RIO DE JANEIRO China’s pursuit of the Olympic women’s team gymnastics title they relinquished to the United States in 2012 got off to a bumpy, wobbly and error-prone start in qualifying on Sunday.
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On floor exercise, the line-up was Gabby Douglas, Laurie Hernandez, Simone Biles, Aly Raisman and Madison Kocian.
Led by three-time world champion Simone Biles, the US women are heavily favored to defend the team gold medal they won at the 2012 London Games.
Gabby Douglas and all the Team USA women’s gymnastics athletes will continue their journey for gold when they compete on August 7th beginning at 8:45am EST. They earned the highest team qualifying score, 185.238, by almost 10 points.
The Americans are spectacularly talented, so deep they could have brought their B team, as well, and both would have medaled.
“It wasn’t 100% perfection, but we showed our gymnastics is on the highest level”, said Martha Karolyi, the national team coordinator.
But if the Fierce Five was arguably the most dominant team under the open-ended system – they beat Russian Federation by a little more than five points – this team is better.
Simone Biles, already the most decorated female gymnast in history, is set to match-or supercede-the fame of Gabby Douglas, the darling of the 2012 London Olympics.
Instead she becomes the first reigning all-around gold medallist to return to the next Games since Nadia Comaneci in 1980. “What I’m trying to do is get the most out of every single person”.
In the qualification round, a gymnast must compete on all four events to be eligible for the all-around final. “I had to kind of ease back into it but after that it was fine”, said Douglas. Brestyan needed to be sure Raisman was serious, so he put the three-time Olympic medallist through countless hours of cardio and plyometrics in 2014 created to test her desire as much as her physical limits.
The U.S. women did what was expected of them in the all-around final, hitting all 16 routines with no major mistakes.
Mao fared no better with her floor exercise. “I really take my hat off to her”.
Competition leotards “are like little prom dresses”, Karolyi said in a conference call with the media in late July. Here’s the thing, though, the thing Brestyan knew the second Raisman walked back into the gym and told him she was ready: Raisman’s fear of failure always wins. “I think everyone recognizes us when we walk by, like, ‘Yeah, those are the gymnasts, ‘ because yeah, there’s a big height difference”.
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Previous year at the Pan American Games in Toronto, Brazil took home the Bronze medal, with Saraiva breaking out to win the bronze in the all-around to put the Rio hosts firmly on the gymnastics map.
