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nebroadwe(Read about Day One here ...)
Today began with an interesting discovery about the lock/unlock widget I received with my rental car keys: if you lock the car with it and then unlock the car manually when the widget's battery fails, the car begins to honk at you. It honks even louder when you open the door, and continues to make a nuisance of itself until you get the key into the ignition. Which is embarrassing. Sadly, the office from which I acquired car and widget claimed it could do nothing for me, unless I wanted to travel to one of their other locations and switch vehicles ... I declined, being on a tight schedule, and headed for the off-site parking lot, trusting that no one would want to steal a cobalt Cobalt when they could get something else.
Arriving at the venue's subway stop, I noticed an amusing floor ad at the foot of the escalators: a pair of enormous white footprints on a blue field surmounted by the legend, "You've made it -- now stick the landing." I trotted past the scalpers, both buying -- "Got'ny extra tickits?" -- and selling -- "Need'ny tickits?" -- the latter further away from the transit station's security folk. Scalping is illegal here. They weren't getting much work, as far as I could tell; the event wasn't at all sold out, even at the lower levels, and tickets to the cheap seats were plentiful. Which is not to say that the trials didn't pull a good crowd. Today's was larger than yesterday's, the women being more of a draw than the men for tween girls and their parents. Lots of gymnastic clubs in matching T-shirts ("There is no charge for the awesomeness of [Club Name]!" read one back, and another, "Coach's fee: $300; [Numerous other equipment fees and dollar amounts]; Being a member of Team [Name]: PRICELESS!" -- MasterCard has a lot to answer for); occupied groups of seats; held up "GO SHAWN" and "CHELSEA ROCKS!" signs; squealed, "We love you, Blaine!" in treble chorus for radio commentator Blaine Wilson; and mobbed the souvenir stands, food counters and the outdoor Fan Fest. I never got 'round to investigating that last, being more interested in watching the athletes warm up (see below), but I did stand in line at the least-mobbed booth to buy a commemorative pin for my collection. It took less time than I'd anticipated, because soon after I took my place, the salesfolk announced that they were sold out of all youth clothing (except hats) and all smalls and mediums in adult clothing (except hats. Nobody seemed to want a hat -- they all wanted T-shirts and sweatshirts and warm-up jackets.). Then I headed in to the arena.
My seat was slightly less awesome today, but only slightly. I had a great view of the balance beam, off to the side of one end, but that was the only apparatus which was truly front and center of my location. I retained a good view of floor (when the boom camera didn't swing down and obscure it), but the uneven bars (my current favorite of the women's apparatus) and vault were very far away again. The vault landing area remained pointed away from me, but the high bar, and therefore everyone's dismount, was aimed in my direction. I shouldn't quibble, really, since I was actually there and seeing everything, and I've never been much for vault. In any event, I improved my quality of life by bringing a flat cushion to cradle my fundament for the three-plus hours of sitting with occasional breaks to stretch. (Forget about hitting the food court or the rest room once competition started if you didn't want to miss something-- there was hardly time between rotations to get in line.) I actually spent more like four hours in my seat -- I found it worth arriving early to catch the athletes warming up. The coaches all talk with their hands and bodies as well as their lips, miming positions and punching, slapping and stabbing the air for emphasis. Every vaulter gets a quick change of springboard and approach mat; some get different landing mats, too. Chalk flies everywhere (at one point on day three the men's parallel bars routines raised gentle clouds of dust with each swing-through; afterward I saw coaches sweeping the mats with their hands). On the uneven bars, gymnasts dropping momentum after practicing a series of giants or pirouettes look uncharacteristically ungainly, splaying out their legs and bending their knees for a rotation or two before jumping down. Fascinating.
Today's competition opened with another junior national rhythmic gymnastics team member all a-sparkle performing with her hoop. She demonstrated lovely flexibility, but lost control of her apparatus once and finished just slightly behind her music. Nevertheless, she was vigorously applauded as the lights dimmed and the spots flashed and movie music played through the speakers for the introduction of the gymnasts with suitable cheering and dramatic hoopla. It took me a day to identify the tune as one of the main themes from Shrek, of all things (the variant played over the dragon-flight near the end) -- does anybody but me think about original context at times like this? Then the national anthem was duly murdered by a local former American Idol contestant. Other people may favor a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning -- I'd cheerfully march in support of one that prohibited the public vocal performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" by anything smaller than a quartet. Eugh.
