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nebroadwe(Read about Day One here and Day Two here ...)
The day began with parking troubles -- my by-now-usual lot was full, so I had to use another about which I was much less sanguine. I spent a good deal of the remaining travel time worrying about whether my car would still be parked where I left it when I returned. Yet I was not so worried that I didn't notice the suit wearing a credential two seats up; he turned out to be a USAG executive, but no one I'd ever heard of. Dang. My friend![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nub2ski always manages to meet celebrities when he attends concerts and sports events, but all I ever see are NPR reporters and USAG administrators. Oh, well.
All this worrying and people-watching made me thirsty, so when I arrived on site I went hunting for a water fountain. The Wachovia Center must make sure that the free water is as warm and tasteless as possible in order to make you consider the revenue-generating alternatives, but I'm made of stronger stuff. I was nearly seduced later into an impulse purchase of lemonade, but resisted valiantly. Gluttony isn't my besetting sin -- I'm more of a sloth person, in token of which I went straight to my seat and sat through the warm-ups again. Unless actively practicing a dismount, I discovered, nobody bothers to stick the landing during a warm-up. I watched Sean Golden loosening up on the rings, just getting a feel for them rather than working at full force or extension. David Durante wandered over and caught the eye of a gentleman two sections to the left of me; they slapped hands and hugged. MC John Macready interviewed three boys, regional champions in their age group, and brought them down onto the rings podium once the athletes had finished using it. "What do you think?" he asked them as they stared up at the apparatus.
"Whoa!" replied the most forthcoming of the three, stretching his arms eagerly roofward.
"Want to try it out?" Macready asked, all but rhetorically.
Lifted to the rings, the kid pulled himself into a pretty good vertical posture and got a big round of applause from the audience. All three boys left the podium looking excited and pleased; Macready remained behind briefly to re-chalk the apparatus. An autograph scrum developed at the foot of my section (prime autograph-gathering territory, I'd found, being just opposite the athlete's entrance and not blocked by equipment, technical folk or the selection committee) -- I couldn't see who was signing, but suspected David Sender, who was present but not competing due to injury. I also caught sight of Bela Karolyi across the arena committing a fashion faux pas: I may be a fuddy-duddy, but observing a man in a navy-blue shirt with a bright yellow jacket and tie makes my hair stand on end. When he wasn't down with the selection committe, he hung out in the NBC booth (fortunately, the awful suit did not read quite as badly on television as it did in real life).
The evening got underway with a proclamation from the mayor of Philadelphia -- he read his remarks as well as the proclamation, though both were quite brief. Then, having been admonished that flash photography was not permitted (I'd say "Duh!" except that people don't seem to realize how distracting it is), we were also informed that videography was forbidden, since NBC owned the film rights to the trials. I don't think anyone paid much attention to that one, however. The lights went down and two male acrobats from Cirque du Soleil of Las Vegas mounted the floor to do a routine that, after the fashion of their troupe, began by violating the principles of human anatomy and ended by bending the laws of physics. I mean, what else can you say about a man who rises from a seated position to his feet while another man does a one-handed handstand on his head? Amazing. They were followed by a fifteen-year-old blind musician's rendition of the national anthem -- miles better than the proto-pop star of the previous two days. And then we were off!
Tonight's crowd was probably as populous as the previous one and appreciably younger: I saw adults with babies and toddlers as well as teens and tweens (Family Night at the Olympic Trials!). The fan festival had evidently been handing out poster-board and markers for the making of signs, given how they had proliferated. I saw a seven-year-old with a poster that read, "I want to be just like Jonathan Horton." (The old school hadn't been forgotten either: someone else held up a sheet that declared: "Happy Birthday, John Roethlisberger!") It was certainly Jonathan Horton's night -- he placed second on four of the events -- but it was a quiet victory, judging by how little my notes had to say about it. He hit both his release skills on the high bar; a little trouble followed at the end of his second tumbling pass on floor, but the overall quality of his work made up for it. His pommel horse routine had a low degree of difficulty and "doesn't get eaten, yay" was the best anyone could say about it (unless they were a judging panel and said 13.65). He was stellar on rings, to the utter delight of his coach as well as the crowd, and landed a doozy of a vault with only a step and a brief windmill. He windmilled again landing his dismount from parallel bars, but clearly has the chops to stick it on another night. If the selection committee wanted quality and consistency, they had their man.
