Before They Were NCAA – The 2012 Elites

Now comes the point in the year when we must attempt to wrench ourselves out of an NCAA mindset and pay attention to the elite world again. We're little more than a month away from Classic now, so the Mad Max remake that masquerades as the US Olympic selection process is soon to reach its familiarly feverish levels. "Do we actually need a bars specialist?" he asks, sharpening an abandoned femur into a spear.

As a bridge between the two worlds, I periodically like to take the results of past US elite competitions and examine how the gymnasts ranked at that point compared to how they would eventually fare in NCAA a few years later. Who rises? Who falls? Who is like the mousy girl in the high school movie who takes off her glasses and suddenly turns beautiful in the NCAA code? Who was using elite difficulty to mask deficiencies that are exposed in college? As we know, success in elite and success in NCAA do not have a 1:1 relationship.

Today, I have taken the various AA and event results from the 2012 Visa Championships (Visa Championships...feels so long ago. Like the John Hancock US Championships, which were basically contemporaneous with John Hancock) and bolded the gymnasts who competed in NCAA at some point after this competition (so I didn't include Anna Li since she's a category all her own). A number of items jump out. 

All-around
1. Wieber – 69.650/61.250
2. Douglas – 60.650/61.050
3. Raisman – 69.200/69.750
4. Ross – 59.750/60.200
5. Price – 59.600/58.500
6. Finnegan – 59.150/58.450
7. Vega – 56.500/57.950
8. Baker – 58.050/56.400
9. Dowell – 55.7800/56.900
10. Sloan – 56.250/56.150
11. Milliet – 55.250/55.150
12. Brown – 54.200/55.500
13. McLaughlin – 55.400/53.150
14. Jetter – 53.550/54.850
15. Skinner – 55.550/51.600
16. Jay – 52.550/53.150
17. Wofford – 51.900/53.350

Fewer than half of the future NCAA gymnasts who competed AA at the 2012 championships continued to do AA in college (and only two or three of the eleven have been full-time AAers for multiple seasons), which helps illustrate the danger of assuming NCAA dominance for all elites. Those who continue at the same strength as all-arounders, your Sloans and Prices and Bakers, are the exception more than the rule. Instead, we have the usual random smattering of competition and success levels, ranging from barely-one-event status to best-in-the-country status. But what's of most interest here is the reason they're not competing AA in college.

We tend to assume that the biggest obstacle for elites transitioning to NCAA is health, that they all would be top-ranked gems if their bodies weren't halfway to the glue factory by now after so many trips to Martha's Texas Adventure. While that's true in several cases, many are relatively healthy but simply not making all the lineups. Even someone who counts in the all-around category like Brianna Brown probably wouldn't have done AA this year if Casanova had been available, and Brandie Jay spent three years not even getting close to Georgia's beam lineup, not because of health but because of "Aaahh, beam!" In her 2015 season at Oklahoma, Dowell was in a similar position to Jay. Sometimes, in spite of an elite pedigree and strong rankings through the age of 18, gymnasts are just not top six on their NCAA teams, even on events that were elite strengths.

In breaking down some of the specific rankings, I'm not taking Sloan into account much because she wasn't up to her full level during 2012, so this isn't really reflective of her standing in the elite world the way 2008 and 2009 were. It's not like Sloan was some middle-of-the-pack elite who suddenly bloomed in college.

Brandie Jay is one who leapfrogged many of her higher-ranked elite peers to become a bigger and more influential contributor in NCAA than she was in elite, finishing largely on par with the likes of Kennedy Baker, who was a higher scorer and more compelling contender during the end of the last quad. Jay is probably the best example here of someone whose dominant years were still ahead of her in 2012.



Finnegan is also an interesting case because if we were to judge her freshman year by the second-behind-Price standard that 2012 gave us, the 2016 season would be considered somewhat average and not the dominance and team-leading influence normally expected of an Olympic alternate. Yet, having gone through years of "does she do gymnastics?" in between, her three events of 9.850-9.900 and ability to leg-event at all this season are a somewhat unexpected and welcome revelation. A lot happens between elite and NCAA, and we don't often maintain expectations for NCAA based on elite results, especially for certain types of gymnasts. I don't think many would say Abby Milliet's NCAA career has been disappointing so far, but she's certainly not top-6 AA level. Even before Grace McLaughlin started at Florida, she was at "maybe a beam routine?" status, not AA-queen status.

A lot of this does come down to injury history/gymnastics style. We tend to maintain elite expectations for gymnasts with Raisman legs who look like they can hold up to four more years of gymnastics, but with the fragile-looking spinny twisties, we're just happy to see a routine at some point, even if it's an exhibition bars. We're like, "Good for her! I can see knees! She still has them!"  

It's worth noting that there are no "whoops, I broke and then disappeared into witness protection without another word" gymnasts in this AA collection, which is encouraging. Everyone either made the Olympics and turned pro, did NCAA, or will do NCAA. The only one in the whole 2012 competition who doesn't fit into those categories is Bross. There are usually more.