The women's field was much larger than the men's (19 to 13) and the meet moved much more slowly with more and longer pauses between routines. It must have been terrible on the nerves: I watched competitor after competitor step to the podium and then wait, pacing or standing in place shaking out her arms and legs. Other athletes sat or stood in the well, stretching or mentally running their routines (you could tell from the truncated arm movements and little skip-hops). Each rotation was divided into two halves, with a break between in which the competitors warmed up and the audience was encouraged, again, to cheer for their sponsoring club or to wave their signs and dance and perhaps make it onto the big screen. One gent my age or older had his moment of fame doing the "carriage return" and got a whack from his wife for showing off. The video feed seemed to have some teething troubles this evening; early views didn't center the athletes properly, so you kept losing track of their feet, which is annoying (feet are important). But matters improved as night went on. The traveling camera guys were sometimes hard pressed to get from one end of the arena to the other, when a bars routine was succeeded immediately by one on beam, say. They'd come charging along the side of the floor podium, each cameraman with an attendant cable wrangler to prevent tangles and accidents. (Imagine someone knocked out of competition because they got boa-constrictored by a camera cable! That would get ugly quite quickly ...)
Given their respective performances over the past year, there was no question that Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin would be dueling it out for the top two spots and their automatic admission to the Olympic team. Liukin began her night on vault, receiving a respectable 15 from the judges and an admiring "Look at that stretch!" comment from behind me. She then moved on to the kind of uneven bars routine that blows you out of the water -- it has a mammoth difficulty rating, so that even when she muffs an element (like her dismount this evening), she scores higher than anyone else. She has wonderful extension and can pirouette above the high bar like nobody's business, which is one of the popular point-scoring moves among both the men and the women this year. Liukin is also the only beam competitor I saw who could really pull off another of this year's popular moves, a forward no-handed somersault-in-the-air into a swan position (one foot planted, the other extended behind, with arms out to the sides). Most swans are wobbly and tense-looking (Bridget Sloan, despite a lovely display of flexibility and line otherwise, was guilty of this), but Liukin's actually manages to look natural most of the time. She laid down an emphatic floor routine, getting enormous spring into the final move of her second pass, and was one of the most dancer-like of the competitors -- though I prefer a more "gymnastic" style, myself (they could take the music out and have the women just tumble, as the men do, and I'd be perfectly happy). Liukin finished only half a point out of first place.
Johnson couldn't touch Liukin on bars, but had a wonderful night (16.25) on beam -- I refrained from writing "no balance checks" till it was over, but did write, "Gorgeous first pass -- lots of spring and good command." The audience watched her work intently, with louder spatters of applause for the individual elements than most other gymnasts received and great enthusiasm for her dismount. The popular athlete, of course, gets more encouragement than the person who's still on the second or third tier (I noted that no one seemed to know who Shayla Worley was when she took to the bars, she received such light clapping -- but then her cheering section kicked in and she gained more notice as the night went on). Johnson's music for the floor exercise was mixed guitar-and-percussion with the kind of central brass section a friend of mine likes to call "an homage to the Prague traffic circle" (it's very popular with mid-twentieth-century Czech composers, for some reason) -- an odd choice, I thought, but her tumbling was great fun to watch. She only had one small sidestep out of one of her middle passes which came down blind, and broke 16 on the routine, for the best floor score of the night. Johnson gave herself an encouraging "Come on!" before starting her run to the vaulting table -- it must have worked, because her score placed her first on that apparatus, too, to finish the evening on top of the leader board.
I had an eye throughout on Chellsie Memmel, returning from a year lost to injury, because she looked so strong at nationals. She began on the bars -- her cheering section across the way hollered and clapped for every skill, and deservedly so, because her execution was dead on. She was also very steady on beam. I tend to notice trends in balance beam skills more readily than those on other apparatus; it began with that period way back in the '90s somewhere when everyone was doing low work, borrowing pommel-horse-style flair from the men. Now you hardly see anyone drop down for an appreciable period in their routine; it's all about leaps and pirouettes -- and, if you're intending to get anywhere near the medals, you add a 180- or 360-degree twist to one of your flips, as Memmel did to great effect. On floor, unfortunately, she angled one of her passes wrong and stepped out, but stuck her dismount and received a quick "Good job!" from her coach on leaving the podium. To finish up she landed an exclamation mark of a vault; her coach looked as pleased as if he had done it himself, but a low degree of difficulty kept her below 15 for the total mark. She had placed first after two rotations, but her lower scores on floor and vault dropped her back to third on the night. Still, a third behind Johnson and Liukin is nothing to sneeze at, particularly when an Olympic berth is in the offing.
