MINNEAPOLIS — One of the many things that make seven-time Olympic medalist and 2016 Olympic all-around champion Simone Biles so great is the incredible difficulty of the skills she performs.
Watch the broadcasts of the U.S. Olympic Trials for gymnastics happening at Target Center in Minneapolis this weekend, and it should be obvious even to the casual observer.
Her speed, strength and mental acuity, along with superior technique, make it possible for her to do the skills and do them very well, giving her higher difficulty marks than many others.
But she’s far from alone in pushing that envelope.
Robin Huebner at the U.S. Olympic Trials
Gymnasts in the Elite ranks do harder skills every year, and that rise has been exponential since I competed in the 1976 Olympic Trials in Los Angeles at the age of 14.
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Some of this rapid ascent is due to better coaching and better tools to learn skills, such as foam pits and rod floors that save wear and tear on joints.
Specific drills allow a gymnast to break a skill down into multiple parts, learning each part properly before doing the whole thing for the very first time.
Growing up in Dickinson, North Dakota, our gym didn’t have a foam pit.
Trying to learn a double back, for instance, required two coaches standing on either side of the gymnast and “chucking” them around.
In addition, competitive gymnastics equipment itself has evolved dramatically, becoming safer, springier and generally better for the athlete.
Back in the day, competing on vault meant going over a smooth, kind of slippery leather-covered rectangular “horse.”
Today’s vault is a padded “table” with a much wider surface area, covered with a textured material.
This has allowed many more gymnasts to perform the Yurchenko entry to the vault, which is a roundoff onto the springboard, back handspring onto the table, with flips, twists or both afterward.
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Biles can do a double pike Yurchenko, flipping twice when others flip once. She's the only woman to do it, and the vault will be named after her if she performs it successfully at the Olympics.
A safety-zone mat that surrounds the springboard is required for that Yurchenko style of entry and gives an extra measure of safety.
The uneven bars in my day were situated much more closely together, with the supports held to the floor by sandbags or weights.
On wrap-around skills, the base of the bars had a tendency to lift up, which was scary.
In those instances, teammates would sit on the weights to help out.
The bars themselves were a strange oval shape; they gradually became rounder and smaller, and easier to hang onto.
Wearing grips with wooden dowels, like most gymnasts do today, also keeps them more secure while circling around the bar.
Also, the bars are now situated much farther apart, allowing for big swings and release moves between them, and are attached by cables to the floor.
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The balance beam, too, has changed. When I first started gymnastics, my dad built me a wooden beam for the backyard, and its edges were quite sharp.
The manufactured beams we used in the gym were obviously better but still made of wood and painful if you came down on them awkwardly.
We wore special socks on our feet and ground them into a wooden box with rosin for a good sticky feel.
Today’s beams are padded and covered in a material that’s a whole lot more comfortable than wood.
It still is only four inches wide, though, and that will probably never change.
As for floor exercise (my favorite), wrestling mats were what we tumbled and danced on first, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t get wiped down after the wrestlers used them.
Eventually, there was a floor system manufactured with vinyl covering, which wasn’t great.
At international meets, we used a floor that was essentially plywood sheets covered with a thin layer of carpet, like in the photo below.
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It had a small amount of “oomph” to it, but was a far cry from the springy floors of today, which are layered with metal springs, plywood, styrofoam and carpet.
All of these factors have come together to keep gymnasts safer, but also allow for increased difficulty, which is inherently riskier and more dangerous.
Here’s wishing all of the athletes a safe and successful competition at Target Center as they vie for a spot to represent the U.S. at the Olympic Games in Paris later this summer!
