Gymnastics News Weekly: Jade Carey, Jordan Chiles join Suni Lee, Grace McCallum in NCAA competition
Plus, the ROC men's team reunited, Parkour Worlds delayed again, and look back at Lu Li on the uneven bars at Barcelona 1992
Artistic Gymnastics
The gang’s all here.
Four members of the U.S. women’s artistic gymnastics team from Tokyo 2020 have now made their NCAA collegiate competition debuts with Olympic floor champion Jade Carey and team silver medallist Jordan Chiles getting their chances to compete after COVID concerns canceled their first week’s competitions.
2020 all-around gold medallist Suni Lee and team silver medallist Grace McCallum had already competed in the opening week of the season. Meanwhile, the final two members of the U.S. squad in Tokyo 2020 are not participating in NCAA gymnastics currently: Simone Biles, four-time Olympic gold medallist, previously gave up her amateur status (though had committed to UCLA) and MyKayla Skinner, Tokyo vault silver medallist, competed three seasons for the University of Utah.
Carey finds herself currently ranked third in the all-around standings, while McCallum’s 39.675 total in week two is tied for the highest all-around score so far in the 2022 season with University of Michigan’s Natalie Wojcik and Stanford University’s Kyla Bryant. Carey is close behind at 39.650.
Making history as the first all-around Olympic champion to compete in NCAA gymnastics, Lee has yet to compete on all four apparatus. However, she earned gold-medal worthy scores in the Auburn-Arkansas meet this week: 9.950, uneven bars; 9.875, balance beam; and 9.875, floor exercise.
Chiles’ debut on Monday (17 January) came after the 20-year-old limited training time due to COVID, according to an Instagram post from her mother. Despite the setback, she was solid on the uneven bars where she scored 9.825.
Meanwhile, in Russia, another reunion…
While members of the Tokyo U.S. women’s team are getting underway together in college, the gold medal-winning ROC squad have all returned to the national training center outside Moscow.
“Everyone is here! At training camp!” wrote David Belyavskiy in a photo with Olympic champion teammates Denis Abliazin, Nikita Nagornyy and Artur Dalaloyan.
It’s the first time the golden squad has been together for training since their triumph at last summer’s Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, held in 2021. Their gold medal was the first for the Russian Olympic Committee since 1996.
Parkour Worlds postponed
The first-ever International Gymnastics Federation(FIG) sanctioned Parkour World Championships have been delayed again.
The event, originally scheduled for April 2020, had been pushed to 25-27 March 2022 but the FIG announced Thursday (20 January) that it would once again be postponed due to rising concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Set to take place in Hiroshima, Japan, new dates have yet to be confirmed, according to the FIG website.
From the vault…
This week, we take a look back at the brilliance of China’s Lu Li on the uneven bars at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain. Lu earned scores of 9.887 (compulsory), 9.937 (team optional), and 9.912 (all-around) in the first three phases of competition.
But her highlight came in the apparatus finals, where she earned a perfect 10.0 score to claim the gold medal. She, along with Romania’s Lavinia Milosovici’s perfect mark in the floor exercise final, recorded one of the two final 10.0 scores in Olympic women’s gymnastics history.