Athens 2004 Gymnastics Animations

[DJC]

I found these while searching for some results on the Athens 2004 Website (http://www.athens2004.com)
They are some quite clever and amusing flash animations describing gymnastics and it's disciplines.

Artistic Gymnastics (http://www.athens2004.com/infographic/en/GA.html) (Includes seperate sections for Men's and Women's)
Rhythmic Gymnastics (http://www.athens2004.com/infographic/en/GR.html)
'Trampoline Gymnastics' (http://www.athens2004.com/infographic/en/GT.html) :p

There are playback controls including pause, which helps sometimes, as it's not overly easy to watch the animation and read at the same time.

[Gingerheid]

Trampoline Gymnastics looks a lot like trampolining, but some of the other things within it seem to have different names from their trampolining equivalents too!
Group, Spread and Rigid Saltos are quite like tuck, pike and straight fronts!

Sorry - shouldn't be nasty! They are lovely animations, and it's the first time I've ever made the effort to understand what Rythmic is!

Some of the rule changes in Artistic seem a bit unfair though. Surely qualification for the finals should be purely on merit?

[DJC]

Yes I noticed some strange terms for trampolining elements. I think it's because they were Greek animations translated into French and English. Some of the artistic competition format changes are a bit harsh, like for the teams, 6-3-3 (6 in a team, 3 up, 3 to count), which leaves no room for error.

[Gingerheid]

Greek translated into English using Greek - Polish, Polish - Estonian, Estonian to Chinese and Chinese to English dictionaries? :D

Three up, three to count is harsh, and I couldn't see the reason for it. I could only think that it was to discourage risk-taking.

But not putting the best people into each next round is just unfair, and means that one of the medals could go to the wrong person.

In theory, it's possible (with four members per team finishing together in the placings) that the person taking the 8th qualifying place could have finished 14th in qualifying. And presuming the performers were consistant over the two rounds, the bronze medal could go to the 5th best performer.

Presumeably the reason is to stop one country taking all three medals (or there only being two countries respresented in the final), but if one countries' performers are the best, then why shouldn't they have them?

[DJC]

I agree, the top 8 performers should be in the apparatus final, and no-one else. Whereas the format for 3 up, 3 to count is new this year, the format for apparatus finals has been like that for a while I think.