

“And they’ve actually tried to go back, to not separating, to put them in the same basket.”
Simone bikes quitter code#
I thought that was the main reason of the open Code of Points, to really separate the good from the greats. “Somebody who has high potential and abilities, you need to give them the edge compared to somebody else. The sport is the sport,” Laurent Landi, who coaches Biles along with his wife, Cecile, said last month. Some of you vault specialists, you know who you are.)īut you can’t encourage innovation one minute, only to try to smother that ambition the next. There are some gymnasts who are inviting serious injury by chucking skills they have no business doing. The FIG will claim that it’s concerned about athlete safety, that it doesn’t want to give other athletes incentive to try skills they can’t do. “They had an open-ended Code of Points, and now they’re mad people are too far ahead and excelling.” The athletes-turned-suits who run the sport have now decided they’d rather have parity, even if it means contorting themselves to get it. OPINION: Chellsie Memmel's comeback a reminder that no one is too old to dreamīut Biles’ dominance – other gymnasts joke about being in the “non-Simone division,” recognizing they’re competing for second – irritates the FIG. OPINION: Biles' new vault move pushes boundaries, motivates her for Olympics

OPINION: Opinion: Biles maintains gold standard despite 19-month layoff As a result, she has a mathematical advantage no other gymnast can realistically match. For every progression in a skill, there would be a comparable reward in value.īiles has been willing to play the FIG’s numbers game while others have not – or cannot.

When the FIG ditched the 10.0 for an open-ended scoring system following the 2004 Olympics, part of its reasoning was to encourage athletes to push the physical bounds of the sport. “It doesn’t seem to be consistent with what they’ve done with (the progression of) other vault values, and I don’t know why they do that.”īecause Biles has exposed the inherent flaw in a scoring system that gymnastics officials created. “I definitely think (the vault) is undervalued,” said Tom Forster, national team coordinator. If Biles can do tricks that defy physics and explanation – and, with four Olympic gold medals and more medals at the world championships than any other gymnast, there is no question she can – she should be appropriately rewarded for them. Instead, gymnastics officials are embarrassed by the massive gap Biles has opened on the rest of the field, and are throwing up artificial barriers to try and narrow it.īut this is elite gymnastics, not a parks and recreation department program where everyone is given a trophy just for showing up. The FIG should be celebrating the unique combination of natural talent, hard work and smart training that makes Biles a once-in-a-lifetime athlete, and commending her for challenging herself and her sport. The FIG is being pig-headed and petty, just as it was two years ago when it undervalued Biles’ double-twisting, double somersault dismount on balance beam. We're just going to take it and just be quiet.” “There's no point in putting up a fight, because they're not going to reward the correct value. “I feel like now we just have to get what we get,” Biles said afterward. By at least 0.2 points if you’re going by precedent, as much as 0.4 if you use the eye test. Pretty much everyone agrees that woefully undervalues the skill. Classic gave her new vault a start value – the measure of its difficulty – of just 6.6 points.

Yet, based on guidance from the FIG, judges at the U.S. She is pushing the boundaries of her sport and, much like Michael Phelps’ quest for eight swimming gold medals in Beijing, Biles’ efforts to challenge the notion of what’s possible will be all the talk of the Tokyo Olympics. On Saturday night, Biles became the first woman to compete a Yurchenko double pike, a vault so difficult few men even attempt it. Only this time, it will be the entire world asking just what the FIG is thinking. Having learned nothing from the mocking it got two years ago, when it unfairly punished the world’s greatest gymnast for its own bad choices, the International Gymnastics Federation is poised to do it all over again. INDIANAPOLIS - Simone Biles still isn’t the problem. Watch Video: Simone Biles focused on Tokyo Olympics and considering Paris 2024
