2020, uh, 21, uh, who knows Tokyo Olympics thread

Watching 3x3 basketball this morning and congrats to the women's team winning the gold. But how does the US men's team not even qualify for the Olympics?

You're telling me there aren't four guys on just about any urban playground court who can ball better than what I'm seeing from the Russians and Latvians? Eight beefy white guys playing for the gold medal.

I don't know what the USOC set as their standards, but they did a crappy job of scouting and selection. Maybe Al Avila and Dave Littlefield were involved.

 

The cute-sounding term, well-known in the gymnastics community, describes a frightening predicament. When gymnasts have the “twisties,” they lose control of their bodies as they spin through the air. Sometimes they twist when they hadn’t planned to. Other times they stop midway through, as Biles did. And after experiencing the twisties once, it’s very difficult to forget. Instinct gets replaced by thought. Thought quickly leads to worry. Worry is difficult to escape.

The cute-sounding term, well-known in the gymnastics community, describes a frightening predicament. When gymnasts have the “twisties,” they lose control of their bodies as they spin through the air. Sometimes they twist when they hadn’t planned to. Other times they stop midway through, as Biles did. And after experiencing the twisties once, it’s very difficult to forget. Instinct gets replaced by thought. Thought quickly leads to worry. Worry is difficult to escape.

The twisties are essentially like the yips in other sports. But in gymnastics, the phenomenon affects the athletes when they’re in the air, so the mind-body disconnect can be dangerous, even for someone of Biles’s caliber.

After Tuesday’s team final, Biles described mental health challenges that went well beyond gymnastics, with roots in the overwhelming pressure to perform as one of the faces of these Olympics and in the stresses of the pandemic year. Her experience with the twisties is impossible to separate from those broader issues, and regardless, it’s irrelevant to the dangers posed by them.

Biles had started to have trouble with some skills leading up to these Games. Fellow Olympic team member Jordan Chiles, who trains with Biles in Spring, Tex., said Biles had been “giving us a little heart attack.”

Biles performs some of the world’s hardest skills, including a double-twisting double tuck dismount off beam and a triple-twisting double tuck on floor. To execute those elements safely, Biles said, “you have to be there 100 percent or 120 percent, because if you’re not the slightest bit, you can get hurt.” As a 24-year-old veteran, Biles realized she might not have been able to regain that mental fortitude.

When Biles mentioned that she had struggled with the twisties, former gymnasts flooded social media with empathy. Some detailed injuries they suffered after getting lost midway through a skill. One person called the twisties the “the scariest, most uncontrollable sensation.”

“It’s like a nonserious stroke,” 1988 Olympian Missy Marlowe tweeted.

Ariana Guerra, a former U.S. elite gymnast, dealt with the twisties multiple times during her career. At one point, she trained a double layout on floor and that same skill with a full twist during the second flip. She needed to warm up the double layout first and would worry that she would twist accidentally. The trouble spiraled, and soon, she couldn’t perform a simple back tuck without twisting. She worried about how the twisties could spread to skills on other apparatuses.

Guerra would go to the trampoline and tell herself: “Just a back handspring. Just a back handspring.” At the last second, she’d pick up her hands so they didn’t touch the ground. That was the only route toward performing a flip without her body adding an unintentional twist. After practice, she would do backward rolls — a skill that preschoolers learn — in hopes of regaining that feeling of only rotating without spinning.

“That's how mental it was,” Guerra said.

It took about two weeks to overcome, Guerra said, and she was in the midst of her preparation for an important competition. She thinks the twisties are more likely to surface during moments of stress.
​

https://www.washingtonpost.com/spor...sties-gymnastics-simone-biles-tokyo-olympics/

 

So Simone got the yips?

 

Overweight grown ass men criticizing one of the greatest athletes of this generation. Hilarious.

 

Based on the replays from the US qualifying, that's exactly what it looked like to me.

 

TBT is 5 on 5, but it pays out good money (ESPN hosts it) and siphons away its share of players who'd be good in a 3 on 3 setting.

 

Waiting for a through explainer from NBC, like they did with exploding pickup trucks...

 

The best part of TBT is Brian Scallabrine cracking on his own team’s performances during his XM show.

edit: I guess that’s the Big 3 or whatever it’s called, not TBT.

 

Not even her teammates?

I feel bad for her. I genuinely do. She should do what is best for her mental health, but in doing so, she let down her entire team.

I don’t understand the pressure she faced, nor will I ever. I’m curious about how it was different this time than in past games and what it was about this year that made her break.

 

There's that and there's TBT, which is 5-on-5.

Again: Good money to be made. And it's good basketball played by men who know how to play basketball, often guys who played overseas, or even in the NBA.

 

As her teammate I would try to be empathetic but I’m sure I would be pissed as well.

 

In the abstract I agree. I mean, I agree if it’s me.

I’m not sure how they feel. Biles has not been right for awhile, and the sport is such a high-wire act that 100% confidence is a big part of performance. I think she’s been giving off “I don’t want to do this” vibes for months - absolutely at the trials - and that trickles down. the only thing she could have done differently is walk away entirely.

Watching the whole event last night I think you can argue Chiles had to juice her adrenaline much earlier than she expected, expending all of that mental energy on bars and beam, and, when she reached the floor, she made huge errors because she’d emptied the tank way faster than she’d expected. If she hits that floor routine there’s no way of knowing how the Russians respond. and if she had a night to think about doing everything, it might have been different.