Simone Biles Makes History as First Woman to Ever Land Yurchenko Double Pike
teenvogue.com
teenvogue.com
Score her fairly, and let her run away with it. That's the whole point of this level of competition - it's not supposed to be elementary school gym class where the goal is having fun and working some energy out. If she's got no one who can rival her, that's amazing and awesome.
> it's not supposed to be elementary school gym class where the goal is having fun
You don't get it. It's about being so above the others that you can have fun again and getting away with it.
Quoting her:
> "they don’t want the field to be too far apart. And that’s just something that’s on them. That’s not on me,”
She's above the competition now. She is not there to win anymore.
It's hard to explain. When I read HN, I see the modern equivalent of corporate paper pushers who want to play nice and dream to excel at society game playing by society rules.
This is not the hacker spirit of the old days, which was about doing daring things. Modern ""hackers"" want to learn the framework of the day to put it on their resume linking to github that show they are teamplayer. This way they get a coveted FANG job then get 2.5 kids and a dog, a 401k, rince and repeat as happy cogs of society until the day they die. Lame.
No wonder why they don't get it!
It's a disease of the modern life ""hackers"": they don't want to bite the hand that feed them. To be fair, I don't expect much from people who need a day job to survive. They just want a ""fair"" competition of people playing by the rules, just like they do now, instead of admiring excellence, like they did before.
Simone is not afraid to stand above. That's a spirit I respect and admire.
Doesn't seem like she sees the under-scoring as fun.
Her actions speak louder than her words: she just doesn't care what they think, so she will keep doing it, scores be damned.
I applaud her continuous determination.
That I can agree with.
Like what, she should just quit the thing she's been dedicating basically her whole life to it and became the best of the best in her field? Why do you think it's just a question of "choose to quit if you don't like it"?
Of course she cares about what they think but it's completely out of her control, it's more of a sign of her being aware of her own power limitations and pushing through in other ways where she can have control rather than accepting whatever the committee decided.
It's very American! I like that!!
I wish more people in China mainland could learn from such examples
Um maybe re-read the comment you are replying to. It seems you both agree that Simone should be scored according to her talent. I think you're being downvoted because you mis-read the comment you are replying to.
There is no such intrinsic quality. There's only winning and performance.
She’s better. Let’s just recognise her greatness fairly. If other athletes feel bad about it, so what? If the audience wants it to be competitive, even when it isn’t, so what? She’s better and we should just recognise (and appreciate) reality.
Love her attitude though. Just does the moves anyway “because I can”. She’s great. Maybe a bit of an ego, but who cares? She backs it up, so who can say anything? Love that.
Disgusting. Do all the competitors also get to have a trophy in the end, like in modern day schools?
If you want everyone to have a chance, next move is to give them handicap. Make them wear lead belts. That'll be fun for you maybe?
Me, I want to see the top competitor crush the others after utterly dominating by doing daring moves
Simone Biles has a unique combination of size, strength, and skill that truly makes her the greatest gymnast ever and probably going forward in time as well.
Biles appears to be the latter.
I love Michael Jordan. He is my favorite basketball player ever. I’ve watched him play basketball live. But he is no Simone Biles.
The question isn’t whether Simone Biles is the greatest gymnast in history. The question is whether any gymnast in the future can ever do what she can do right now. Unless children become genetically engineered to be gymnasts, there may never be another gymnast as great as Biles.
NBA centers are all 7 feet tall which precludes most people from being NBA centers, but there's a whole world and somehow they manage to fill the jobs.
It seems most GOATs are eventually supplanted because things that are unfathomable become table stakes, think like triple axels in figure skating. Forever is a really long time.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/lebron-...
and drafts are done in order of underperforming teams.
No, this is a competition. The best should win.
https://www.thesportster.com/entertainment/top-12-athletes-s...
Contrast this with wrestling. That is a show. There are always tweaks to the rules in these sports to make them interesting but not to the blatant disadvantage of one competitor.
Imagine if they made Tiger Woods play an extra hole all those years. That's what this feels like.
