Opinion: As Simone Biles pushes limits of gymnastics, gymnastics may push back again
It looks as if international gymnastics officials will get a second chance to do right by Simone Biles.
In a 60 Minutes interview Sunday night, the Olympic champion was shown training a Yurchenko double pike vault, a skill no woman has tried yet in competition. Should Biles decide to do it at the Tokyo Olympics, or a World Cup meet before that, the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) will have to assign it a value.
Which means it can either recognize Biles’ greatness, or it can punish her for being better than everyone else and continue dumbing down the sport.
Given the FIG’s track record, I’m not overly optimistic about what it will choose.
It was two years ago that the FIG undervalued Biles’ double twisting-double somersault dismount off balance beam. Intentionally so.
Every gymnastics skill is assigned a numerical value. The more difficult the skill, the higher the number and, theoretically, the higher the total score for a routine. The women’s technical committee, which is responsible for assigning skills their value, said in a statement that part of its reasoning for not giving Biles’ dismount the full credit it deserved was that it wanted to discourage other athletes from trying skills they are not capable of doing.
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“They do not like that Simone has made a mockery of the open-ended Code of Points. And made it so that a competition isn’t a competition before the competition starts,” said Spencer Barnes, author of the popular gymnastics blog, “The Balance Beam Situation,” and a co-host of the GymCastic podcast.
“But she’s kind of broken the system they created.”
Unlike the old 10.0 scoring system, there is theoretically no maximum score in the current, open-ended system. Gymnasts compile points for both the skills they do and execution of them.
When the FIG ditched the 10.0 scale, the thinking was that it would both reflect and encourage technical advances in the sport. That’s exactly what Biles has done, her natural athletic ability and savvy in training allowing her to push boundaries. She’s won every meet she’s entered since the 2013 U.S. championships, often by wide margins, and about the only way she won’t collect another slew of gold medals in Tokyo is if she doesn’t go.
But rather than celebrating the bar Biles is setting, the FIG has shown it would rather side with the poor gymnasts who can’t keep up. That’s as insulting to other gymnasts as it is to Biles. The FIG might as well stop awarding titles and medals and just give everyone a participation trophy if it’s going to take that attitude.
