Worlds 2015 – You Guys, I Think We Broke Everything I've Ever Loved

Well, there we have it. The annual Kohei has Koheied for another Kohei, and Kohei managed to Kohei through all six Koheis and Kohei the gold Kohei by Kohei points. In case that was unclear, Kohei "I, like, invented Simone" Uchimura did this thing where he pops out of a golden lamp, does all the perfects, and then laughs at all those pathetic sloths with leprosy that can barely even get a 90. Kohei persisted in being so much more un-terrible than everyone else that he physically died from lack of competition in the middle of his rings routine and still sent everyone else to the sadness corner by winning his 84th world championship and becoming sultan of hair and everything.

After this competition, if Kohei doesn't fill a bathtub with gold medals and then take a picture of himself in it wearing only a captain's hat while holding a cigar and a snifter of brandy with a parrot on his shoulder, then he and I have officially nothing in common.

[Spot reserved for Kohei Bathtub Pirate. Oh, I can wait......]

Hm. You want to play underwater charades? One word, five syllables? Talk to the hand because my finger is busy? Hi mom, but give me a minute? Hit me blisters, one more time? I just can't crack your code.

-But memo to the world championship: you need to pick yourself up off of the snooze pile and pull your shit together. For a competition that started out with such promise of life-enforcing ridiculousness (remember when Romania got possessed by all those poltergeists on bars and got 11s? REMEMBER????), it has turned into a stale rehashing of three-year-old storylines these last few days. This isn't Gossip Girl, you know. We have standards.

-The event finals really better bring out the big drama to make up for all this predictable Kohei/Simone will-they-won't-they nonsense. At least give us a murder mystery, or a fake pregnancy, or an uneven bars mount, or an amnesiac quintuplet who bursts open the doors of the balance beam final and goes, "I'M THE REAL SANNE WEVERS! THAT'S AN IMPOSTOR!" Is that too much to ask? I don't think so. But let's get into the men's AA.

-Manrique. At least we'll always have Silver Manrique. While Kohei was busy twiddling his 15.8s and learning the rules of auction bridge during a giant, Manrique Larduet sent everyone into a vicious throwdown to see who can use the word "stylish" the most in a five-minute span and sent the whole Swiss team running up to him asking for sage earring advice. He finished only slightly more than a point and a half behind Kohei, which is basically commemorative-tattoo worthy. Other people get the Olympic rings. Manrique should get "1.634 behind Kohei." Ask Afanasyeva for placement advice. I'm thinking face. Across rings-vault-pbars-hbar, Manrique had higher scores than Kohei. It's primarily pommel horse holding him back (Cuba is quite close to the US after all, and the pommel-horse-sucks are airborne), and a final floor pass mistake that probably compromised his chance at a 91. But boy did he have the competition of 16 lifetimes today. He was like all your favorite gymnasts, but if they were good. 

-Professor Manrique taught several classes, mostly on sticking landings and how to do this thing where you don't fall at every moment, but also an advanced course on how it seems that pronouncing names is like coal mining in a hurricane made of daggers, except harder. Clearly, Nameless Commentator took all our helpfully snide commentary (you're welcome, the discourse) quite badly because she showed up today all ready to karate chop us in the eye with her surprisingly comprehensive knowledge of MAG skills. She was on it. But still not on the pronunciations, thankfully, changing Manrique's name at various times to Maurice Lardwee, Manreek Lardyou, and Mandrake Lardo. Take your pick. We also got the introduction of "Arthur Mysenko of Brazil," which is nothing, and by the end of the meet, Nikolai Kuksenkov had just become Knuckle Quicksand. At first, I was disappointed we didn't get Christine and Mitch on the stream this year, but if she's going to keep giving us these gems, she can absolutely stay.    

-Aside from Kohei doing Kohei things and Manrique getting the nation of Great Britain pregnant with every successive landing, this was a day for ripping out our hearts, throwing them in a vat of liquid nitrogen, and then shattering them in front of a science class. I'm speaking of course, of Danell, who fell. The little-known Shel Silverstein poem. Unfortunately, Danell got a little confused. He watched yesterday and thought the cool thing for Americans to do is to have not a great day in the all-around. 

-No, Danell. You don't do like Simone. Danell fell on floor, was proud to be an American on pommel horse, and had a serious case of the fuck-its on high bar, so the competition quickly became a race to finish not last. Victory! He knew it was a terrible day, which is why he pulled out his apology nipples after it was all done. Better than an apology alpaca any day. And now that we happen to have entered the customary distracted-ogling portion of my MAG discussions, I'd like to take this opportunity to acknowledge that I know I make fun of the women's leos riding up so high I can see their Ponors, so I should equal-opportunity note that many of the guys were really showing off their Nemovs in their tight little shorts and pants today.

-Also, Fabian pulled out. Like we didn't have enough to deal with emotionally without being denied Captain Smirky and the Bicep Brigade.

-Well, even if Danell is having a bad day, we can always rely on Max Whitlock to save everything. NOPE. Apparently, Max has been training under the impression that high bar is good-optional, and that is false. He needs to go Manrique school. He had yet another lifetime of broken promises with the bar today to drop down to fifth place, continuing to shrink the point of everything down to a microscopic level. And just when I was getting so proud of the Brits for being barely hungover at all to start the day! It was really impressive for a second. Even my future ex-husband Dan Purvis fell to seventh because the judges are under the idiotic impression that he doesn't have competitively difficult routines across all six events in spite of his physically painful adorableness bonus.

-Oleg. Oleg, Oleg, Oleg. It seemed like such a promising opportunity for a medal, but Oleg had an early nasty on the pommel horse, losing form once and then having a ghoulish no-dismount lovers' quarrel with the concept of gravity since it's a total asshead. He went again to finish an actual dismount involving the use of his legs this time, but by that point he was counting a fall and had scattered broken glass all over his yellow brick road to the silver medal. Can we get Sydney Ruler Woman out there to look at the horse? Denial phase. Most of the rest of the meet was fine, but there still remains an empty place where Oleg's accomplishments are supposed to be. Pbars repeat?

-Instead, the bronze medal went to Deng Shudi for his accomplishment in the field of hitting six routines and that's pretty much it. His higher difficulty and massive pbars routine carried him over the line of AAers who hit six routines, while the similarly consistent and impressive meets from My Purvis and Knuckle Quicksand saw them finish around a point lower.

-In better news for the great American experiment, Donnell Whittenburg was picked up by a gigantic crane and hurled into the AA at the last minute in spite of being the second alternate. Thank you. Otherwise it would have been a really depressing day for the old stars and pink. Whittenburg had by far his best showing of the competition so far, recovering from a case of team-itis to legitimately challenge the top portion of the standings. If he had landed his rocket-science-that-masquerades-as-a-vault successfully, and weren't quite so Brestyan's on high bar, he could have won a medal, which would have been a ridiculously tremendous accomplishment. Still, 8th is something. 

-Kazuma Kaya is the Flavia Saraiva of the men's competition, and he made a little squeal after he hit pommel horse in the first rotation that deserved all the medals. He's basically a little piglet, and it's fantastic.

-Something else probably happened. I was too busy entering a depressive coma.