Vault (one vault, two days)
1. Wieber 15.650/15.900
2. Price 15.800/15.600 
3. Douglas 15.350/15.800
4. Sacramone 15.450/15.500
5. Raisman 15.450/15.300
6. Ross 15.100/15.250
7. Finnegan 15.000/14.900
8. Baker 14.650/14.800
9. Skinner 14.550/14.600
10. Jay 14.600/14.500
11. Dowell 14.250/14.700
12. Vega 14.100/14.500
13. Jetter 14.100/14.150
14. Milliet 14.050/14.150
15. Brown 13.950/14.100
16. McLaughlin 13.800/14.200
17. Sloan 13.850/14.150
18. Brannan 13.800/14.150
19. Wofford 12.000/12.200

The American Cup of America for Americans – Live Blog

The elites are here. I hope you're not ready for it because I'm not either. The season after the Olympics is always a weird one featuring a heterogeneous mix of elite veterans hanging onto a series of broken limbs while they wait for NCAA or the sweet release of retirement who are bumping up against new seniors trying to prove that their talent is more interesting than that of the people we've already forgotten.

Four years ago, this is the event where a little pink-adorned Jordyn Wieber brought her Amanar to the world stage and beat Olympic team member Bridget Sloan. USAG was going for a similar dynamic this year by inviting the stick-around Olympian, this time Kyla Ross, to compete against the preordained star of the quad, Katelyn Ohashi. (That is, after Elizabeth Price pulled out.) Ross then also pulled out with a heel injury that did not prevent her from doing podium training, and she has been replaced by a muscle named Simone Biles who sports a Maroneyesque Yurchenko 2.5. Both can contend for the World team this year, but that is a premature conversation until we know who is going to pretend to compete this year and who isn't even going to bother.

This competition will send a very important message:

Dear Everyone over the Age of 16,

You have been forgotten. You are elderly wrecks. Go sit in a rocking chair or dance with some stars or something. It's time to meet the new crop.

Thoughts on Classic

While apparently there was some gymnastics performed on Saturday, focus is solely on this month's USAG Lifetime Original Movie called The Denial of Chellsie Memmel. You'll probably cry. While I feel bad for Chellsie because she should have Qualifier Emeritus status at this point and there's no legitimate reason to prevent her from going, I also live for all of the commotion this has caused. That part of me now wants to see Shawn Johnson skip Nationals and be granted a petition to Trials just to see what would happen.

Most of the controversy of the petition denial has centered around the arbitrary 14.000 one-event qualifying score that Martha apparently established without telling anyone. She has said that Chellsie could not be granted a petition because she did not meet that score. This is a red herring. The entire point of the petition is that it can be granted to a gymnast who doesn't meet the qualifying criterion and yet deserves to go anyway. So the argument that a petition cannot be granted to a gymnast who failed to reach a qualifying standard is ridiculous. That's why petitions exist, and it certainly could have been granted if they wanted to do it. They didn't want to.

Chellsie Memmel was never going to make this Olympic team, but neither is Brianna Brown, so let's not pretend that advancing to Nationals is all about who is in contention to make the Olympic team.

Nastia Liukin and the Classic of Secrets

I have been a bit remiss in providing updates since the end of the NCAA season because not much has been happening besides rumors and a trickle of partial routine videos from USA Gymnastics. I've also been spending a fiar bit of time working on my word and language blog, The Dictionary Eyes. So feel free to check that out and tell your friends if you're the type of person who has friends.

On to gymnastics, I was waiting to talk about UGA hiring Danna Durante until we got some kind of official confirmation, but they are taking forever with that. I would say I have a lot of thoughts, but I don't. This is a very middle-of-the-road, shrug-of-the-shoulders choice. I have strong opinions about everything, and yet I have almost no opinion at all about this, which is telling. Georgia would have loved to get someone with a strong pedigree or big name, but why would a big name take this job? That was one of my main criticisms of the Jay Clark firing. Who else is going to be better?

We'll have plenty of time to dissect Durante's every word during the NCAA preseason, but for now let's turn our attention to the elites and the upcoming Secret Classic.

Once Visa Championships and Olympic Trials start, we will be spending most of our time talking about potential teams and the likes of Jordyn Wieber, Gabby Douglas, and Aly Raisman. The Classic this year isn't really about them. All the major Olympic contenders will be competing at least one event, but their Classic results will be mostly irrelevant. We've seen enough from them already this year to know that they are on track. A fall from one of them would probably send the internet into a tizzy, but it would do little to derail anyone's momentum. No, this year's Classic is all about veterans and comebacks.


To be more specific, it's all about Nastia Liukin. She'll be competing balance beam at this event with a doubtful question mark next to bars. A bars routine needs to come along very soon for this comeback to be relevant at all, but she could save that for Visa Championships and be fine. Technically, I believe she would need a two-event qualifying score at Classic to make Championships, but come on. All qualification rules magically disappear when names are involved. It should be of concern to the younger gymnasts that even the very concept of Nastia competing is the most interesting thing to happen in US gymnastics this year. Reputation, personality, and presence go a long way.

While a bar routine with something around a 7.0 D-Score would be her golden ticket to London, let's not discount beam. She won't be able to muster the huge difficulty in the 6.5-6.7 range that we'll see from some others in London because she doesn't have any E+ acro skills, but she will be capable of a  very clean routine with low-6s difficulty, which would be useful in Team Finals. Kyla Ross needs to watch out for Nastia because if Nastia proves more useful on bars and beam, we could be looking at a situation where Ross is not top three on any event come Trials (especially because I'm not sold on the landing of that Amanar), and that's a very dangerous position for a five-member team. Nastia could shake up a lot of people's chances if she proves usable on beam at Classic.