thiago_simoes

Today (August 21) the International Gymnastics Federation announced that Costa Rica officially qualified in women's artistic gymnastics. I figured this out two months ago. This federation is a joke.

What are you guys talking about? China scored the highest team score this year, even better than Russia at the European Championships! Japan had a shameful day, for sure. Finishing fourth in qualifications is a disaster, even if this is the B-team.

Gymnasts from Indonesia and the Philippines have achieved top 3 positions in qualifications. It will be amazing if they manage to get a medal!

If you mean releases, they are. The thing is the gymnast must perform releases as high as possible, and the more complex, the more they earn points, of course. A lot of gymnasts prefer to perform "safer" skills with different grips of their hands instead of losing points in execution in a release move, though.

FINALLY a good draw for Brazilian women. Team Brasil Men's team: Arthur Zanetti, Francisco Barreto, Lucas Bittencourt, Arthur Nory, Caio Souza Women's team: Rebeca Andrade, Flávia Saraiva, Thais Santos, Jade Barbosa, Lorrane Oliveira

Çolak has a REAL chance to beat Petrounias at the World Championships. Even with slight mistakes here and there, he got a huge score. Nice for Turkey to finally earn a medal at the Europeans again, after 10 years.

I didn't watch the routine, but one possible explanation is him losing one compositional requirement (there are four, and each worth 0.5 in each routine), and this element could be linked to another one (0.1 bonus for connection value of a select group of elements). Or maybe he missed the dismount, which would lower his score in 0.4-0.6 depending on what he did wrong.

Ude's difficulty score was 5.5, Whitlock's was 6.3. If Ude had low difficulty in his routine, there's no way his execution score alone could put him on the podium. Whilock's difficulty score was 0.8 higher than Ude's, and a fall is worth 1.0 less, so things are not so absurd.

This could be a problem, but his execution score was so high I think he was not affected at all by the change.

At this rate, he is going to get a medal at Worlds as well. He's doing fantastic!

An Icelandic gymnast qualified to the vault final. What a nice surprise!

Retired Kazakhstani gymnast Sabina Ashirbayeva has been suspended for doping and will lose the medals earned at the 2017 Asian Championships. Not sure about what will happen to the silver medal she won at the Berlin World Cup stage last year, but this is sad news, for sure. She was one of my favorite gymnasts.

It's sad but no one cares about the Universiade in Brazil. Some athletes decide to pay for the travel expenses and their accommodation, which leads to strange things like two very weak girls being sent to compete in rhythmic gymnastics at the 2017 Universiade while Jade Barbosa, who could have earned a medal in artistic gymnastics, stayed home. I don't blame our Olympic Committee, though. They gave LOTS of money to all federations for the 2016 Olympics, but every day it seems like there's a new scandal being mentioned on the newspapers because a president of a sports federation, or a politician, stole part (I mean, a huge part) of the money that was meant to help the training of the athletes.

You're right. The federal police knocked on their door and now they're acting all surprised. There are three different police forces in Brazil: civil (they basically investigate crimes), military (they patrol the streets) and the federal police (they combat terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundry... all the big stuff). If the someone from the federal police knocks on your door, you know you screwed things up BIG time. Apparently, the federal police is asking questions about the 2011 World Championships which were staged in Brazil and caused a huge loss of money for the Brazilian Handball Federation. The president of federation at the time was also accused of corruption and money laundry. I think they changed the president, but the federation is pretty much short of money so they have no means to send athletes to major competitions. The Brazilian Olympic Committee usually helps when things get rough, but they are also short on money, and they have to invest in other sports too (rumors say that Valeri Liukin will be hired as the head coach of the women's artistic gymnastics team, and if this turns out to be true, the BOC will be the entity responsible for paying his salary, so they are not wasting any more money on the handball federation anytime soon).

I forgot about Melanie dos Santos. Nice work for her, but probably my least favorite routine in the final. Still, gold medal for France. Oh, well.

Golgota with the gold medal. Almost unbelievable, but not undeserved.

It's interesting to see a routine with great choreography and full of personality from van Gerner, and right after it a routine with bad choreography and lacking in personality from Basile. The tumbling was pretty good and difficult, though, so that should give her a good score.

Weird. I thought choreography in the middle of the dance jump series was not allowed on floor, but Fenton did it anyway. This kind of choreography breaks the sequence of jumps, and reigning World Champion in 2005, Alicia Sacramone, failed to qualify for the final in 2006 at the World Championships because she performed choreography in the middle of her series of jumps. Is it allowed now?

Wait, isn't she injured? I assumed she was, because she has enough potential to reach 14 on floor and this would have been enough for gold.

I love how van Gerner looks like one of the Spice Girls.

On paper, of course, this is not impossible. But we're talking about absolutely no mistakes from Becky Downie and Claudia Fragapane, especially on beam, and they always screw up somehow. This year only the medalists on women's team will qualify for the Olympics, and it's going to be an easy victory for the United States, followed by Russia (if they hit) and either Japan or China in third. Canada and France and the dark horses, Brazil, Belgium and the Netherlands are the long shots. Great Britain could easily sneak in third if the program had more consistency instead of high difficulty with few and far hits when it counts (but it worked in 2015 because Russia had a rough day, so who knows).

Nope. No way even your best girls could score above 165. They are simply not consistent enough.

Millousi ALWAYS finds a way to crush my hopes on her. I've given up.

I don't quite like this routine from Wevers, but she finally nailed it. it should be enough for gold.

When did French girls begin to perform all all those amazing bars routines?