Team sports often have “try-outs”. They also often have complex rules for selecting participants which have nothing to do with skill.
And the idea of 'fixing' competitions to tinker with the odds of winning trying to optimize the event like it's a slot machine to perfectly trigger the crowds fun levels is super creepy. Like if social media were put in charge of the olympics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Formula_One_World_Co...
I would argue F1 is as much about engineering as the driver. Hamilton on a different team likely excells, but probably doesn't win nearly as much.
Then why is all the prize money distributed based on the Constructors' championship, which is effectively which team does the best engineering? Indycar is the racing competition; F1 is car design competition that is judged by the racing ability of the cars, drivers and teams combined.
Is that true? I don't think so. And, I think there's lots of obvious evidence it isn't. Did people stop watching swimming when Phelps was dominating? No. Did people stop watching cycling when Lance Armstrong was dominating? No. Those sports had a huge increase in viewership, at least in the US where I was at the time. It's not even limited to the home country. I certainly hear more about sprinting after Usain Bolt than before.
If we extend to team sports there are even more cases. Remember when everyone around the world stopped watching NBA basketball because of Michael Jordan and the Championship-Era Chicago Bulls? I sure don't.
So maybe gymnastics is totally different, but that seems odd. I can pull examples from local sports, worldwide sports, team sports, individual sports, big money sports, small money sports, fighting sports and even auto racing. There's nothing about gymnastics that seems different from all other sports.
Maybe this is an unsatisfying conclusion, but I don't know why people keep thinking this, that you need evenly matched competitors for the audience. There are people who keep commenting it, and the judges act like it's true. And maybe an upsetting conclusion to some, but after writing out this whole comment I can't come up with a better answer than "she's a Black woman". So maybe that's it.
If someone can name a case where a dominating competitor decreased the popularity of a sport, I'm genuinely very interested to hear about it.
That his dominance was later discovered to be ill-gotten doesn't change that.
Sports categorically do BETTER when they've got a massive superstar. Both because some people tune in to see what amazing, unbeatable performance they put out, and because some are dying to see them choke and lose. This is literally no different, Biles could try one of these moves and break her leg and be out of the competition, she's absolutely beatable even doing moves the others can't. It's all about execution.
Honestly most of these sports are losing popularity and money over unfair judging whilst athletics celebrates superstars like Usain Bolt that then draws crowds and new talents to these sports.
For fear of breaking their backs, no-one else dared to try this and the guy just dominated this event.
That question alone will tell you how objective the scoring will be. The winner of the 100m dash is almost completely unambiguous and objective, but sports like figure skating will always be doomed to some subjectivity in the scoring.
She already has 4 skills named after her including the one worth the most point in the field. The Yurchenko Double Pike is just particularly dangerous. It's perfectly understandable that it's not the direction the federation wants to take gymnastics towards.
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinseale/2019/10/08/if-you-ca...
I'm definitely not saying they should do this, of course, especially in the Olympics. Crippling dominant teams and players to promote competitive balance in team sports tends to be a more practical measure to keep fans of the crappier teams interested and paying.
No this doesn’t prove anything, it’s just a data point that happens to fall on a trend line. In this case, HN sees something that looks like a nail and would rather fling the hammer out the window then consider using it.
The same way online games keep rebalancing player classes to nerf excessively powerful classes and boost excessively weak classes, so that the fight stays based on skill and luck, not on grabbing a super-weapon.
To use another games analogy, this is more like "rubber-banding" in racing games, where the pack is artificially caught up to the leader.
Not so sure about the Olympics.
The "barely win" thing is solely about preserving the family secret. It doesn't make the race any more interesting. I can only imagine that they're hoping he'll get bored after winning a few plastic trophies and go off in search of something more challenging.
That's not really the case here. She's not categorically different from the other female athletes. She's slightly stronger, slightly more talented, and slightly bolder. In sports, such slight advantages mean consistent wins, but only if you work as hard as everybody else. They're not magic.
