Gymnastics is well aware of its role in the wider Olympic ecosystem: to have judging drama. That’s why we are here. We explain judging scandals offering simplifications that normies can understand; prompting them to go on and have very strong and newly informed opinions about. So… the biggest judging scandals in Olympic gymnastics history
We discuss:
00:01:14 – Rebeca Andrade (BRA) video fo Triple Twisting Yurchenko
00:04:11 – Biggest judging scandals in Olympic gymnastics history, setting the stage for Paris
00:05:13 – The Case of the Ill-Given Gold: 2004 Yang Tae-Young lost gold because of judging error
00:13:23 – The Case of the Bogus Bronze: Drăgulescu give impossible score knocking Shewfelt to fourth
00:18:45 – The Case of the Sexy Stoppage: Alexei Nemov’s score causes crowd to protest and judges to adjust his score
00:23:45 – Fallout from the multiple men’s judging scandals at the 2004 Athens Olympics
00:26:03 – Can you still get a 10.0 score in Olympic gymnastics?
00:28:00 – How to spell the Chéng vault correctly
00:32:15 – The Case of the Accused Australian: When Nastia and He Kexin tied for bars gold
00:37:58 – The Case of the Diabolical Dismount: 2012 London Team Final, Kohei’s botched dismount and waving money at the judges
00:44:56 – The Case of Bela’s Bullshit: 1980 Olympic All Around disputed victor
00:51:36 – How non-controversies get started, revisiting 1980 Olympic news article
00:55:55 – The Case of the Convenient Communist: For years the wrong story was told about the 1968 Mexico City Olympic all-around Caslavska vs Petrik
01:03:34 – New Rules for Paris Olympics
01:17:08 – Gymternet News
01:18:51 – Elvira Saadi’s lifetime ban upheld
01:19:41 – Livvy Dunne is staying at LSU and we get to see more of her beautiful form
01:22:22 – Simone Biles Rio Olympic coach has a new book out
- Simone Biles’ coach for 15 World and Olympic medals, including Olympic all-around gold, has a book coming out. Pre-order Aimee Boorman’s book now.
REPLAY TICKETS for OLYMPIC TRIALS LIVE SHOW ON SALE HERE
Join Club Gym Nerd (or give it as a gift!) for:
-
- Weekly Q&A Behind The Scenes podcast, dedications, mini-commissions , group commissions, exclusive extended interviews, and College & Cocktails episodes. Plus discounts and first dibs on Live Show tickets and merch.
- Exclusive VIP section on the message board Forum
- More goodies:
- GymCastic newsletters
- 2024 College & Cocktails menu (including mocktails, of course)
- GymCastic Fantasy Games
- GymCastic Store
- clothing and gifts to let your gym nerd flag fly
- “tapestries” (banners, the perfect to display your support in an arena)
- Baseball hats available now in the GymCastic store
RELATED EPISODES
Olympic Trials
-
- Paris Olympic Trials Recap
- Women’s Day Two: Olympic Team Named
- Men’s Final
- Women’s Day One
- Women’s Podium Training
- Olympic Trials Stuff
- Photo Galleries
- Olympic Trials Gymnastics Fantasy Game
- Day Two U.S. Championships 2024
- Day One U.S. Championships 2024
- Podium Training U. S. Championships 2024
2024 U.S. Classic Recap Podcast with Denis Vachon
RESOURCES
- Spencer’s Clickable Code of Points
- Highest scoring team machine from Emily Giambalvo at the Washington Post
- What Scores Get You a Medal
- How to Build The Paris Olympic Team
- The Highest scores, D scores and World Cup rankings at The Gymternet
- Gymnastics History and Code of Points Archive from Uncle Tim
- Men’s Gymnastics coverage from Kensley Neutral Deductions
MORE WAYS TO LISTEN HERE
Language nerd reporting! My understanding of pronunciation for “pinyin,” (the phonetic writing of Chinese names into roman letters for English speakers) is that the “e” in Cheng Fei’s name should actually always be pronounced that way, but the diacritic over the letter indicates which of the different tones you should pronounce it with: straight tone, rising, falling, falling and then rising, or neutral. The diacritic over the “e” in Cheng is not to indicate that the vowel is pronounced differently (it’s the same vowel sound regardless), but that the pitch or tone of the vowel should rise as you pronounce it. Cheng’s 2008 teammate Deng Linlin, for example, has a falling tone on the e in Deng, meaning the tone (and diacritic) would be different, but the vowel is still pronounced the same as it is in Cheng.
Admittedly, I could be misinformed. I only ever studied Mandarin, so perhaps this is a rule for Cantonese or a specific dialect? Can any Chinese speakers provide more info?
Outside of Cantonese (Yue) and maybe Hokkien (Min), there aren’t really common standard ways of transcribing dialects. As far as I’m aware, all such transcription systems involve some sort of phonetic spelling with a separate marker for the tone (eg in Cantonese, you spell out the sound and then write a number for the tone). In any case, the tone marker shouldn’t change the vowel sound. But also this is moot because all English-language official documentation in China has been using Mandarin + pinyin for the past few decades.
Native Chinese speaker here. The diacritics in pinyin (the most common way of transcribing (Mandarin) Chinese into the Roman alphabet) represent the tone. So Cheng would technically be written Chéng, where the accent represents the second tone (it’s a rising tone, as if you’re saying “Cheng?”). But regardless of the tone marker, the e would be pronounced the same as the “uh” vowel sound as compared to the “eh” vowel sound. When it comes to orthography, most people omit the tone markers, so it really isn’t that big of an issue! (Personally I would prefer if the tone markers were written so I wouldn’t have to look up people’s names in Chinese to get the tones right.) Perhaps the more salient issue would be getting the four accents in Říčná right?
Oooh very helpful, thanks much for this additional info! 🙂
I really enjoyed this episode. Thanks for all your research… I’m sure this kind of in-depth fact checking is very time consuming!!
In this great épisode you mention a gymnastics movie (best film as you put it), i cannot find it. Can you give More Information?
thanks!