Your Guide to Olympic Gymnastics: Balance Beam

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Your Guide to Olympic Gymnastics: Balance Beam

For two weeks every four years, women’s gymnastics is one of the biggest sports in the world. The rest of the time, those of us watching are kind of a niche group.

That can make it hard to fully appreciate what you’re seeing when the athletes take the Olympic stage. If you want to know what’s required on each apparatus or how to distinguish good routines from great ones, we’re here to help.

Here, we’ll look at the balance beam, starting with a broad overview and then moving into the technical details. We also have guides to the vault, uneven bars and floor exercise.

The basics

The beam is about 16 feet long, about four feet high and about four inches wide — not much wider than a credit card.

Every routine must include:

A successive series of two or more acrobatic skills (handsprings or flips). At least one must be a salto, meaning no hands.

Two or more consecutive dance skills (turns, leaps or jumps). At least one must be a leap or jump featuring a 180-degree split.

Acrobatic skills in multiple directions (backward versus forward or sideways).

At least one turn or pirouette.

Gymnasts receive one score for difficulty and one for **********, and the two are combined for their final score. In the best beam routines, the gymnast has no wobbles and, of course, no falls. (In reality, small balance checks are common.) Judges also deduct for poor form and excessive pauses between skills.

The reigning Olympic champion is

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of China, and the reigning world champion is

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of the ******* States.

What the gymnasts do

Every skill has a difficulty rating from A (the least difficult) through H (the most). Gymnasts earn credit for their eight hardest skills, of which at least three must be acrobatic and three must be dance.

Mounts

Many gymnasts mount the beam with simple skills like

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(A);

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(A), basically jumps into seated positions; or

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(B), and save more difficult skills for later.

Two ******* but still common mounts are

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(D) — in which the gymnast uses a springboard to leap into a split, switching the direction of her legs in midair — and

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(C), in which she stands alongside the beam with her back to it, dives backward and lands upside down with her arms wrapped around it.

Acrobatic series

Many gymnasts fulfill their “acro series” requirement with backward skills, for two reasons. First, they’re easier to connect than forward skills because gymnasts can use the momentum from one to rebound into the next. Second, when flipping forward, they can’t see the beam as they land.

Jumps and leaps

In a jump, a gymnast takes off from both feet and moves only up and down. In a leap, she takes off from one foot and travels forward.

Turns

Turns may not look as flashy as flips, but they can be just as difficult. The 2016 Olympic beam champion, Sanne Wevers of the Netherlands, received much of her difficulty value from

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.

Dismounts

Many gymnasts generate power for their dismount with a roundoff (basically a cartwheel in which both feet land at once) or a back handspring.

Two common dismounts are the

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(D) and

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(E). Only a few gymnasts can do a

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(G). So, naturally, Simone Biles went and did a

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(H) — but only once, to get it named after her, because it would need to be an I or a J to be worth the risk of injury or error to do it again.

Forward dismounts are rare, both because they’re difficult (gymnasts can’t see the ground when they land) and because doing them means forfeiting the connection bonus that comes with doing a dismount out of a roundoff.

How they’re scored

Gymnasts’ final marks are the sum of a “D score” (difficulty) and an “E score” (**********).

Difficulty

The D score has three components.

Composition requirements: Each of the four requirements — an acrobatic series, a dance series, acrobatic skills in multiple directions and a turn — is worth 0.5.

Skill values: Gymnasts receive credit for their eight hardest skills, with an A-rated skill worth 0.1, a B-rated skill worth 0.2 and so on.

Connection bonuses: A large part of the difficulty score comes from gymnasts’ connecting one skill directly into another. For instance, a B acro skill + an E acro skill is worth 0.1 in bonus, and two D skills are worth 0.2. If a gymnast is supposed to connect two skills but wobbles between them, she can lose difficulty value on top of the ********** penalty for the wobble.

**********

Judges deduct amounts ranging from 0.1 for a slight balance check to 1.0 for a fall. Jumps and leaps can be minefields, with deductions for insufficient height, flexed feet and splits short of 180 degrees.

Some ********** errors can lead judges not to give full credit for the difficulty of a skill a gymnast intended to perform. For example, if she means to do a switch ring leap but her head position and back leg don’t fulfill the criteria, she might get credit for only a switch leap, 0.2 less.

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#Guide #Olympic #Gymnastics #Balance #Beam

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