The Last East German WAG Stan

"[Gymnast] could learn another vault likely. Maybe a Tsuk 1/1 or Lopez would be good."

This is about a gymnast who would need to show a second vault which she's never shown ... in the next 2-3 months. I do not believe she's ever done a Tsuk or YHalf entry.

Retired Gymnast Oksana Chusovitina has won a bronze medal at the 2025 Cottbus World Cup.

So... let's talk about CaMarah Williams and more importantly .... USAG International Elite Committee bureaucracy

This year the IEC instituted a rule that says that if you use vault to qualify with a 2 or 3 event score to US Championships you need to do 2 vaults and the average will be used. A lot of us assumed that rule applied to Winter Cup and Classics but the wording actually only says Championships. The fact that the rule only applies to championships was proved when CaMarah Williams was qualified to Winter Cup. But ... there are some implications here.

Let's start with the mechanics of qualification: Winter Cup, American Classic, and US Classic are primarily intended as a qualification route to US Championships. Yes some gymnasts will use it for competition experience but those gymnasts either have already qualified to championships or are not expected to have any trouble doing so. And USAG has, allegedly, been trying to keep the numbers of athletes at these competitions under control. But by using different rules to qualify to Winter Cup and US Championships they've created a situation where Williams can't actually qualify to nationals without getting the qualifying score to Classics that she's already failed to do.

She can only do vault and floor at Winter Cup. Theoretically she could do 2 vaults at Winter Cup and get that 2 event score, but the reality is she's never competed 2 vaults and if she throws a low difficulty second vault she is highly unlikely to get the 2 event score using her vault average. This Winter Cup is simply a dead end.

Williams is an extremely inconsistent gymnast.

She competed 2 elite national qualifiers this year:

Metroplex - VT: 14.150 UB: 10.300 BB: 11.450 FX: 13.150 - 49.050

Vegas Cup - VT: 13.400 UB: 9.800 BB: 13.000 FX: 11.900 - 48.100

Even with the IEC lowering the score threshold to 50 she hasn't come close to qualifying by the AA to Winter Cup/Classics. And at least for the moment the Nationals qualifying score is 52.

But I can hear you saying... she qualified to championships last year. Maybe she is just having a slow start to the season.

Except this is what her season looked like last year:

Vegas Cup: VT: 13.900 UB: 13.000 BB: 9.300 FX: 11.400 - 47.600 City of Lights: VT: 13.150 UB: 11.900 BB: 12.850 FX: 12.850 - 50.750

The City of Lights score gets her to Winter Cup ....

Winter Cup: VT: 13.850 UB: 10.800 BB: 13.600 FX: 12.750 - 51.000

That Winter Cup score gets her to US championships with the lowest possible qualifying score.

American Classic: VT: 13.800 UB: 10.250 BB: 11.700 FX: 12.250 - 48.000

US Classic: VT: 13.750 UB: 12.150 BB: 10.150 FX: 13.000 - 49.050

US Championships: VT: 11.800 UB: 8.100 FX: 12.700

I know that people think of gate keeping as bad... but gate keeping is the IEC's job. And they have failed at gate keeping. There is no actual reason to assume this gymnast will somehow get a qualification score at the post Winter Cup elite qualifiers. Winter Cup itself is a dead end. And I'm frankly not sure there is even justification for inviting her to National Team Camp.

So IEC... what the hell are you doing here? What is the point?

"Guys the US has a bars problem this year..."

Jayla Hang just dropped a cool 6.0 bars routine.

Yup it was very cool. But ... are we forgetting that D has not been her problem?

The USAG International Elite Committee has decided in it's infinite wisdom to lower the qualifying scores for juniors to Winter Cup and US Championships. And to hold more Elite Qualifiers in the spring.

They had to lower it to 48 to get even two more qualifiers for Winter Cup among the juniors.

They also lowered the senior qualifying score for Winter Cup to 50. Most of the people who are newly qualified are getting their scores from US Champs... which I will remind you was early JUNE of 2024. Several of them have competed this year with very mid scores. Others I know are injured. And at least one of them has regressed a lot.

They knew all of this about the gymnasts who would be qualifying when they lowered the score.

This all smells of desperation.

But you know why the IEC has reasons to do this kind of thing? Only coaches with gymnasts at US Championships get to vote on leadership of the women's program.

But anyway, guys maybe I'm dooming but the US program is collapsing over this quad and they're going to be desperate for Tokyo and a few Paris quad gymnasts to stick around.

Now that we've had enough meets to have a range of gymnasts have scores in 2025 here are the score leaders as of Feb 9, 2025.

WAG AA

Single VT

WAG UB

WAG BB

WAG FX

WAG AA Difficulty

BONUS: Jr WAG AA

BONUS: MAG AA

Training videos are training videos so one shouldn't expect them to be perfectly clean and any 6.0 bars routine is impressive...

... but does like no one else see how messy her form is or how little amplitude she gets?

Let's just say I have strong reason to think she would prefer to not compete in 2025 but she may have to go for a fall international assignment because she's an adult with bills to pay and her funding expires in August.

The gymnastics subreddit is downvoting me to hell for daring to push back against the idea that Jade Carey has managed elite and ncaa "quite well."

Apparently 2023 does not exist.

I'm sitting here wondering when USAian fandom is going to realize the program is about to fall off a cliff as soon as any significant amount of the Tokyo Quad gymnasts retire from elite.

At the moment there are 5 French juniors with higher AA scores than the top US junior AA score. Yes the French scores are inflated domestic but the US scores are all from national qualifiers which aren't to be trusted either.

In terms of young early seniors we're looking at Pease and Rivera who are both Valeri WOGA gymnasts.

The highest US senior bars score right now is 13.6 from Izzy Stassi and the top junior bars score is a 12.7.

I keep thinking about Livvy Dunn's mother saying that no one understands elite scoring and "competitions without Simone Biles" have empty seats.

But worlds has been sold out in recent memory except 2018 when it was held in Qatar.... every major US meet including Winter Cup and US Classic have been sold out for years ... yes there were empty seats at US Champs last year but that's because they sold all session passes and people bought those but didn't use all the tickets. I think there might have been some empty seats at 2022 European Championships but Olympiahalle has a seating capacity of 15,500.

So I'm left to the conclusion that Livvy Dunn's mother didn't understand how elite scoring worked and figured that most people were the same as her despite the fact that her daughter was actually doing the sport.

And she doesn't watch elite gymnastics.

Buy hey, if she meant there were empty seats at like... elite qualifiers? I'm sure there are. But I don't think any amount of ~*education*~ would make people go to one of those.

🇩🇪 Pauline Schäfer-Betz in military promotional photos for the German Bundeswehr