Re: Players to watch out for at Doha Asia Games
The joy of gymnastics
For children, movement is life. The raw, exhilarating, simple joy of movement challenges and trains the developing limbs. We stretch and test our sinews, tendons, muscles and bones using our bodies in any way we can. Movement teaches balance and rhythm and life.
A very special few find that the raw joy of movement, that desire to test and stretch the limits of the human body, remains with them all their lives. These few become gymnasts.
Movement is part of the very beginning of our lives, and in the same way the challenges of gymnastics have been with us for most of our history. Texts outlining exercises akin to gymnastics have been found in China and Egypt from thousands of years before the modern era. Europe’s earliest written history, by Herodotus, describes the Gymnopaedia in Sparta from 600BC; a gymnastic and martial festival. Archaeologists in India and China have found pictograms that date from even earlier dates.
While the ancient Olympics did not feature a gymnastic discipline on its own, the flexibility, resilience and strength demonstrated were key parts of the many running and throwing disciplines at the time, and they were a standard part of the education.
Today there are three gymnastic disciplines recognised by the 15th Asian Games Doha 2006, as in the modern Olympics: artistic, rhythmic and trampoline. They all require grace, strength, rhythm, courage, precision, and suppleness; all are an elevated expression of the human mind and body, of art in athleticism; but each discipline is particularly emblematic of specific human virtues.
King of the rings: Yang Wei is a favourite for Doha 2006 gold
While artistic gymnastics is a display of awesome strength and control, rhythmic gymnastics is undoubtedly the most entrancing of the disciplines. The routines demand grace, suppleness, balance and the delicate articulation of every limb, joint and bone while the gymnast weaves ball, ribbon or rope.
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All of these disciplines combined create a huge array of competitions and medals. There are six men’s disciplines and four women’s in artistic gymnastics. Rhythmic gymnastics, too, works with six apparatus, each requiring different rhythmic talents but all demanding the grace and suppleness of a ballerina.
Currently trampoline is only recognised as a stand-alone individual discipline by the Asian Games, as is the case in modern Olympics.
In all, it makes for 19 separate competitions and one of the richest gold seams in the Games. In gymnastics, there’s a lot to play for.
And with China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and many other Asian countries and regions among some of the top performers in these events, Doha 2006 is set to offer a very exciting round-up of top quality gymnastics action.
China is expected to scoop the majority of the honours. Its men’s and women’s artistic teams took the all-round artistic award and Yang Wei secured the men’s individual all-round gold at the World Championships in Aarhus, Denmark in October. Cheng Fei, on the women’s side, was instrumental in the team victory, winning gold in both vault and floor to bring her total medal tally to three.
Now, China’s coach is worried the team will become complacent. "It's very dangerous for our gymnasts to regard themselves as indisputable number one in the Asiad gymnastics competition," Zhang Peiwen told the Xinhua news agency.
China will certainly not be unchallenged in December. Japan’s men’s artistic team will provide stiff resistance, particularly Hiroyuki Tomita, Japan’s greatest artistic gymnast, who lost his gold medal to Yang. Korea will also be eager to overcome the disappointment felt at the World Championships. It failed, against all expectations, to qualify for the final.
Doha will witness world class rivalry in rhythmic gymnastics, too. In the 2005 World Rhythmic Gymnastics Championships, Kazakhstan’s Aliya Yussupova, Japan’s Yukari Murata and China’s Yiming Xiao were the highest-placed Asian competitors in the individual all-round events, although Japan and China led Kazakhstan in the overall rankings. There is no team event in rhythmic gymnastics, but countries do count their cumulative winnings.
Winning streak: China's Cheng Fei took three medals at the World Championships in October
FIG introduced the system following a protest by fans over the scoring of the men’s parallel bars event in Athens 2004. At that event, Russia’s Alexei Nimov thrilled and delighted fans with a spectacular display. But their delight quickly turned to anger when Nimov received just 9.725 for his routine.
After 10 minutes of booing, the shocked and bewildered judges increased the marks to 9.762. Fans, amazed by the ambition of his performance, did not realize his minor errors of execution. FIG developed the new system to make scoring more transparent.
And while it will make scoring clearer, it definitely obscures the medal outcome. The system rewards daring techniques, and at the recent World Championships some competitors complained that it was pushing athletes into risky manoeuvres. Certainly the men put on some spectacular displays at that competition.
But women tended to focus more on perfection of execution and they scored at least as highly as their male colleagues, proving that excellence of execution is still equally valued as the ambition of the routine.
These rules were first used at the World Championships in October, but Doha 2006 is just the second time the rules were used in real competition. It could still produce surprises as the new regulations bed down.
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