Then there's gymnastics. After the scores are announced and the competition is over, most of the athletes are left in limbo. Gymnastics is a subjective sport, subjective decisions. They go to private rooms and wait to hear if they made the U.S. team.
Competition is fierce again this year, especially for the final spots, and tension will be high in Minneapolis on Sunday night when an opaque process decides which gymnasts will represent the United States at the Paris Olympics.
For the past 20 years, the selection process has followed a similar pattern: The top athlete in the overall standings (or in some years the top two) earns an Olympic berth, and the rest of the team is chosen by a committee according to broad, vague criteria.
Previous administrations have taken different approaches – Marta Karolyi at the 2004-2016 Olympics and Tom Forster at the Tokyo Olympics – and there will be new leadership at the Paris Olympics, but it's unclear how the committee will select the five gymnasts who will represent Italy this summer.
One method prioritizes overall ranking in the selection board, the other prioritizes players with complementary strengths that maximize team score, and both approaches tend not to result in the same five players being selected.
Karolyi created a roster that emphasized team scores over overall rankings. Because three athletes perform on each apparatus in the team final, athletes do not need to be strong on all events to be valuable. For example, Madison Kocian, who placed eighth overall at the 2016 Trials but excelled on balance beam, and McKayla Maroney, who placed seventh overall but was the nation's best vaulter in 2012, both qualified for the Olympics. Both U.S. teams won gold medals, and Kocian and Maroney won individual silver medals in their respective strengths. Compared to the Tokyo Olympics, where teams were limited to four members, Karolyi's team had five, giving athletes a little more leeway to excel on one apparatus.
Forster, who became high performance coordinator in 2018, was part of the three-person committee that decided on selecting the top four all-around finishers for the 2021 Olympic team.
“I wanted to rank them as much as possible, and this is just my personal preference,” Forster said of the overall rankings. “That just seemed the fairest to me.”
A slightly different player combination might have resulted in the team's scoring ability being slightly better, but Forster said at the time, “I didn't think it was worth changing the integrity of the game for a fraction of a percent.”
Those hypothetical team scores needed to differ by about one point to fall out of the overall standings, Forster said in an interview this week.
No U.S. Olympic women's gymnastics team in recent history had a result so close to its qualifying result.
Since 1996, Olympic teams have not been selected on all-around performance alone, which usually ensures that all athletes have well-rounded skills and the potential to compete on any apparatus if needed. Tokyo was played with four-person teams, so all athletes competed on each apparatus in the qualification rounds and only one athlete per event was absent from the team final, making all-around ability even more important than usual. With a five-person team, Forster said the approach might have been different.
Grace McCallum earned the final spot on the team by placing fourth in the preliminary round, but Mikayla Skinner, who excels on the vault and could have given the team a little more steam, earned a spot in Tokyo to compete as an individual rather than as a team member.
Explaining the selection, Forster noted his team's wide victories at the 2018 and 2019 world championships, saying: “We are fortunate to have such a strong team that I don't think Tokyo will be decided by tenths of a second.”
But the Russian Olympic Committee took a lead of more than one point in the qualifying rounds after a shaky performance by the U.S. team. Forster said the team's low execution score came as a surprise. In a chaotic team final, Simone Biles' failed vault and not competing on any other apparatus helped Russia win the gold medal by a larger margin.
The team with the highest expected scores may have more room for error, but a team with additional options on each apparatus may be considered a safer choice, especially considering scenarios such as last-minute injuries. It is reasonable to consider such cases, especially when the difference in scores between several gymnasts is negligible.
In 2016, the team's points could have been maximized by selecting Kocian and Ashton Locklear, another standout on the bars, but having two athletes contribute on only one apparatus would have been risky. Karolyi selected Kocian, who outscored Locklear on the bars at the trials, and added 2012 Olympic all-around champion Gabby Douglas to the team.
Douglas fell on the balance beam both nights of the trials, placing her seventh in the all-around. Despite the mistakes, her simulated team final score was just slightly higher than Skinner, who placed fourth. Karolyi said at the time that she expected Douglas to perform better during pre-Olympic training camp, and she was right: in the Olympic qualifying rounds, Douglas scored more than a point higher than she had at nationals and the trials.
This summer, especially with Russia out, the U.S. is expected to win the team final by a large margin. The five-person combination will likely be strong enough to win the gold medal. But because these decisions have life-changing ramifications, this strategy begs the question: What if the gymnast who finished seventh had the strength to maximize the team score? Deserves It doesn't matter whether you finish higher or lower than the fifth-place finisher for an Olympic spot. The vagueness of the selection process only emphasizes the importance of the selection committee explaining the reasons for their choices.
Chelsea Memmel, technical lead for the High Performance staff, recently said that the team finals are “our number one priority,” referring to the format of only three skaters performing on each apparatus. Memmel is not a member of the selection committee, but another member of the High Performance staff, Alicia Sacramone Quinn, is one of three members. (Quinn's opinions on the committee reflect both her own perspective and Memmel's.) Quinn qualified for the Olympics in 2008 after excelling on vault, balance beam, and floor, but not on balance beam. If the team had been selected based solely on overall ranking, she would not have been an Olympian.
The recent World Championships provide insight into how the Paris team will be selected: the top five overall finishers at the 2022 and 2023 selection camps will be chosen, but Quinn said that's by chance and not indicative of a preferred method.
“It's always a puzzle, that's how we talk about it,” Quinn said. “It's a combination of our best all-around player and our best event finalist. It just happened to be that way, and there are other things we consider in between.”
Tokyo individual all-around champion Sunisa Li had impressive results on balance beam and balance beam, but the U.S. team will not use her vault or floor exercise results in the team final. Li, who placed fourth in the individual all-around at U.S. Championships, has continued to improve this season. But if the individual all-around performance is given weight, a gymnast could make a mistake in an event she may not compete in in Paris, hurting her Olympic chances.
When asked if he thought Li needed to finish in the top five to qualify for the Olympics, Li's coach, Jess Graba, replied, “I don't know. It's tough. I think, realistically, our goal would be to finish in the top five all-around and top three on balance beam and balance pole.” Those kinds of results would likely keep Li on the national team regardless of how the athletes are selected.
Competition for the final spots could be fierce: The selection process leaves committee members free to choose their approach, and how they reach their decisions likely won't be clear until the Paris competitors celebrate in the arena after their names are announced.
