There Is Nothing “Lazy” or “Untalented” About Olympic Gymnasts

Gymnastics is the cruelest sport.

On Sunday, American Jordan Chiles scored the third-highest all-around total in the qualification round. She was just behind her teammates, Simone Biles and Suni Lee, who have both won the all-around before—Biles in Rio in 2016, and Lee, in Tokyo in 2021, after Biles dropped out.

Yet, Chiles will not be able to contend for the championship on Thursday because of a rule that the FIG instituted after the 2000 Olympics, limiting the number of contestants from each team to two. It is an absurd rule and cruel to the core.

It happened to another Jordan, Jordyn Wieber, in the 2012 London Games. She was the 2011 all-around world champion and the 2012 national champion. Like Chiles, she finished fourth out of the entire field, but just a hair behind her teammates Aly Raisman and Gabby Douglas; the latter would be crowned the all-around victor.

In Rio in 2016, defending champion Gabby Douglas found herself on the outside looking in, finishing third-best out of the entire field.

According to the gymnastics website, The Medal Count, before the two-person rule was instituted for the all-around final after the 2000 games, at least five gold medalists between 1972 and 2000 were third-place team finishers in qualifying.

For decades, watching gymnastics was like being an NFL fan watching the Patriots win every year. As an aspiring gymnast, I grew up watching Russians and Romanians dominate gymnastics, opining over legends like Romanian Nadia Comaneci and Russian Olga Korbut. The occasional East German (Maxi Gnauck) or Chinese gymnast would squeak in. The domination began before I was born—the ’50s and ’60s winners were almost exclusively Russian, save for dominant Czech gymnast Věra Čáslavská.

Cathy Rigby was the first American to puncture the Soviet Bloc, in 1970, winning a silver medal on the balance beam at the world championships. Later, it was Mary Lou Retton, who won the all-around in Los Angeles in 1984, her victory aided in part by the Eastern Bloc boycott of the games.

Russia and Romania’s state-run programs churned out champions as if on an assembly line. In America and many other countries, individuals had to fund their own training, and gymnastics is an expensive—and all-consuming—sport. There is no time for dating, proms, after-school activities, or normal high school things.

The tables turned sometime in the ’90s. The Soviet Union splintered, Germany reunited, and Romanians rose in prominence.

Then came Shannon Miller, Kerri Strug, and the Magnificent Seven in 1996, winning the first-ever team gold. And since Carly Patterson won gold in Athens in 2004, American women have won every all-around gold and been the team gold medalists in three of the last four Olympics.

For gymnasts, the Olympics are the apex of the sport. It is the goal. And for most gymnasts, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And with each decade, the opportunities get harder and harder to come by. Gone are the days of compulsory and optional routines, and combined or averaged scoring to determine who advances to the individual events. The qualifying event (with one round) is now an all-or-nothing proposition for team and individual events.

During the qualifying round in Paris, the French women’s team, which had won bronze at Worlds last year, collapsed—falling off bars and beam—and their best gymnast, Melanie de Jesus dos Santos, who trains with Simone Biles, was in tears. “I’m very sad. I feel like I’ve worked for nothing the past years,” she said.

And the opportunities even to get to the Olympics keep shrinking. Team size has fluctuated from 12 to as few as four in Tokyo. It expanded back to five this year. Today, only three gymnasts compete in each event, leaving teammates on the sidelines, which is what happened to Hezly Rivera, the youngest member of the U.S. team, because the coaches chose Biles, Chiles, and Lee to compete in almost every rotation. Jade Carey only performed on vault. For much of the modern Olympics, all gymnasts would compete, and the lowest score would be dropped. There is now no margin for error. 

These changes are supposed to bring parity to the sport, allowing for countries with a small field to compete; but as Mike Davis of The Medal Count pointed out, the number of entrants in all-around keeps shrinking as the number has reduced from 36 to 24 athletes.

There are small victories with these changes. The new format of bringing five gymnasts and using the best three to compete in the team events allows for event specialists to become Olympians. Americans witnessed the benefits firsthand on Tuesday. The U.S. men’s not-so-secret weapon, pommel horse specialist and current world champion Stephen Nedoroscik, wearing coke bottle glasses and meditating on the sideline for three hours, took off his glasses and transformed from Clark Kent to Superman. As he sliced his way across the cruelest apparatus, he secured the team bronze for the U.S., their first team medal in 16 years.