Bronze happiness of Nagorny and Biles: how the artistic gymnastics tournament ended at the Tokyo Games

The final day of the artistic gymnastics tournament simply had to pass under the sign of Simone Biles.

The four-time Olympic champion spun the intrigue of the competition to the limit without withdrawing from the last final - on a balance beam.

It was possible to safely process this plot into a script without inventing or adding anything, and a full house is guaranteed!

For the happy ending, one thing was required: for Simone to win.

On the balance beam, the American won three times and took bronze medals at the world championships twice, and also finished third at the Games in Rio behind the Dutch Sane Vevers and compatriot Lori Hernandez, having reduced the difficulty of her program by 0.2 compared to qualification.

But in qualifying for the current competition, Biles qualified only with a seventh result.

One could only guess to what extent she could get nervous in her only Olympic final, having missed the entire personal tournament.

Why did the gymnast leave exactly the beam, which from time immemorial has been considered the most difficult and insidious apparatus?

In my opinion, Biles did this for a completely obvious reason: unlike the other three types, this projectile does not require elements from the athlete, where somersaults would be combined with a large number of screws.

That is, the possibility of “getting lost” in the air (and this is what happened with the four-time Olympic champion in the vault of the team tournament) has been reduced not even to a minimum, but to zero.

Simone performed more than soundly, but without brilliance. In itself, the return of the American woman to the platform was, of course, a strong step, deserving, if not admiration, then great respect. But the quality of the combination of the strongest gymnast in the world was not comparable to how the Chinese women Sijin Tang and Guan Chenchen performed in this final. And in terms of the difficulty coefficient, Biles lost to three girls at once: very tiny Guan (she demonstrated a program of prohibitive complexity with a base of 6.9), compatriot Sinisha Lee and Canadian Elizabeth Black.

In total, Simona lost to the winner a very solid value by gymnastic standards - 0.633 points.

This is not yesterday's equality between Denis Ablyazin and Shin Ji-hwan in the vault competition, and not even two dozen lagging behind Angelina Melnikova from Jade Carey, who became the champion in floor exercise.

In short, if we go back to cinematic comparisons, the ending of the script would definitely be worth rewriting.

The Russian athletes were not very lucky that day: David Belyavsky remained fifth on the uneven bars, the only finalist of the team on the same beam, Vladislav Urazov, showed only the eighth result, and it was not too much faith that Nikita Nagorny would get to the podium: in qualification he had the crossbar has the fifth total of points and not too high (in comparison with the opponents) basic difficulty.

Before the start of the final tournament at the Games, the Russian himself assessed his own chances on this shell not too optimistically.

Perhaps it was a purely emotional reaction - the gymnast did not succeed in performing on the crossbar in the all-around, and this was one of the reasons why the absolute world champion did not reach personal Olympic gold.

But the final ending is always the most severe stress and, as a result, unpredictable layouts.

This happened in Tokyo as well.

The final was opened by the fall of the Kazakh gymnast Milad Karimi, who showed the second result in the qualification, and after a very clean execution of his combination, the Japanese Takeru Kitazono fell from the shell twice.

Australian Tyson Bull followed him onto the mats.

So by the middle of the final stream, Nagorny continued to hold the lead with a decent margin.

Another question is that the hope for a medal still remained illusory. With the base combination cost of 6.0, Nikita was deliberately inferior in 0.5 to the absolute Olympic champion Daiki Hashimoto and the 2017 world champion from Croatia Tin Srbic. Both worked without mistakes and quite rightly bypassed the Russian. But to his bronze happiness, Dutchman Bart Teurlo, who completed the program, also failed to cope with his nerves.