Gymnastics World Championships: Team Finals

After two days of qualifications, the Team Final event of the gymnastics World Championships took place today in Nanning, China. The competition was intense, all eight teams showing their best effort to improve on their qualification score and trying to earn the best placing.

The United States of America was expected to win the team title and did so with great overall performances. The more experienced members of the team, Simone Biles and Kyla Ross, led the team delivering strong performances. World Champion Biles presented outstanding floor and vault performances and Ross showed great execution and class through out. For the other 4 members of the team, this competition was the first big international meet of their careers, but they didn’t let it show and helped secure USA’s top spot finish. A lot is still to come from the USA, as Biles is expected to dominate this year’s World Championships after qualifying with the top score to four of the five individual event finals.

Despite some errors on bars and floor, China managed to get the silver medal in front of their home crowd. Traditionally, China is beautiful to watch on beam and today’s final was no exception, Shang delivering one of the strongest and most confident beam routines of the day. China qualified the maximum number of gymnasts allowed to both uneven bars and balance beam finals, where, if things go as planned, they are expected to medal.

The battle for the bronze medal was captivating, with the Russian Federation, Romania and Italy, all aiming for a third place finish. In the end it was Russia that came out triumphant and made it onto the podium. Led by Olympic Champion Aliya Mustafina, who performed beautifully on all for events, the Russian team outscored Romania by half of a point. Besides Mustafina, Daria Spiridonova also showed a beautiful combination of grace and difficulty on the team’s best event, uneven bars.

Left out of the podium, Romania had to settle with a fourth place finish. Despite coming only 0.499 short of the bronze medal, the Romanian team’s overall performance was much improved from what they showed in qualifications, where they ended in 7th place. One of the reasons for missing the podium is the fact that Romania brought a young, inexperienced team to this year’s World Championships, Larisa Iordache and Stefania Stanila being the only members of the team to have attended such a big competition before. Iordache was the leader of the team, hitting strong performances on every event, ending the competition for Romania with a massive score on balance beam. Also the team’s low uneven bars difficulty played a part in the team’s score.

The highlight of the Italian team was their floor exercise rotation, where veteran Vanessa Ferrari and Erika Fasana showed top scoring routines. The team achieved the goal they settled for themselves coming into this competition by finishing in the fifth place. Both Fasana and Ferrari have qualified to the floor final, where they have a chance at a medal.

Great Britain ended their competition in sixth spot, despite qualifying in fourth. It looked like emotions took the best of them as they are capable of better performances than the ones showed today. The team has qualified gymnasts into 4 of the 5 individual finals, uneven bars and floor being the events where they have the best shots for medals. The top 8 at this year’s team finals was completed by Australia and Japan, in seventh and eighth place respectively.