The rest of the field, by contrast, was all over the place; none of the other all-arounders managed to maintain altitude in more than two or three of their events. Pommel horse began by eating Tim McNeill right before his dismount -- he just couldn't make the transition to the handstand. Bhavsar, following him, kept bending his knees and hesitated getting up to his handstand, but managed not to fall off the horse. He seemed very enthusiastic about his own performance throughout the evening. On rings, it was certainly appropriate; his somersaulting sequence finished in a handstand wherein the rings were still, as they should be. His routine tied Durante's for third place, topped by Horton's and Kevin Tan's (which, I noted, also kept the rings properly still through a very complicated series of maneuvers). On vault, he dashed up the runway with great speed and audibly thump!ed onto the table, but his 15.95 was only good enough for fifth in a strong field. He sighed with visible relief after his stint on the parallel bars; nevertheless, that was his strongest event of the evening, first by half a point over Horton by virtue of a greater degree of difficulty. Bhavsar's high bar routine wasn't terribly difficult: "Sloppy," opined someone behind me, probably for leg separations on his releases, but he magnet-footed his dismount and exchanged high-fives with his coach and teammates like a man who thought he'd done his utmost. He took the same attitude after his floor exercise, but I thought it hoppy; none of his passes really hit the ground and stayed there. Third on the night in the all-around, he struck me as less impressive than Justin Spring, who competed in five of six events and took third or fourth on four of them and sixth on the other, with more difficult routines and generally higher execution scores.
Jersey boy Durante let off a monster of a vault to begin with, scoring well into the middle-15s, and requested more applause from the audience on his walk back, which they were happy to supply. He was equally pumped after his rings routine, who-da-man-ning the crowd, which hollered its approval. His performance on the high bar was nothing to write home about -- not bad, but not spectacular. This relative slump continued on the floor, though he stepped in with great deliberation and had no awful mistakes. He left encouraging the crowd to cheer him more loudly again -- I began to wonder a little about his showboating, but it never quite crossed the line into obnoxiousness, and how often do you get to reach for the Olympic rings in front of your home crowd? Durante had a long wait prior to getting the green flag on the horse (during which time he was treated to a tinny soprano chorus of "We love you, David!"), which probably had something to do with the broadcast schedule, because we were live by that time. The camera guys came charging across the well at last, having just finished recording Bhavsar on high bar, and Durante proceeded to win the night on pommel horse -- not a bad thing to have shown on television. He patted the beast appreciatively afterward (did he slip it a treat beforehand? :-) His last event was rings, which I imagined swayed a little from the noise that greeted his advent -- you really can't blame someone for lapping up the hometown-hero vibe on a stage this important. He was justly pleased with his routine, which helped place him second overall on the day. Had he had a better first night, he would have challenged more seriously for a spot on the Olympic team.
As Alexander Artemev stepped up for his first event, the high bar, I noted, "Let's see where his head is today." Sadly, he missed regrasping the bar by a whisker after his release, which took his score down below 14 (Morgan Hamm won this apparatus with a 15.5 -- I noted that he "has to windmill to keep it, but sticks his dismount"). It set the tone for an off night. On floor, I commented that "his flair goes on for longer than seems possible, but his finishing moves [are] ragged." Distractingly, his coach-father had a fan in the section to my left who repeatedly called, "Vladimir! Vladimir!" afterward until the man looked around and offered her a preoccupied (or perhaps bemused) wave. When Artemev launched his routine on the pommel horse, he did well until he had to convert from legs-together circling to a flair sequence -- he popped right off and his father looked dyspeptic. When he relaunched, however, his flair was gorgeous -- fast and nicely extended -- and he hung on for fifth place on that apparatus, his best finish on any of the events. On rings, I noted a number of small problems as well as one fairly large form break; a score in the mid-fourteens dropped him to ninth. His vault landed off-balance to the right, then hopped out of bounds to the left, leaving him nowhere against a field loaded with vault specialists. He finished on the parallel bars -- I was underwhelmed, since he seemed to keep having to stop and think or regrip between elements, and I prefer the routines that move more smoothly. And that was that -- first all-around on day one, he finished sixth all-around today. Given his inconsistent history, I doubted his performances at this meet did him any good with the selection committee.
