Only the margin of victory was ever in question.
Advertisement
41-year-old gymnast Oksana Chusovitina of Uzbekistan competed for her seventh time at the 2016 Rio Games.
In the end it was not even close.
The 22-year-old MA native was part of a record-setting women’s gymnastics team that stormed to the gold medal, winning by the largest margin in the history of the current scoring system. “That’s what we were aiming for”, said China’s Shang Chunsong, who won the bronze.
“I think her tumbling was sky high today”. She hasn’t lost an allaround competition in three years and she could win five of the six gold medals available in women’s gymnastics.
“We competed with the understanding that the USA team were stronger than us”. They’ve won all five world or Olympic titles since then.
The USA Women’s Gymnastics team made history by being the first USA team to win back-to-back in the Team Competition with an eight point gap, the largest since 1960.
Four years after her floor exercise clinched gold for Team USA, Aly Raisman once again put on a dazzling display that seemed to defy physical possibility. Each country can only take two participants and for the US it will be Aly Raisman and Simone Biles. She underlines her status as the best female gymnast in the world with a dazzling floor display to top the leaderboard in qualifying for the individual all-around final. “From my nature, I’m really not a sentimental person, honestly”, Martha Karolyi told the newspaper. Rio is the last Olympics to have five-member gymnastics teams.
The name change comes in honor of coach Marta Karolyi, 73, who will step down after the Rio Olympics. “I think that’s probably comparable to the other era, first when Russian Federation was dominating and then Romania took over and dominated for several years”.
Advertisement
NBC commentators expressed ceaseless amazement during the competition, event after event, in which the five women continued to outperform themselves compared to their qualification routines just two days earlier.
