Artistic gymnastics looks great on television, but in situ You can see the difference between gymnasts in terms of distance and height when executing the elements. Simone Biles flies. The imprecision in some of her landings is due to the difficulty of controlling so much power.
On the balance beam, as had already been seen in training, she did not directly link her mixed series of dance jumps and acrobatic elements with the entrance, but preferred to take a break between the two. It is the qualification: you have to think about the team and ensure your places in the finals. The risk and extreme precision can wait. Simone Biles seemed a little nervous, like the rest of her teammates, but any human being would be starting an Olympic competition on the balance beam. Biles did her best and handled the procedure with ease.
On the floor, one of her great specialties, she performs two elements that bear her name. One of them is the double somersault with triple twist. She has been doing it for a few years now, since before Tokyo, but, as much as we have become accustomed to seeing it, it is the most difficult element that appears in the current women’s artistic gymnastics scoring code for any of the apparatus and, for the moment, only she performs it in competition in the women’s category. The other of the floor elements that bears her name, a double somersault with a half turn on the second, already has followers. She competed with more efficiency than precision, with an exit from the area, without nailing any acrobatic series and without marking the ends of the dance elements as the purists like, perhaps bothered by the pain in her left calf.
On vault, Biles made history by performing for the first time at an Olympic Games the most difficult vault in the current women’s artistic gymnastics code: a yurchenko (coming in from a round-off to place her hands with her back to the platform) and two and a half rotations on the transverse axis in a pike position (bent at the waist and with her legs straight), something that no other woman currently does in competition. She did quite an over-rotation, but managed not to fall on her back by taking one foot back. Her second jump was a cheng: round-off entry plus a half turn to support the hands facing the platform and a somersault in plank with a pirouette and a half. Another difficult jump that she takes to the stratosphere.
The asymmetric ones are the worse Biles’ apparatus. She has a tendency to spread her legs, and nature did not endow her with the insteps that other gymnasts take advantage of to show off, but she achieves spectacular height in her releases and transitions and performs a great dismount called fabrichnova: Double somersault grouped with double pirouette. The exit alone is spectacular and difficult, but it is also performed directly linked to a complete vertical turn.
Cristina Martinez Jimenez She is a popularizer of artistic gymnastics at gimnastas.net
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