Among the people whom nobody watching on television got to see, Yewki (spelled thus) Tomita had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad first day, with a visible form break on high bar, a butt-first landing during his floor routine, and a chomp from the pommel horse. I had written him off myself, but was re-engaged by his demeanor on the parallel bars: deliberate without hesitations, a slower rhythm than some of his competitors but (to my inexpert eye) graceful. "I like this," I wrote in my notes, and I perked up again when he took the same attitude into his high bar routine. Attitude isn't everything, unfortunately, since he failed to break 15 on that event. Yet he kept it together for the horse, performing his elements with wonderful control and had only the briefest of wobbles getting up to a handstand for his dismount. He knew he'd nailed it the moment his feet touched the podium and hung around for a good minute accepting the adulation of the crowd. (I broke out into fangirl Japanese, myself. Hey, sometimes it's warranted.) He left the podium eventually, but had to return because he'd forgotten his shoes. I thought he had a shot at making the team as a specialist, but that must have been fangirl enthusiasm, since the NBC broadcast ignored him completely.
They also ignored Sean Golden, which was a crying shame. He began on rings with one of those entrances where "And the crowd goes wild" is less cliché than sober statement of fact. "His horizontals are exceptionally horizontal," I commented, but unfortunately in this field the best he could do was tie for fourth. That out of the way, he proceeded to land the night's best vault: a 6.6 degree of difficulty combined with a 9.8 for execution. Can you applaud, children? Because the audience did, loudly and at length. The luck of the draw had him close out the competition on floor, and I could spit nails at NBC for failing to show him work. They had time to do so after Bhavsar's routine, and you can hear a little of the enormous applause that greeted his routine -- not just because he was the hometown hero, but because he did very, very well: first on the night. The roof blew up a few inches from the hootin' and hollerin' after his salute. Again, I thought he had a shot as a specialist, but the broadcast choices should have warned me otherwise ...
A pause followed, and then they brought the entire field back out onto the floor, plus Paul Hamm, to announce that he and Horton had been selected for the Olympic team. Being a little anxious still about my car, I left before NBC began interviewing the two of them. On the train back, I was surrounded by twenty-somethings who were chuffed to hear via cell phone that they had been shown on television. They and tens of others, I expect, but everybody loves the camera, even though it doesn't always love them back.
My car was safe, so I met friends and went to dinner with a glad heart, and thence to bed ...
To be continued ...
The day began with parking troubles -- my by-now-usual lot was full, so I had to use another about which I was much less sanguine. I spent a good deal of the remaining travel time worrying about whether my car would still be parked where I left it when I returned. Yet I was not so worried that I didn't notice the suit wearing a credential two seats up; he turned out to be a USAG executive, but no one I'd ever heard of. Dang. My friend
nub2ski always manages to meet celebrities when he attends concerts and sports events, but all I ever see are NPR reporters and USAG administrators. Oh, well.All this worrying and people-watching made me thirsty, so when I arrived on site I went hunting for a water fountain. The Wachovia Center must make sure that the free water is as warm and tasteless as possible in order to make you consider the revenue-generating alternatives, but I'm made of stronger stuff. I was nearly seduced later into an impulse purchase of lemonade, but resisted valiantly. Gluttony isn't my besetting sin -- I'm more of a sloth person, in token of which I went straight to my seat and sat through the warm-ups again. Unless actively practicing a dismount, I discovered, nobody bothers to stick the landing during a warm-up. I watched Sean Golden loosening up on the rings, just getting a feel for them rather than working at full force or extension. David Durante wandered over and caught the eye of a gentleman two sections to the left of me; they slapped hands and hugged. MC John Macready interviewed three boys, regional champions in their age group, and brought them down onto the rings podium once the athletes had finished using it. "What do you think?" he asked them as they stared up at the apparatus.
