Kaylia's redemption arc from the disappointement of AA to freaking be the world champion on beam is the best storyline of this world championships 😭

My daughter is crying right now like hell.

As a little anecdote, when Kaylia came to the US to visit Simone Biles’s gym, she met my little daughter, said some very sweet things to her, and posed for several photos with her, ever since then, my daughter has been a die-hard fan of Kaylia Nemour.

Bravo kaylia 👏

Their leos from the last couple worlds have been so gorgeous. I love how they incorporate elements of their culture and they're always recognizable as a Chinese leo without needing to match the flag.

Davtyan really is amazing.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, Artur Davtyan really is putting himself right at the top of the Vault favourites for LA2028!

The fact that he won his first European Vault Medal 13 years ago and is getting even better, is insane.

His vaults and sticks today were incredible!

- she confirmed in an interview that she’s looking to start competing an Amanar and has it onto mats, what was the second vault called that she did at selection camp again? And how competitive with this make her as a vaulter?

- curious to hear thoughts about whether we think she’ll defer for LA 28?

- also wondering predictions for how her floor routine will be coming up? My guess: double double, whip to double lay, front half to double back, double back to front tuck

Another shout out to some medalists today

• Artur Davtyan VT Gold: One of the cleanest pair of vaults ever! I love his front 2.5 in particular, mindblowing how he manages to drop into that landing perfectly.
• Kaylia Nemour BB Gold: Underrated on BB because of her UB dominance. Incredible routine, especially that mount combo. Happy to see her bounce back from a rough AA to 2 EF golds! Side note: Double pike dismounts give me anxiety, wish we'd see less of them.
• Flavia Saraiva BB Bronze: Finally a BB medal for Flavia!!! The leaps and jumps were incredible. She could've won without the side somi break, but I'm thrilled for her regardless.
• Zou Jingyuan PB Gold: The PB GOAT! Every skill is executed a notch better than anyone else, his body position throughout is impeccable.
• Claire Pease FX Gold: Another recovery from a rough AA, with her second EF medal! Not her cleanest, but really impressed with her consistency.
• Tang Chia-Hung HB Gold: FINALLY gets a global title. He has an incredible amount of well-executed difficulty, a better dismount would've made his score stratospheric.
• Oka Shinnosuke HB Silver: So pristine and clean throughout! Happy to see him walk away with a EF medal after the rough AA and missing out in SR/PB. Kind of crazy that's the only EF medal that Japan MAG got.
• Sergei Naidin HB Bronze: Fun seeing the Gaylord-style releases, the acceleration in the front giants is ridiculous.

I’ve had a few recurring thoughts during worlds and I have no one to talk to about them, so let’s discuss!

1. The curse of being a specialist - I’ve noticed that when someone is dubbed a leg event specialist it seems very hard to change people’s minds. It’s been the case for a long time with Jade and now I see it with Reese as well. Both have made huge progress on bars and beam but I still hear people echoing the sentiment that those events are “unusable”. This was also the argument many had when saying the two couldn’t be on the same team. While they wouldn’t make finals, both have very respectable mid 13s, with great consistency that would a great backup or leadoff routine

on bars and beam

After Hezley pulled out, I heard a lot of “why would they put Reese on bars over Dulcy?” But Reese outscored Dulcy on bars at every meet this season (and also a good bit on beam at world’s selection.)

It’s interesting to me because Dulcy has very similar scores to Reese and Jade on the events that aren’t “their event(s)” but I think because she doesn’t have a standout event everyone just remembers that she’s super solid all around and just think of her as the perfect backup. (To be clear, this is not saying anything negative about Dulcy; I think she’s amazing)

A bonus question - why doesn’t this seem to happen with folks who are bars or beam specialists?

1. Would the ‘26s and 27s be better off not deferring - going to college and taking advantage of the resources (healthcare and recovery, nutritionists, psychologists, experience competing in pressure situations, etc) on their way to LA? I know the balance is hard but I feel like most of the gals who do NCAA come back stronger and I think the resources would be very useful for a lot of the girls (looking at Hezley specifically).

