“And she said, ‘This is why we do so many repetitions in practice'”.
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The dominance on breathtaking display in all four disciplines was comparable to a 100-50 basketball score, making these gymnasts the petite version of the U.S. Dream Team.
“It didn’t feel like the Olympics”.
“We want to work hard and deliver those prefect routines”. “It felt like one more routine and we kept calm”.
The weight of expectation after leading qualifiers by over 10 points had only made them stronger, said Raisman, a gold medal victor in London. If that’s all it took for her to stay cool as a cucumber to dominate her first Olympic competition-plus the confidence that she’s the best in the world-I’ll have what she’s having.
Douglas, who became the first American to win gold in both the team competition and the individual all-around in 2012, won’t be given an opportunity defend her gold in the all-around. All of her scores on vault, floor and balance beam were the highest in the field. So Karolyi’s strategy worked – not that it really mattered, considering the way Simone Biles, Aly Raisman and Laurie Hernandez performed in the other events.
The US women’s gymnastics team made the team final a race for silver.
Aly Raisman killed it on beam and stuck all her landings in floor – “solid” is the word. So that’s the vault, the uneven bars, the balance beam and the floor exercise.
Before Tuesday, the previous biggest winning margin under the open-ended scoring system, which was introduced to the sport in 2006, came at the 2014 world championships when the Americans beat China by 6.693 points.
“We were trying for silver”.
The final score for the Final Five comes out to 184.897, which is 8.209 points higher than Russian Federation, who will take home the silver medal.
Lauren Hernandez and Madison Kocian joined Biles in taking home a gold from their first Olympics. “Of course you are nervous, but we just did exactly what we did in training”. Russian Federation took the silver eight points behind.
The result was history for the Americans, who claimed their third team medal. Before the all-around and event finals later this week, I recommend reading Nancy Armours latest column about them in USA Today.
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Japan failed to follow their men’s team onto the podium finishing fourth ahead of Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Brazil.
