Post-London 2012

(because the pink is awful and I couldn't get a perfect quality vector from BoTW or the others)

So, the London Olympics are over, which for USA was a huge success if you only watch women's art gym. This was the first Olympics that most post-08 "I became a fan because of Shawn Johnson"-type fans saw post-Beijing. This was also the Olympics where other countries that weren't the USA and in part China were expected to have a resurgence (mostly talking about Russia and Romania for the girls and Japan for the men) and those expectations and hopes for the most part were both fulfilled and extinguished depending how you look at it.

It was also after these that I decided to make a blog after reading blogs like Spanny's Big Fake Smile and Uncle Tim Talks Men's Gym (those guys are too smart for me for the time being) in which they were in part, an inspiration. I don't expect this to go far in popularity but more a place just to write my own thoughts because YouTube isn't enough.

Firstly, I know on my YouTube account I answered some people that I'd try uploading videos of London. I did try, and each time the IOC takes it down, so so much for sharing with the world and social media if people won't be able to watch the thing. Some people were able to upload videos without them being auto-detected by zooming on one part of the video or making it look 3D like or mirroring it. If you're desperate, look for torrents and CTV has plenty of coverage in up to 720p quality around the net.

It was also an Olympics filled with disappointment and facepalms concerning coverage, 'expert analyst' and fan reactions (like those fouryear's Spanny talked about so much), which drove me to make some of these pieces:

"Err, isn't this a men's sport too?" "Yeah, look at the picture."

Really? I think they could have at least gone with a shade of red, since blue would look too much like a World Championship competition that fouryears never watch (this same arena in 2009 was blue as were the Ahoy and Tokyo Metro Gym in 2010 and 2011 respectively). I first used this pic on a facebook post as a comment about the Olympics and how this made gymnastics look a women's sport only (in the USA this could in a way be accurate, of course a country like Japan would object), and got a handful of likes. :P

"[I didn't see anyone from Beijing!]" - Bela Karolyi

This one came to mind when Bela Karolyi expressed his observations watching the women's team training, and how "no one from Beijing was on the team" or something similar. Of course first I had to find a shot of the two gymnasts in question having a sad moment, which was in the Team Final a few days later, more specifically the two gymnasts that took the biggest brunt of all the "underaged" accusations back in Beijing (some still do and did, for instance claiming He Kexin "turned 16 in Rotterdam and began to flop" while others claim she turned 16 in London. Though what scares me is that Deng Linlin, even though 20, still performs like she's young and still manages to sell it because Asians never age) (I say that living in a city dominated by Asians in the USA)

Cheers? What cheers? You're supposed to be paying attention to my face!

Now, I'm sure I'm not alone when it comes to disgust about NBC's coverage. Anyone stuck waiting for primetime before they show a big chunk of bastardized, edited, monetized, and cut gymnastics (there were 5-10 minute snippets of Brazil and Australia during the afternoon) had to go through this hell if they didn't have a cable subscription to watch the streams on NBCOlympics or had a way of getting to BBC or other international streams outside of their respective countries.

When it comes to this picture, anyone watching the NBC primetime coverage of the US women qualifying will have heard huge home-crowd roars for another performance on the floor after Gabby had made a mistake on FX and when we were waiting for her score, where we also were stuck looking at close-ups of Jordyn preparing to perform her own routine. In case no one knows, these roars were for that of Beth Tweddle's all-important qualifying routine on Bars in the background, a routine NBC never bothered to show:

(click to play, if you didn't figure that out)

Now, I can't complain about NBC being too biased because we did get her FX routine (I think?)...which finished in 9th place.

Of course I looked at the QF results around the net before I found BBC and ran across this:

(it was the "weird" spelling of Afan's name apparently)

Onto more complaints about biased coverage...that's just NBC, they've been like this every time every Olympics if you didn't know. Just like in Beijing, they would show all the routines of the US and their #1 competitor (in this case Russia) and then one routine each from the two teams fighting for bronze (in this case Romania and China) on the bars, at least during team final. In the subdivision with the US, we got all of the US routines and 2-3 routines of any other countries in the same subdivision (see, they gave so little routines I can hardly remember how many or who they even showed), everything else was filled with commercial break which had commercials about corny "new world record, new goal for me while I watch an event on my phone" or "Let's go down this really curvy mountain road in Morocco with this car!"