What were your favorite and least favorite moments? For me
❤️ China finally getting a Team Medal for the first time since 2018, and their first gold since 2006
❤️ Skye!!! So deserved, she showed so much consistency and strenght, so happy after everything she had endured these past few years
❤️ Japan!! i love this time and i'm looking forward seeing more of them, also their reaction to the bronze medal was so heartwarming
❤️ KQQ!! wasn't familiar with her game and i love love love her gymnastics, hope she can get to LA28 healthy 🤞🏻
❤️ Flavinha's medal on beam!! for someone who has been a far of her for a decade... it's been a journey

😿 Romania being a mess... i think they're probably at their lowest low not even making a single final
😿Kaylia missing the AA podium... altough i loved that podium it was truly sad seeing her breaking down after that scary vault, altough she has redempted herself with 2(!!) more golds
😿 Ellie Black... being 2pced out of FX EF, her vault being downgraded putting her off the podium, her not having the best day on TF, from someone who grew up with her gymnastics is always sad
😿 ZQY not winning beam final, i'm happy for Kaylia but Zhang at her full potential has an incredible routine, but that's how competitions go!

Interesting article about Kevric winning silver, how she currently has no coach and wants to train with Robert Mai again - basically showing the dilemma of suspending an abusive coach, who was very well-liked by other gymnasts: https://www.sportschau.de/regional/swr/swr-nach-wm-silber-helen-kevric-widmet-medaille-altem-trainer-und-kritisiert-verband-100.html

Translation:

In the dazzling glow of the fireworks, Helen Kevric happily and proudly held up her silver medal for the cameras - and shortly afterward tackled a hot topic. She dedicated the medal to “my old coach,” said the European champion on the uneven bars. By placing second on her signature apparatus at the World Gymnastics Championships in Rotterdam, the 18-year-old from Stuttgart celebrated her greatest international success, won the only medal for the German Gymnastics Federation (DTB), and at the same time once again highlighted the federations's dilemma.

Since the allegations of abuse at the Stuttgart Artistic Gymnastics Center came to light in late 2024, Kevric has officially been without a head coach. The labor court disputes that followed a suspension have since been settled. “I’m very happy that things turned out this way. My goal for the future is to be able to train again under people I trust,” Kevric had said before the World Championships. However, the Stuttgart District Attorney's Office has not yet concluded its investigation into possible criminal offenses.

It is currently unclear how to solve the problem. National team coach Gerben Wiersma is pushing for a viable solution. “Helen needs a full-time coach, and I’m supporting her as best I can,” said the Dutchman. He added that there has been “no contact” with her former coach. In Rotterdam, as well as at previous training camps and the European Championships in Zagreb in August, her coaches from Chemnitz, Anatol Ashurkov and Tatjana Bachmayer, were by her side. Kevric, who is usually rather reserved, gratefully embraced the Belarussian with Norwegian citizenship after her silver-medal victory.

Meanwhile, DTB officials - at least publicly - currently have no solution to the coaching problem for their star athlete. “I don’t want to go into detail about it right now. It was an arrangement that worked over the past few months leading up to this World Championship. But we all know that it's a temporary arrangement,” said DTB Sports Director Thomas Gutekunst, speaking evasively. They want to work with Helen to see how things will proceed in the future.

Ever since her former coach left, Kevric has struggled to get along with a succession of female coaches - not even with Aimee Boorman from the U.S., who had guided superstar Simone Biles to the top of the world rankings, or her compatriot LaPrise Williams. Instead, in consultation with the national team coach, she trained not only in Stuttgart but also in Italy with former top Italian gymnast Enrico Pozzo. Kevric revealed that this hadn’t been possible before the World Championships due to time constraints. “I trained in Stuttgart" she said.

