qualifications fourth overall, she’s third among Americans—and this is the moment, every four years, when Olympic fans either learn (or relearn) about the “two-per-country” rule.
The International Gymnastics Federation put this rule in place way back in the primordial ooze of 1973, to limit how many gymnasts per country could enter any particular individual final (and thus contend for a medal). Essentially the world was bored of watching Soviet (women) and Japanese (men) gymnasts sweep podiums (and sometimes comprise more than half of finalists). So the FIG sought to offer teams with less depth a chance onto the world stage in the name of both fairness and viewability.
Nobody in the U.S. had a problem with this back then, when no American gymnast had a chance in hell of medaling at a fully contested Olympics—and you also didn’t hear much from us about it after 2000, when the then-limit of three gymnasts per country was shrunk to two, after the Romanians swept the podium in Sydney. But now that the U.S. has more or less been the world’s gymnastics Goliath for more than a decade, every Olympics, when one of our own gets “2per’d” out of a final, the chorus of Americans’ anti-2per rhetoric emerges anew. But you know what? Every elite gymnast in the world, including those in big-depth programs, knows these rules going in and abides by them willingly. Also: It’s OK! Four out of the five Americans who competed in qualifications—including Carey, in vault—made it to at least one individual final apiece anyway. And they all also have a more-than-decent chance of coming home with hardware. (Sixteen-year-old Hezly Rivera struggled on her signature event, balance beam, but if your very first senior international competition was the Olympics and you had to go first and start on beam, you would struggle too!)
Henry Grabar
A Rainy, Raucous Party on the Seine
Read More
Chiles, despite the disappointment she must have felt, bore the result like an absolute class-act team-player champ. And despite Carey’s balk and Biles’ mystery injury (which her coaches say isn’t serious, please Goddess in Greek Drag Queen Heaven let it be so)—the American mood after qualifications was buoyant. For a number of interesting reasons, and to appropriate the verbiage of Beyoncé, this team’s highest-profile fan (of many!): This ain’t Tokyo.
First of these reasons is the absence of Temu Russia, which means that there was little suspense the U.S. would be comfortably in first place after these qualifiers. (In Tokyo, they very noticeably were not leading at this stage.) Russia’s absence means the Americans, having succeeded with a more or less “hit meet,” lead with a large margin of more than 5 points. As a consequence, all other things being equal, Biles and Co. could count five falls in Tuesday’s team final competition and still walk away with gold. To put this into perspective, the margin between the second and fourth-place teams after quals was 0.362. But all scores start over anew after qualifications. Five falls is not at all outside the realm of possibility, so no deals are done!
Provided that the Americans continue apace, though, the silver and bronze team medals are going to come down to individual tenths of a point: leg form; chest position; landings. The women’s team final is going to be a thrilling, uncertain meet, and without a home team to cheer on—tragically, current world silver medalists France had a total meltdown and got shut out of every single final—the fan favorite remains Brazil. Jade Barbosa’s Britney Spears routine alone should make this true for us all.
This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only
This Ain’t Tokyo
The Social Network That Has Been Feeding Paris for Generations
The Competitive, Athletic, Hugely Popular Sport That the Olympics Won’t Touch With a 10-Foot Pole
A Rainy, Raucous Party on the Seine
But the biggest reason that this qualifying meet was different from Tokyo? The Americans, even with Biles’ weird calf injury and Carey’s weird balk, did not, at any point, make me ask the following question in earnest: Is this team OK? Yes, sure, they are also currently the best. But, more importantly, aside from those few minutes of uncertainty, viewers spent the entire meet seeing firsthand that this team is, indeed, OK. Under new leadership, they have eaten pizza and made TikToks; they have loved being in the Village with everyone else; they have smiled and laughed and pulled on those nine-billion-Swarovski leotards; and they’ve gotten out there and done their best. But more importantly: They seem as if they have felt more than OK doing it.
You’re going to hear the term “redemption tour” a lot of times in the next two weeks; it’s one the team came up with themselves, and it’s their right to wear it with pride. But as far as I’m concerned, just looking at their mental states alone, everything that needed to have been redeemed has been already. The result, thank goodness, is that the U.S. team will go into their impending finals—including the all-around throwdown between Anrade and Biles—soaring through a headspace markedly different than the anxiety and uncertainty of 2021. They are, one might say, unburdened by what has been.
Source link : https://slate.com/culture/2024/07/olympics-womens-gymnastics-qualifying-results-usa-brazil-biles.html
Author :
Publish date : 2024-07-28 21:59:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