She's not being held back to protect a secret. She's being held back because of a murky set of biases, resentments, and politics.
On the other hand, major men's sports tweak rules all the time: change the resilience of the baseball; outlaw spitballs; lower the pitcher's mound; talk about moving the pitcher's mound back; add overtime to pro football games; literally move the goalposts (to the back of end zone) and otherwise make field goal attempts less attractive; modify rules to protect the quarterback; dramatically reduce the amount of contact a defensive back is allowed to bring on a receiver; expand the three-second area dramatically (there's a reason it got the name "key"); etc.
The safety aspect of the deterrence part is critical, though.
> If she's got no one who can rival her, that's amazing and awesome.
The goal that is notionally targeted is to have the allowed moves challenging enough to provide the opportunity for real differentiation at the elite level but not so dangerous as to have people at the elite level sufeerinf large numbers of serious injuries trying to avoid being mathematically eliminated by degree of difficulty (you could allow more moves but give less return to degree of difficulty at the highest level to achieve a similar effect, but I don’t think allowing the moves but underscoring them has any broader appeal than straight-up bans.
If an athlete is, like Biles, good enough to do a move banned for this reason, they are also good enough to reliably dominate without it.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/may/22/simone-biles-y...
Just ask Caster Semenya.
Also, it looks most like penalizing exceptionalism, similar to how the penalty rules of hockey were changed to limit Wayne Gretzky's dominance when both teams were down a player (and changed back shortly after Gretzky's retirement, IIRC).
Spoiler: It's a lot.
We can admire and respect insane talent and aspire to solve problems like homelessness at the same time!
If even attempting this move is likely to seriously injure other gymnasts, then banning it would make sense. Sports are just a game.
If its actually unlikely olympic gymnasts would be injured trying it, then just let her do it, who cares, its just a game.
It made sense but this does not at all. Aspiring gymnasts can use foam pits, crash mats and spotters to learn new moves. It's called progression.
Earlier than this Steve Corbett's flip has disappeared from the internet but it did happen in 1975 at Whistler BC: Corbett's quad backflip was the first one ever done. He was 80 feet (24 metres) in the air flipping four times. You can see him here at the 16 second mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afv8Ts-zTPQ
I think though Jean-Marc Rozon was the only one to do it in competition. He was the leader of the famed Quebec Air Force that dominated Freestyle Aerial Skiing in the 80's. You can see his quad in the second clip above at six seconds.
In 2012, Matt Chojnacki 'landed' a quad twisting quad backflip. I'm not sure if this was in competition, it would have been dsq'd if it was. My guess is training: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=druWqXZnoeU
The Yurchenko was named after Soviet gymnast Natalia Yurchenko in 1982 during a competition in Moscow.
I love that spirit :)
Your fixation on "great man" view of history, in which only those who affect society on a grand scale matter, belongs in the last century, as does your reductionist view that societies "progress" along some linear axis of "good" or "bad." Everyone affects society, everyone matters, and society moves in countless directions at once.
Nevertheless.
However unimportant you may consider Simone Biles, the fact still remains that she's accomplished far more than you likely ever have or will. So apply your own rubric and find a bit of humility. She has achieved master status in her art. She has doubtless inspired generations of gymnasts with a lifetime of practice, effort and skill, and made an indelible mark on her field. She's the best in the world at what she does. What have you done, Nikolay?
...that's a rhetorical question, I don't actually care.
She inspired me and other in her boldness
> Maybe she is. I see no grace in her performance though. Maybe I'm too used watching Soviet Bloc gymnastics. Isn't this artistic gymnastics? I see no artisticism in her performance, just routine - it's like a robot doing it, but failing to land properly
Your lack of interest in pushing the boundaries or rejecting pre established rules (Who said gymnastics should only be about art? Why do you think soviet block country must forever be the model?) strikes me as dull and classicist.
You would be very happy in China mainland, where you have one model to obey and follow, coming from the top down, with no room for inspiration or breaking the mold.
I love your take. It makes me happy to find the rare soul on HN who gets it.