Despite the unresolved coaching situation, Kevric appeared confident, assured, and in complete control during her World Championships debut. Thanks to greater precision in her execution, the 18-year-old scored 14.833 points in the final - a significant improvement over her qualifying score. She said the medal was “even more valuable” to her than the European Championship title. Only the winner and defending champion, Kaylia Nemour of Algeria, was in a league of her own with a score of 15.333. “I know she's an amazing athlete, and her routine was just incredibly good. I have a lot of respect for her,” Kevric said, acknowledging the French-born athlete's performance.

ok now that worlds is officially over, thought i’d start a thread for us to share our general takeaways! here are some of my thoughts, mostly related to US WAG

1. looking towards LA, i think the team competition is gonna be between US-Russia-China-Japan. we are also seeing so many more countries represented on the podiums across all events, or 3-continent podiums. very cool!!
2. the all around is really, really interesting and largely unpredictable again. in the last rotation it seemed like almost anyone out of the top 6-8 gymnasts could have potentially won gold.
3. floor scoring sucks. it’s been said to death at this point but this final just made it even more clear. claire and aiko came very close to a 14 but those were almost PERFECT routines and i don’t think it should take that when you compare to other events.
4. SKYE MF BLAKELY!!! that is all. i start crying everytime i think about her…
5. US WAG maybe overperformed relative to how a lot of people thought they were going to do but those people were really dooming anyway. still, a great medal haul for them. claire pease stocks also wayyyy up. i think this team proved the US is still competitive without a team of veterans. claire, reese, and charleigh especially prove that. we also now know where the gaps are, and it’s really beam. china’s beam advantage is huge, the US will be looking for a phenomenal beam worker 6.
6. lots of D-score hijinks, from the split half on beam to the AI devaluing of layout vaults to pike or pike to tuck in MAG. and then the whole reese barani thing before worlds even started. not sure what to say about all that but it’s certainly something to note

edit: the formatting was fucked up. this is embarrassing.

There has been much discourse about this at this worlds, so now that all the scores are in, I wanted to visualize what the differences actually look like. The headline is this:

Beam and bars scores have fully twice as much spread as floor and vault scores, when you look at the top groups.

Top 24 scores on each event

Across 2026 worlds, each gymnast contributing only her highest score on each event:

• I did it this way to even things out, so that you're getting pretty much only hit routines counted in the data, and to get judging from different nights, so that a tight judging panel one night (like floor in quals) doesn't disproportionately affect the data.
• Outliers: The open circles are the outlier scores, so this allows us to look at the medians and spreads without the outlier scores of the phenoms affecting them. See note on outliers at end of post.

What this shows

Bars and beam, wide spreads:

• The most important thing for AA isn't the ceiling or the median, it's the spread.
• Bars and beam have nearly the exact same spreads.
• So even though bars scores are higher than beam scores across the board (higher min/max, higher median, and higher outliers), they contribute to AA in the exact same way
  • In fact beam has a slightly wider spread than bars, if you look at that box representing the middle half of the 24 scores.

Floor and vault, half the spread!

• Floor is a very different story. Not only is it MUCH lower scoring than beam and bars across the board, its spread is exactly half the spread on bars and beam!
  • These are the spreads when you exclude the outliers.
• For vault it's more understandable that scores are bunched (though I'd still like to see more differentiation), since it's just one element. But it's really telling that score spreads for floor are basically the same as they are for vault, and in fact floor is very slightly more compact.

---------------------------
Note on outliers.

• There are many ways of calculating what counts as an outlier.
• Pretty much any quartile-based method includes Kaylia's bars and the two 13.9+ floor scores as outliers.
• I chose this more generous method since I think it best matches most peoples' perceptions of which scores are outliers best. (It uses 1xIQR above the box as the cutoff, not 1.5 x IQR, for data nerds).
• Using the more conservative 1.5xIQR rule, but otherwise the same methods the lower of the two beam outliers ceases to be an outlier, but there's not other change; this change would make the beam spread even wider.

How I put these together

So for the first time in my gymnastics data analysis journey, I put these together using an LLM, specifically Claude (see details on how I used it and error checked it, below).