I was also watching Jana Bieger make her return from ankle troubles (I love a good comeback story). She placed sixth overall with solid but not standout work. Her vault was creditable, with only a small forward hop on landing, and her uneven bars routine well-performed. Her opening move on the beam, a handstand with bent legs and lowered chest to demonstrate grace and strength together, got a call of "Beautiful!" from the stands, but I thought that young Chelsea Davis's was prettier. She got nice height in her leaps, however, and ran straight to the end of the beam to throw a multiply-rotating somersault of a dismount, earning the evening's second-best score on that apparatus. Bieger finished on the floor, pounding into her initial passes with such energy that she couldn't stick her landings and bounced out twice for .3 in deductions. I noted that she visibly dialed it back for her final pass and had much better control; her coach gave her an encouraging double cheek tap as she headed for her chair.
Local product Darling Hill was never really in the mix, but she had lots of fans who began cheering the moment she stepped onto the podium for each of her routines and called encouragement to her throughout. She had a bad night on the beam, unfortunately: she fought through two wobbles but the third did her in. On beam, I decided, problems don't cumulate the way they do on bars (or pommel horse); you have time to stop and re-center ... but if you can't find your center, you're doomed. Sadly, I missed Alicia Sacramone's creditable beam performance because of a seat kerfuffle in the row in front of me. Some squatters moved down into a half-empty row after the first rotation, but the legitimate ticket-holders showed up during the third. Bizarrely, the squatters didn't want to move until the routine was finished, which left the ticket holders fuming vocally in the aisle until one of threatened to go in search of an usher. I swear, they would all have been less distracting if they'd just exchanged seats and had done with it. Mr. Squatter returned a couple of times over the next hour to speak to friends near the seats-of-contention, while Mr. and Mrs. Legitimate looked hissily past him. Oy.
Everything finally finished up past 10:30 and I booked my way back to the subway stop. The traffic pattern there had improved from the previous night, when everyone was trying to figure out how the turnstiles worked and using their teeth to open the very resistant plastic bags of tokens. Yes, Philadelphia still uses tokens. But once on the train, I found my way swiftly home to sleep, looking forward to the next day's afternoon session and the possibility of an early night ...
To be continued ...
Today began with an interesting discovery about the lock/unlock widget I received with my rental car keys: if you lock the car with it and then unlock the car manually when the widget's battery fails, the car begins to honk at you. It honks even louder when you open the door, and continues to make a nuisance of itself until you get the key into the ignition. Which is embarrassing. Sadly, the office from which I acquired car and widget claimed it could do nothing for me, unless I wanted to travel to one of their other locations and switch vehicles ... I declined, being on a tight schedule, and headed for the off-site parking lot, trusting that no one would want to steal a cobalt Cobalt when they could get something else.
Arriving at the venue's subway stop, I noticed an amusing floor ad at the foot of the escalators: a pair of enormous white footprints on a blue field surmounted by the legend, "You've made it -- now stick the landing." I trotted past the scalpers, both buying -- "Got'ny extra tickits?" -- and selling -- "Need'ny tickits?" -- the latter further away from the transit station's security folk. Scalping is illegal here. They weren't getting much work, as far as I could tell; the event wasn't at all sold out, even at the lower levels, and tickets to the cheap seats were plentiful. Which is not to say that the trials didn't pull a good crowd. Today's was larger than yesterday's, the women being more of a draw than the men for tween girls and their parents. Lots of gymnastic clubs in matching T-shirts ("There is no charge for the awesomeness of [Club Name]!" read one back, and another, "Coach's fee: $300; [Numerous other equipment fees and dollar amounts]; Being a member of Team [Name]: PRICELESS!" -- MasterCard has a lot to answer for); occupied groups of seats; held up "GO SHAWN" and "CHELSEA ROCKS!" signs; squealed, "We love you, Blaine!" in treble chorus for radio commentator Blaine Wilson; and mobbed the souvenir stands, food counters and the outdoor Fan Fest. I never got 'round to investigating that last, being more interested in watching the athletes warm up (see below), but I did stand in line at the least-mobbed booth to buy a commemorative pin for my collection. It took less time than I'd anticipated, because soon after I took my place, the salesfolk announced that they were sold out of all youth clothing (except hats) and all smalls and mediums in adult clothing (except hats. Nobody seemed to want a hat -- they all wanted T-shirts and sweatshirts and warm-up jackets.). Then I headed in to the arena.