Before NBC, there was ABC, who gave gymnastics coverage from Olympics decades ago and World Championships in the 90's (if I can remember), like those videos with Bart and Kathy as commentators (and one more whose name escapes me) of the '97 Worlds videos (primarily beam final videos) that you've probably seen long long ago. This fantastic coverage is what ABC brought us.

Which brings me to this for Team Finals for poor Afan (<3) (I made two variations): 

impression* 

 

I had watched the Team Finals live on the BBC stream even though I live in California (or an hour from where the Olympic Trials were held to be specific), so I had the opportunity to watch this fab routine which unfortunately ended in tragedy for Russia.

(Speaking of which you can find pictures of if you know what to search for if you haven't seen it and can't because of IOC blocking videos because NBC gives them $ for doing so)

   what difference a change in spelling can be, it'd be useless to cross out my name since this is connected to my Google+ where you can find me that way too

There's that, or there's this video:

Anyway, if you want to find more recent photos or hits of the lovely and divine Afan, you are better off searching the "new" spelling of her name (Kseniia Afanaseva) that they for some reason use in competitions since 2011, even if it might be incorrect, since that's what all the news article writers and photographers use to tag their photos.

Of course, the rest of us that have watched her since forever and ever that upload vids or pictures of her still use and refer to her by the initial (and probably correct) spelling of her name, Ksenia Afanasyeva. (This also applies to a certain Komova that for some reason is going by her name spelled as Victoria)

Back to the lovely and divine Afan and her Team Final routine, NBC did not air it, which infuriated me and I'm sure many other fans in the US subjected to NBC that are also wild fans of her gymnastics.

Articles by the likes of Deadspin and the Huffington Post note reasons NBC would not broadcast this routine, either by NBC's own response "in the interest of time" or "to create fake drama reality-show-style", at least the second one is plausible.

What infuriated me even more is that they didn't show her at all until her event final performances half a week later. They didn't show her preliminary routines (both of which qualified for their respective event finals) or her Team Final beam routine where she performed last and was the most solid after two shaky Russian performances. My initial thoughts were that since NBC were trying to sell the Russians as "diva-bitchchicks" through their laughable and hysterical fluffpiece, they didn't bother showing the lovely and divine Afan, who they later described as 'stoic', and by myself 'relatively humble' compared to her Russian compatriots, who was simply "not diva enough" for NBC to bother showing her at all. Wild guess, but that's because I love her to death if you haven't noticed.

Anyway, here is a video from the stands of her qualifying routine where we all (or most of us hopefully) fainted at the great display and understanding of music, dance and artistry:

(click to play yadayadayada)

Oh yeah, and Step edited a perfect cut of her 2011 music here!

Lastly, I'll rant about the men and the attention they got. They were the only ones I made the "excursion" to San Jose for during the Olympic Trials because I knew that the women's sessions were going to be oversold or populated to the roof. Little did I know that USAG were not going to cover these competitions like they did at Nationals (probably because greedy NBC), so I only got day 1 on my YouTube on my potato-cam.

Enough about the past, the US men and the men in general hardly got any attention, compared to the "Fab Five" (or as they are known now, the Fierce Five) or w/e corny nickname they can make for the teams. Oh well.

We got about 3-4 of the 6 rotations for the US men from their subdivision which also (I think?) included Japan and China, so NBC did their "three birds with one stone" thing and showed (to my knowledge) that subdivision only.

For Team Finals, we got just under an hour's worth of actual coverage while the rest was all commercial and fluffpiece-reality-show kind of material. (The full competition on Canadian [find their torrents] or British TV [the BBC stream full replay and coverage] was well over 2 1/4 hours).