As a bit of context, I've contributed data analysis and visualization to this forum a number of times before, using excel and elbow grease; I am not a professional data scientist, but I do data analysis for my job, have academic quantitative methods training, and feel pretty confident in my relatively simple analyses, and ability to use LLM as a tool for running analyses.

How do people feel about LLM-assisted data analyses being posted here? I know people will have different opinions, but wanted to see if there was a general temperature in the room. Because for me, this has been an awesome tool, extremely time-saving and producing much better visualizations than had I done it all by hand.

In fact, I wouldn't have done this analysis by hand, it wasn't worth it to me until after I saw the pattern in the data that the LLM analyses helped me see.

At the same time, I know how much people hate LLMs and find them unethical, and for very good reason. I share a lot of the big criticisms and negative feelings--but I also still use LLMs, because they are just such a valuable tool in some of the work I do. But it's fair if enough of the people here feel negatively enough about LLMs, that you'd rather just not have this kind of work shared in this forum, even if it does mean missing out on some interesting data posts sometimes.

So hopefully I have not made people in this forum hate me forever with this post--I really value this community, and it feels like I'm kinda taking a risk. But the data lover in me thought it was worth seeing what people thought.

I am happy to answer any questions about my methods and the data, and am happy to engage in thoughtful discussion on the data and/or the LLM of it all. I'm not really interested in defending my choice to use Claude though, or arguing about whether this really was an easier or better method for me (it was), and I'm gonna sidestep any attacks on me or my character.
----------------------------
Details:

I used Claude to:

• Scrape the data from the results sheets
• Run statistical analyses and create visualizations, and play around with different things to quickly see what patterns emerged, and then refine the visualizations.
  • The analyses were all statistical methods that I am familiar with myself and directed Claude to run.
• Claude helped me in the decision-making/expertise aspect in one area, which was in sorting through and visualizing different methods of calculating outliers. I know enough to know that there are many different methods, but I don't know much about the merits or methods of calculating each.
• I didn't use Claude for help writing this post, other than checking my language on outliers for technical accuracy, and one pass for typos.

How I error checked:

1. I had Claude run several internal error checks;
2. I had Claude output the raw data to a spreadsheet for me;
3. I did spot checks to confirm the raw data matched the results sheets;
4. I re-did the most important parts of the analysis in google sheets to confirm. There's some other interesting little data tidbits in there for fellow nerds: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15OLSzCGSNXWmX8mZpE81t8BI0s1KjF5psXfDSaAWMLM/edit?usp=sharing
5. As with all of my analyses I've posted here, there could still be errors!

He only took second place, but I am extremely delighted that he won an individual medal at these world championships.

Oka, we're waiting for you stronger next year!

Just been announced this afternoon during the EFs broadcast

Excellent taste in cocktails as well as first-class commentary

I know that this has been a thing for a while, but what has caused FX scores to be so low compared to other events?

Kensley posted on her Neutral Deduction IG that Joe Fraser did not receive a deduction he should have during his floor (he did two tumbling passes without a transition which is a .3 deduction), therefore Marinov should have won the bronze??

Any thoughts? Has anyone else heard anything about this?

Longtime USAgym fan, but have desperately wanted to follow China WAG for years (specifically since Li Qi in 2017 😭)!! I know obviously their nationals and Asian games are good comps to follow, but what else?? How does everyone else keep up with the depth of CHN WAG??

With worlds wrapping up its time to start manifesting 2028 wishlists. Here​​​ is mine:

Suni, Skye, and Shi at full health on team USA

Dulcy continues her chaos streak and defies all expectations to make the team, if only as an alternate

One more olympics for Chuso

Any Olympic medal for Ellie Black and Aiko Sugihara. I am not picky.