My seat was slightly less awesome today, but only slightly. I had a great view of the balance beam, off to the side of one end, but that was the only apparatus which was truly front and center of my location. I retained a good view of floor (when the boom camera didn't swing down and obscure it), but the uneven bars (my current favorite of the women's apparatus) and vault were very far away again. The vault landing area remained pointed away from me, but the high bar, and therefore everyone's dismount, was aimed in my direction. I shouldn't quibble, really, since I was actually there and seeing everything, and I've never been much for vault. In any event, I improved my quality of life by bringing a flat cushion to cradle my fundament for the three-plus hours of sitting with occasional breaks to stretch. (Forget about hitting the food court or the rest room once competition started if you didn't want to miss something-- there was hardly time between rotations to get in line.) I actually spent more like four hours in my seat -- I found it worth arriving early to catch the athletes warming up. The coaches all talk with their hands and bodies as well as their lips, miming positions and punching, slapping and stabbing the air for emphasis. Every vaulter gets a quick change of springboard and approach mat; some get different landing mats, too. Chalk flies everywhere (at one point on day three the men's parallel bars routines raised gentle clouds of dust with each swing-through; afterward I saw coaches sweeping the mats with their hands). On the uneven bars, gymnasts dropping momentum after practicing a series of giants or pirouettes look uncharacteristically ungainly, splaying out their legs and bending their knees for a rotation or two before jumping down. Fascinating.
Today's competition opened with another junior national rhythmic gymnastics team member all a-sparkle performing with her hoop. She demonstrated lovely flexibility, but lost control of her apparatus once and finished just slightly behind her music. Nevertheless, she was vigorously applauded as the lights dimmed and the spots flashed and movie music played through the speakers for the introduction of the gymnasts with suitable cheering and dramatic hoopla. It took me a day to identify the tune as one of the main themes from Shrek, of all things (the variant played over the dragon-flight near the end) -- does anybody but me think about original context at times like this? Then the national anthem was duly murdered by a local former American Idol contestant. Other people may favor a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning -- I'd cheerfully march in support of one that prohibited the public vocal performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" by anything smaller than a quartet. Eugh.
The women's field was much larger than the men's (19 to 13) and the meet moved much more slowly with more and longer pauses between routines. It must have been terrible on the nerves: I watched competitor after competitor step to the podium and then wait, pacing or standing in place shaking out her arms and legs. Other athletes sat or stood in the well, stretching or mentally running their routines (you could tell from the truncated arm movements and little skip-hops). Each rotation was divided into two halves, with a break between in which the competitors warmed up and the audience was encouraged, again, to cheer for their sponsoring club or to wave their signs and dance and perhaps make it onto the big screen. One gent my age or older had his moment of fame doing the "carriage return" and got a whack from his wife for showing off. The video feed seemed to have some teething troubles this evening; early views didn't center the athletes properly, so you kept losing track of their feet, which is annoying (feet are important). But matters improved as night went on. The traveling camera guys were sometimes hard pressed to get from one end of the arena to the other, when a bars routine was succeeded immediately by one on beam, say. They'd come charging along the side of the floor podium, each cameraman with an attendant cable wrangler to prevent tangles and accidents. (Imagine someone knocked out of competition because they got boa-constrictored by a camera cable! That would get ugly quite quickly ...)
Given their respective performances over the past year, there was no question that Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin would be dueling it out for the top two spots and their automatic admission to the Olympic team. Liukin began her night on vault, receiving a respectable 15 from the judges and an admiring "Look at that stretch!" comment from behind me. She then moved on to the kind of uneven bars routine that blows you out of the water -- it has a mammoth difficulty rating, so that even when she muffs an element (like her dismount this evening), she scores higher than anyone else. She has wonderful extension and can pirouette above the high bar like nobody's business, which is one of the popular point-scoring moves among both the men and the women this year. Liukin is also the only beam competitor I saw who could really pull off another of this year's popular moves, a forward no-handed somersault-in-the-air into a swan position (one foot planted, the other extended behind, with arms out to the sides). Most swans are wobbly and tense-looking (Bridget Sloan, despite a lovely display of flexibility and line otherwise, was guilty of this), but Liukin's actually manages to look natural most of the time. She laid down an emphatic floor routine, getting enormous spring into the final move of her second pass, and was one of the most dancer-like of the competitors -- though I prefer a more "gymnastic" style, myself (they could take the music out and have the women just tumble, as the men do, and I'd be perfectly happy). Liukin finished only half a point out of first place.
