Maggie AstorCompte certifié

(Brief intermission to say: I'm not writing this thread for other gymnastics fans, who already know all of this. I'm writing it for non-gymnastics fans who might be interested in what's going on here, since Biles and her new skills are getting mainstream coverage.)

One of the reasons this is especially insulting to Simone Biles is because, as I wrote in a thread in August (below), she *doesn't compete a skill* until she has it pretty much perfect. She DOESN'T chuck skills she can't do well. Ever. https://twitter.com/MaggieAstor/status/1160729441812791297 …

THAT SHOULD BE REWARDED. The ability to do incredibly difficult skills that no one else can do is the sort of thing the open-ended code was invented to reward in the first place. It's the point. 10/

So essentially, refusing to give Simone's dismount the difficulty value it deserves is ignoring the central purpose of the modern gymnastics scoring system. This is a fundamental thing. 11/

It's true that, as FIG (the international gymnastics governing body, which assigns difficulty values) said in its statement, Simone's dismount is the only H-rated skill on beam. But that's also not the point. 12/

One letter value above anything else on beam does not accurately reflect how *much* more difficult it is than anything else on beam, and the point of the open-ended code is to enable FIG to make those sorts of distinctions. 13/

In its statement, FIG compared Simone's dismount to the Produnova vault. Because some gymnasts were chucking that vault unsafely, knowing the difficulty value would often outweigh the execution deductions they got for doing it badly, FIG lowered the difficulty value. 14/

But the two are not actually comparable. 15/