Simone Biles of the United States competes on the balance beam during the Artistic Gymnastics Women’s Team Final at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, July 30. criticism writing. [James Hill/The New York Times]
Women’s artistic gymnastics may be one of the few Olympic events to feature music and choreography, but that doesn’t mean the sport takes them seriously. In 2016, in the middle of the Rio Games, the special publication Dance Magazine announced that today’s floor routines are “offensive dance.”
Gymnastics, this line of thinking goes, has distanced itself from its artistic roots by emphasizing acrobatic difficulty, with choreography now merely a generic filler between the actual fireworks.
As a dance critic and athletics fan, I was hoping to feel different last week as I headed to Bercy Arena, the Olympic stage for the sport in Paris. After all, athletics officials have made efforts since 2016 to re-prioritize art in the sport’s official rulebook, with “poor meaningful participation” and “insufficient complexity or creativity of movements” among the assignments that judges can now undertake.
To some extent, it has helped: Some gymnasts, and national teams, are taking advantage and thinking clearly about the overall effect of their floor exercises. But at Bercy Arena, dancing still felt like an afterthought – and the format of a complete competition prevents further progress.
While TV viewers are usually shown one practice at a time, live athletic competitions are chaotic. Different athletes go on several machines at the same time; in the final of the women’s team like the one won by the USA last Tuesday, the eye of the live viewer must be climbing between the main rivals. Do you want to see the fast Brazilian team on the floor? Good luck after full practice when Simone Biles or the Chinese star Qiu Qiyuan are on beam.
It doesn’t make for a good look at sports in general – no matter what you do, you’re bound to miss important moments – but for choreography, it’s a death knell. Because the dance elements are only a small part of the scores, your attention is often drawn away as soon as an incidental pass is over. The cheers and gasps of the audience regularly drown out parts of the music. (Around me in the cheaper Bercy seats, there was also a lot of scrolling and texting between gymnasiums.)
It would help a lot if the organizers would just stop practices in a deliberate way. NCAA athletics started doing that last season in the US, with more than two events going on at the same time. At the Olympics, only the floor final, on Monday, gives gymnasts the opportunity to give the audience the full attention of their routines.
Athletic choreography is perhaps best understood as designed for TV. Close-ups help highlight what the gymnasts and dancers were up to: Even for the most experienced performers, throwing out 15,000 is a tall order a person sitting in the circle.
But the filming experience is also very successful: Some dance events never make it to the TV broadcast, which only shows a few practices in the team finals and around. Dancers and scores go without credit. And the edit isn’t necessarily tied to a specific performance: When I went back to watch Biles twist and turn her way to the women’s team title, I found that pieces of her choreography – by Grégory Milan, who was a French ballet dancer – was shot. until Biles brought her back to the camera, losing her face.
Despite the problems, some gymnasts are still putting on very personal shows.
Italian gymnast Manila Esposito, for example, is a dancer’s dream, with her flawless width and toe. Jordan Chiles, an experienced American gymnast who has put on a show at the NCAA level in recent years, attacks her practice inspired by Beyoncé with decisive, musical expressions.
Both will appear in Monday’s final, as will Brazilian star Rebeca Andrade, a confident dancer whose routines honor her favela roots. It is clear that Brazil, who won the team bronze medals, value dance as a high-energy performance, and they have won hearts in Paris for their performance. Flavia Saraiva’s tribute to the cancan may not be subtle here – many athletes went for French music for the Games, with mixed results – but her clear, spicy way of expressing steps Bercy Arena hit him every time she appeared on the floor.
There is an ongoing trend towards Brazilian customs, and a sense of personal style, which few sports have. Again and again, as other competitors approached the corners of the floor to prepare for a dive pass, they suddenly shifted gears, tensing up and leaving the quality of movement behind.
The Points Code, an athletics rulebook, prescribes deductions for such problems, albeit small ones (up to 0.30 point for “poor meaningful participation in the style of the music,” for example). These can add up, but the audience does not know how art was evaluated. Only the overall execution score, out of 10, is stated, and combined with the standard’s difficulty score.
There is a template in the sport for an increased emphasis on performance quality: US collegiate athletics has in recent years capitalized on a lively, hit-ready choreography to grow the sport’s audience. . But even for NCAA gymnasts like Chiles who also compete at the Olympics, the issue is that elite routines require much harder elements, and often more complicated passes. The duration of the floor routines does not change accordingly: one minute and 30 seconds is still all they have to dance on the ground and take to the air.
If athletics really values art and wants the audience to focus on it, there are options, from limiting dunk passes to allowing longer practices, or awarding ethics bonuses to top performers. That would involve thinking of each floor as a small choreography: an organic whole that deserves to be enjoyed by every audience, live or on TV.
This article first appeared in The New York Times.