Johnson couldn't touch Liukin on bars, but had a wonderful night (16.25) on beam -- I refrained from writing "no balance checks" till it was over, but did write, "Gorgeous first pass -- lots of spring and good command." The audience watched her work intently, with louder spatters of applause for the individual elements than most other gymnasts received and great enthusiasm for her dismount. The popular athlete, of course, gets more encouragement than the person who's still on the second or third tier (I noted that no one seemed to know who Shayla Worley was when she took to the bars, she received such light clapping -- but then her cheering section kicked in and she gained more notice as the night went on). Johnson's music for the floor exercise was mixed guitar-and-percussion with the kind of central brass section a friend of mine likes to call "an homage to the Prague traffic circle" (it's very popular with mid-twentieth-century Czech composers, for some reason) -- an odd choice, I thought, but her tumbling was great fun to watch. She only had one small sidestep out of one of her middle passes which came down blind, and broke 16 on the routine, for the best floor score of the night. Johnson gave herself an encouraging "Come on!" before starting her run to the vaulting table -- it must have worked, because her score placed her first on that apparatus, too, to finish the evening on top of the leader board.
I had an eye throughout on Chellsie Memmel, returning from a year lost to injury, because she looked so strong at nationals. She began on the bars -- her cheering section across the way hollered and clapped for every skill, and deservedly so, because her execution was dead on. She was also very steady on beam. I tend to notice trends in balance beam skills more readily than those on other apparatus; it began with that period way back in the '90s somewhere when everyone was doing low work, borrowing pommel-horse-style flair from the men. Now you hardly see anyone drop down for an appreciable period in their routine; it's all about leaps and pirouettes -- and, if you're intending to get anywhere near the medals, you add a 180- or 360-degree twist to one of your flips, as Memmel did to great effect. On floor, unfortunately, she angled one of her passes wrong and stepped out, but stuck her dismount and received a quick "Good job!" from her coach on leaving the podium. To finish up she landed an exclamation mark of a vault; her coach looked as pleased as if he had done it himself, but a low degree of difficulty kept her below 15 for the total mark. She had placed first after two rotations, but her lower scores on floor and vault dropped her back to third on the night. Still, a third behind Johnson and Liukin is nothing to sneeze at, particularly when an Olympic berth is in the offing.
I was also watching Jana Bieger make her return from ankle troubles (I love a good comeback story). She placed sixth overall with solid but not standout work. Her vault was creditable, with only a small forward hop on landing, and her uneven bars routine well-performed. Her opening move on the beam, a handstand with bent legs and lowered chest to demonstrate grace and strength together, got a call of "Beautiful!" from the stands, but I thought that young Chelsea Davis's was prettier. She got nice height in her leaps, however, and ran straight to the end of the beam to throw a multiply-rotating somersault of a dismount, earning the evening's second-best score on that apparatus. Bieger finished on the floor, pounding into her initial passes with such energy that she couldn't stick her landings and bounced out twice for .3 in deductions. I noted that she visibly dialed it back for her final pass and had much better control; her coach gave her an encouraging double cheek tap as she headed for her chair.
Local product Darling Hill was never really in the mix, but she had lots of fans who began cheering the moment she stepped onto the podium for each of her routines and called encouragement to her throughout. She had a bad night on the beam, unfortunately: she fought through two wobbles but the third did her in. On beam, I decided, problems don't cumulate the way they do on bars (or pommel horse); you have time to stop and re-center ... but if you can't find your center, you're doomed. Sadly, I missed Alicia Sacramone's creditable beam performance because of a seat kerfuffle in the row in front of me. Some squatters moved down into a half-empty row after the first rotation, but the legitimate ticket-holders showed up during the third. Bizarrely, the squatters didn't want to move until the routine was finished, which left the ticket holders fuming vocally in the aisle until one of threatened to go in search of an usher. I swear, they would all have been less distracting if they'd just exchanged seats and had done with it. Mr. Squatter returned a couple of times over the next hour to speak to friends near the seats-of-contention, while Mr. and Mrs. Legitimate looked hissily past him. Oy.
Everything finally finished up past 10:30 and I booked my way back to the subway stop. The traffic pattern there had improved from the previous night, when everyone was trying to figure out how the turnstiles worked and using their teeth to open the very resistant plastic bags of tokens. Yes, Philadelphia still uses tokens. But once on the train, I found my way swiftly home to sleep, looking forward to the next day's afternoon session and the possibility of an early night ...