1996 Olympics Balance Beam Compulsory: Podkopayeva vs Miller

[VGThuy]

I guess she felt like she had to up the level of difficulty. Opening with a full-in was pretty common in the 80s but by the late 90s came around, that kind of mount was sort of seen as almost compulsory. What's interesting is that a full-in was valued the same as a double pike in the 97-2000 quad but then it became super-common again in the 2001-2004 quad.

The code truly affects the kind of gymnastics we see. That 2004 code was so strange. I felt the kind of tricks we saw went down in difficulty despite the fact that it was much harder to obtain a 10.0 SV under that code and it was seriously deduction-heavy (except when it came to pirouettes in bars)...just ask Terin Humphrey. Remember how hitting a 9.7+ was like hitting a high 9.9 and any score in the 9.8 range was like a rare ten. I guess that's why we saw less risk. Plus, the way it undervalued tumbling and overvalued dance leaps dictated the kinds of routines we saw. I could never like a code where the FX of Cheng Fei wouldn't be able to compete with the FX of Catalina Ponor. It was so illogical in every way imaginable and showed what a laughing stock that judging system was and led to the death of the 10.0 - that and other things.

 

[VGThuy]

Speaking of beam, I always loved this beam performance from Boginskaya from 1992 Worlds Semi-finals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgeBwvZig-s