everyone's talking about it.

kayla williams retired. first us vault champion at worlds. it was an awesome vault. i remember watching her dty and dropping my mouth. it looked damn near perfect. well, she's decided she probably won't make the worlds team so she's focusing on college. cant be surprised with the competition being so much tighter in the us than the past.

i immediately thought "omg! alicia can make it now!" everyone kept saying the only thing stopping her was williams but that was a big IF. no if anymore. i'm excited for alicia and i think marta will give it to her. i'm more curious about kytra hunter and where that puts her. i know we think of aly raisman as alicia ii but what about kytra? she's an everything but bars girl. she has awesome tumbling. she's STRONG in the 3 events she does. i think she deserves a shot.

only time will tell.

i wanted to write an article for the couch gymnast on adult gymnastics but i see someone has already done that. maybe i can do it from the perspective of someone who has never done it? i dunno. i just looked and there are adult classes in hanover. well, actually in vermont but only 10 minutes from dartmouth. the downfall is that it's just a 1 hr class. the class at mit was 2.5hrs! i'm curious how much you stretch and how much guidance you get. the class at mit was also a lesson. we all learned pretty much at the same time. maybe we worked on different things or the same thing but doing drills at different levels but it was still instruction. i'm not sure if i'll get that anymore :(

just saw despicable me! it was lovely. a good pg movie. definitely pg for rude humor, i mean, russel brand is in it! but cute movie overall. when we left, the moon looked orange. i said maybe it was vector's jumpsuit. next, i wanna see ramona and beezus. maybe i'll watch that on my computer when it's available and skype chat with my sis. i miss her. i leave for dartmouth on sunday! excited, terrified, anxious, and curious? all at once.

some gymnastics math

it seems like the us will be in trouble again at worlds. ppl say we would have lost the olympics anyway because china's sv was higher than ours. it seems like we might have this problem again.

i realize, though, that i'm jumping to conclusions. these are based on classics and chinese nationals. i dont think it's fair to compare since key people were missing from classics.

what i did/am doing: i'm looking at the us scorers in the 6.0+ d-score and assuming they make the team.

macko - 6.2 bars - barf, i don't really like her
kytra - 6.1 beam
alicia - 6.3 vault, 6.0 beam
bross - 6.2 bars (horribly overscored 9.25 e-score), 6.0 beam
bridget - 6.0 bars

just looking at that, it looks like we're in trouble. only 2 of those people are definites.

lets look at chinese nationals. this is also based on names i've heard thrown around for them
he kexin - 7.4 bars,
deng linlin - 6.8 beam,
su liu - 6.4 beam, 5.8 floor,
wu liufang - 6.9 bars, 6.0 beam,
huang quishan - 6.6 bars,

actually, scratch what i said before. i think it will become a battle of power-house strength versus artistic-ness. oh yeah, artistry. china is clearly dominant on bars with their lowest sv being 6.6. i'm confident hexin is going so she can win the bars final medal. their beam is higher than us values unless bridget didn't throw something. us seems to be better on vault, thank you asac. based on nationals, the highest sv from china was 6.0 from li yiting (whose other vault was 5.0). she has the highest average. i'm confident the us can better that with asac, kytra/kayla, bross maybe? not sure but it's higher than china's. with floor, it seems the us will have a slight advantage. but that's not to say there are more chances for errors on us floors - see out of bounds by nastia and shawn in 08. we shall see