Of course, the judging controversy and fiasco (as in the endy part with the waiting and inquiry) was cut out on NBC mostly because it was all waiting stuff, they cut to the chase with the Japanese coaches giving the inquiry and then them receiving the verdict to the boos of the O2 North Greenwich Arena crowd. Of course out of this we got arguing for once on the men's side of gymnastics (because it's so easy to run into arguments and drama drama about the girls) about Kohei not hitting a handstand yada yada British and Ukes robbed yada yada blah blah I couldn't care because the MTC accepted their inquiry, end of story.

Moving on, NBC showed about 45 minutes or so of all-around which included the 3-5 minute fluffpiece about Danell, Yin, and Ryan Seacrest, which didn't even show all of Danell's or John's routines, while showing Kohei's vault, Marcel's floor, Mykola's bar...I don't even remember because again they showed so little.

What saves this kind of coverage to an extent are the camera angles and video quality, but that's it. Everything else flushes it down the toilet. Which brings me to...

take this too seriously and I'll point and laugh at you muahaha lol 

Now, in case you didn't know, the event finals at Worlds or Olympics always alternate between the men and the women (ex. MFX, WVT, MPH, WUB, MSR...), but NBC showed women's finals (without even showing everyone most of the time) and then showed the top 3 from the men by the time everyone was asleep or had to go to sleep (by this time all-nighters were the norm for me so NBC latenight was no biggie).

So for example in day 1, they showed Women's Vault with the big buildup for Maroney to easily take gold by skipping the first half of the competition to begin with an unfortunate turn of events for Eli Black, complete with fluffpieces and big 'expert analyst talk', and we know how that turned out...

if the knowyourmeme entry wasn't enough click to enlarge blahblah 

and THEN they showed Men's floor (top 3 + Dalton and Gonzalez), and THEN Men's horse (top 3, what a trend).

Oh yeah, and if you were watching the women's individual all-around competition on NBC primetime, you were stuck waiting like the rest of us for 45 minutes after the third rotation concluded for the fourth rotation to begin, like come on really?

Onward, day 2, Women's UB (All 8 routines!!!! Too bad this never happened again), then Men's VT then SR (because VT had Sam in it and was probably the most enjoyable after women's UB). Now NORMALLY the order would go Women's UB, Men's SR, and then Men's VT (supposing the finals were spread across two days instead of three as they were in London and Beijing, UB and SR would be on day 1 while VT would be the first final of day 2). Now for men's VT we only got the second half of the competition and didn't even include Igor Radivilov, who was the bronze medalist, but we did get Denis Ablyazin, Sam, Tomas Gonzalez, and Yang HS. In SR, we only got the top 2 (?) comparing Chen Yibing and Arthur Zanetti (who probably unexpectedly won gold not because he beat Chen but winning gold instead of Hypolito who failed to qualify for Floor Ex).

And finally, with day 3, we got Women's BB and then Women's FX, and then later (as in 45+ minutes later) we got Men's HB, which IMO was the best final of the entire artistic gymnastics competition. If they were trying to play it off that Men's HB was the last final (as it has been for every Worlds/Olympics I can remember prior to London), I'd give them credit, but I think it wasn't to be now, since they didn't show Men's PB until latenight, a fortnight really, after they showed Men's HB, where they again only showed top 3. Personally on day 3 I thought the women's finals were crummy compared to the men's as far as competition, we got falls and mistakes galore with the girls, and the men had a much cleaner competition given the circumstances (err, HB and that risk-factor, and not much arguing over the results either, yo!).

Which brings me to Vanessa's leotard for floor finals:

Yay: Not mesh
Ogodwhy: One sleeve much?

Now to end, I leave you with this, in what should have been the final final (lol) of the Olympic games, instead of what happened in women's FX which was the actual final final and didn't quite end on a high note:

(click to play or go to the video, idk lol)

TL;DR, NBC ruined this Olympics for Americans (which is why I watched on the BBC site), which already weren't so great to begin with (women's side and the arguments from teenaged to adult girls and teenaged boys like myself), and if you didn't notice, there was no gymnastics gala, boo.