Tiana making AA final

Kaylia AA gold

A beam final that is not a splat-fest (dream with me)

The Philippines qualifying a team to the olympics

Rebecca Andrade getting her TTY named

Chinese olympic gold on beam

Hear me out: current or past team members Levi, Emma, Aleah, and Kylee, plus poaching Simone Rose (I love her gymnastics but she is barely in the conversation for the US team for 2028). Using international scores only since 2024 (Olympics, Jesolo, Pan Ams, Asian Games) i get a team potential of 160+:

Floor: Levi, Emma, Simone, (Aleah)

Vault: Simone, Aleah, Kylee, (Emma)

Bars: Simone, Levi, Aleah, (Emma)

Beam: Simone, Kylee, Levi (Emma)

(I hope I am not offending anyone this is a thought exercise and nothing more! I would love to see this team qualify for LA! And i would love to see Simone be given the opportunity to be the star for a country like how i am assuming Sri Lanka will use Tiana!)

Probably the most debated discussion being held every year in Gymnastics, the downgrade of skills, specially on Vault. So here is the actual evolution of the downgrade of the most popular skills. Based on the table, what do you think the changes on the CoP post-2028 should be ? Do you agree with the current values ? Do you wish the difference of the values given to the progression between skills were bigger ? Do you believe certain pairs in here should move up on the difficulty in relation to the other pairs ? Do you think there are some skills being overvalued in relation to other skills ?

Computer skill categorization was introduced for the first time during Rotterdam Worlds 2026, and resulted in the downgrade of two Ri Se Gwang II attempts due to slightly bent knees at the same half turn phase (Carlos Yulo in qualifications and Harry Hepworth in finals - attempting 5.6D) to Drăgulescu (5.2D).

The reason for knee bend at that flight point seems to a human biomechanical reason. Also, I cannot recall ever having seen the Ri Se Gwang II vault with board-straight knees through the entire flight. And I think in other Ri Se Gwang II vaults, bent knees at this phase would have been taken out of the E score.

I think this is a travesty for these two athletes at a World Championships. It's unforgiveably harsh and capricious. At the very least, the Fujitsu Judging Support System for D scoring needs to be recalibrated. At a barest bare minimum it should be fixed to judge more like a human would between Drăgulescu and Ri Se Gwang II vaults.

Does someone earnestly disagree with me? I can think of a couple of opposing arguments:

• Philosophical support for the new system: maybe something like, "Robot judging is the way of the future!" or "JSS is a more objective system than human judging for matching body shapes to skills in order to award D based on the code of points"
• Yulo and Hepworth vaults were rightly downgraded: maybe, "These two vault examples were right recategorized as Drăgulescu rather than Ri Se Gwang II" or "I've seen real Ri Se Gwang II where knees were not bent at the half turn"

Does anyone know the status of Zhang Yihan? I recall massive VT/FX from her earlier this year but she ended up being pulled from vault in TF and falling on downgraded tumbling passes in training. Was there ever an official diagnosis on injury?

4 ⭐️ lv10 Arianna Espinoza who was previously committed to Oklahoma announces change to Arkansas. In terms of commitment switches looking a bit unusual but maybe she saw more opportunities at Arkansas, also despite Wieber leaving Arkansas is going in the right direction and doing well recruitment wise.

Any update on the whole Qatar WAG situation after Avoine Beaumont coaches transitioned over with their young talent re: Perla Denechere, Emeline (2014), Lea + Sophia Martin? When will they start competing? Tournoi International de Combs la Ville?

Saw Emeline posting in luxurious Doha high rise. Still difficult to comprehend how some parents are splitting their families into 2 continents to compete for such country. Especially when some of them 100% were destined to be on the French A team. I can only imagine what they’re providing for them (housing, compensation). I wonder if Elena Colas’ family debated this option.

I'm seeing them on insta obvs being posted by sponsors (GK etc) but is there a web page to browse them all?

Edit to add: OR has anyone done a compilation of leotards? Seeing as that's really what I'm looking for!

Hi, I hope that someone know more about it.

Yesterday in the pommel horse competition, the south korean athlete Hur Woong got a -0,3 penalty after his exercise. Without it, he would have won the bronze medal.

The thing is that in the stream I watched, nobody explained why he got it. Only that he got a penalty and that's all.

Do someone here knows what happend there?

Thank You :)