USA’S NEW GOLD STANDARD
Americans steamroll Russians at worlds
Simone Biles, Kara Eaker, Morgan Hurd, Ragan Smith, Grace McCallum and Riley McCusker celebrate Tuesday after Team USA cruised through the women’s team final in the Gymnastics World Championships with a record victory margin.
DOHA, Qatar – The scoreboard is only half the measuring stick for the U.S. women.
If that was all they cared about, they could show up to the world championships and Olympics, give an OK effort and still saunter off with the gold medal. That’s the level of depth and talent the U.S. women have.
But it’s not enough. Not when you’re a team that has produced the Fierce Five and the Final Five. A team that has gone eight years now without a loss at a major international meet, a streak dating to the 2011 world championships.
Winning has become the expectation, but perfection is the goal.
“We hold ourselves to high expectations every time we step on the mat,” Simone Biles said Tuesday after the Americans won their fourth consecutive title at the world gymnastics championships, locking up a spot at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 in the process.
“Even when we have mistakes, you can see us get a little bit upset. Everybody is like, ‘It’s fine, you guys are going to win anyway.’ But it’s our personal performances, how we feel, rather than the scoreboard.”
Which is bad news for the rest of the world.
The Americans had three major mistakes yet still steamrolled their competition, beating Russia by a whopping 8.766 points. To get an idea of how ridiculous the gap is, go find the halftime score of that game between the Warriors and the Bulls on Monday night. Yeah. Like that.
It was the largest victory margin at a worlds or Olympics, by a men’s or women’s team, since gymnastics abandoned its 6.0 scoring system in 2006. It was so large that Germany, which finished last in the eight-team final, was closer to the Russians (3.435 points) than the Russians were to the Americans.
“It shows how strong the group of girls are and how strong Team USA is,” Biles said. “Anything you guys throw at us, we’ll try and work even harder to improve ourselves and our scores for the team.”
USA Gymnastics remains a flaming dumpster fire, unable to find its way forward from the crisis created by the revelation that Larry Nassar, the longtime team physician for the federation and Michigan State, had sexually abused more than 300 gymnasts. USA Gymnastics has gone through three CEOs, one of whom lasted five days, in the last two years, and Tom Forster is the second national team coordinator since Martha Karolyi retired after the Rio Olympics.
Yet the athletes have managed to not only maintain their focus but find a way to rise above all the noise. There is a standard to maintain, and while the adults might not be able to do their jobs, the gymnasts sure are going to.
“I think I can speak for all of us when I say that it feels absolutely amazing,” Morgan Hurd said.
It helps that the Americans have Biles, the greatest gymnast of her and every other generation. Even with a mistake on floor exercise — she got so much height on her first tumbling pass she bounced way out of bounds — she scored a 14.766, the highest by almost a point. She also had the best scores on vault and uneven bars, despite still feeling pain from the kidney stone that kept her in the emergency room until 1 a.m. the night before qualifying.
But her teammates can hold their own, too.
Kara Eaker is on the team to do one event, balance beam, and she delivered again with the highest score on it. Riley McCusker, who likely would have been banished under the old regime after her rough performance in qualifying, rebounded with the third-highest score of the night on uneven bars and fifth-best on balance beam.
All totaled, the USA had all three scores in the top nine on three events.
“I was ready to come in today and kill it,” McCusker said. “I’m definitely a changed gymnast after this. I feel like I have so much experience now that I can just pull from. I think it’ll help us a lot in the future.”
And therein lies the secret.
The Americans don’t rebuild, they reload. While other traditional powerhouses struggle simply to find the talent to be competitive at the world level — talking to you, Romania, which didn’t even make the team final — the United States pumps out one heavy-medal producing generation after another.
The gymnasts might not have the experience — this was the first world championships for McCusker, Eaker and Grace McCallum — but they have an expectation, one that has nothing to do with anyone else on the floor.
“The expectations are set daily in practice,” Forster said. “The key is just not letting down and comparing yourself necessarily to other people, but to how good you can do personally. That’s our goal, to help them achieve their best performances.”
That is the American measurement of success, their own gold standard.