"Whoa!" replied the most forthcoming of the three, stretching his arms eagerly roofward.
"Want to try it out?" Macready asked, all but rhetorically.
Lifted to the rings, the kid pulled himself into a pretty good vertical posture and got a big round of applause from the audience. All three boys left the podium looking excited and pleased; Macready remained behind briefly to re-chalk the apparatus. An autograph scrum developed at the foot of my section (prime autograph-gathering territory, I'd found, being just opposite the athlete's entrance and not blocked by equipment, technical folk or the selection committee) -- I couldn't see who was signing, but suspected David Sender, who was present but not competing due to injury. I also caught sight of Bela Karolyi across the arena committing a fashion faux pas: I may be a fuddy-duddy, but observing a man in a navy-blue shirt with a bright yellow jacket and tie makes my hair stand on end. When he wasn't down with the selection committe, he hung out in the NBC booth (fortunately, the awful suit did not read quite as badly on television as it did in real life).
The evening got underway with a proclamation from the mayor of Philadelphia -- he read his remarks as well as the proclamation, though both were quite brief. Then, having been admonished that flash photography was not permitted (I'd say "Duh!" except that people don't seem to realize how distracting it is), we were also informed that videography was forbidden, since NBC owned the film rights to the trials. I don't think anyone paid much attention to that one, however. The lights went down and two male acrobats from Cirque du Soleil of Las Vegas mounted the floor to do a routine that, after the fashion of their troupe, began by violating the principles of human anatomy and ended by bending the laws of physics. I mean, what else can you say about a man who rises from a seated position to his feet while another man does a one-handed handstand on his head? Amazing. They were followed by a fifteen-year-old blind musician's rendition of the national anthem -- miles better than the proto-pop star of the previous two days. And then we were off!
Tonight's crowd was probably as populous as the previous one and appreciably younger: I saw adults with babies and toddlers as well as teens and tweens (Family Night at the Olympic Trials!). The fan festival had evidently been handing out poster-board and markers for the making of signs, given how they had proliferated. I saw a seven-year-old with a poster that read, "I want to be just like Jonathan Horton." (The old school hadn't been forgotten either: someone else held up a sheet that declared: "Happy Birthday, John Roethlisberger!") It was certainly Jonathan Horton's night -- he placed second on four of the events -- but it was a quiet victory, judging by how little my notes had to say about it. He hit both his release skills on the high bar; a little trouble followed at the end of his second tumbling pass on floor, but the overall quality of his work made up for it. His pommel horse routine had a low degree of difficulty and "doesn't get eaten, yay" was the best anyone could say about it (unless they were a judging panel and said 13.65). He was stellar on rings, to the utter delight of his coach as well as the crowd, and landed a doozy of a vault with only a step and a brief windmill. He windmilled again landing his dismount from parallel bars, but clearly has the chops to stick it on another night. If the selection committee wanted quality and consistency, they had their man.
The rest of the field, by contrast, was all over the place; none of the other all-arounders managed to maintain altitude in more than two or three of their events. Pommel horse began by eating Tim McNeill right before his dismount -- he just couldn't make the transition to the handstand. Bhavsar, following him, kept bending his knees and hesitated getting up to his handstand, but managed not to fall off the horse. He seemed very enthusiastic about his own performance throughout the evening. On rings, it was certainly appropriate; his somersaulting sequence finished in a handstand wherein the rings were still, as they should be. His routine tied Durante's for third place, topped by Horton's and Kevin Tan's (which, I noted, also kept the rings properly still through a very complicated series of maneuvers). On vault, he dashed up the runway with great speed and audibly thump!ed onto the table, but his 15.95 was only good enough for fifth in a strong field. He sighed with visible relief after his stint on the parallel bars; nevertheless, that was his strongest event of the evening, first by half a point over Horton by virtue of a greater degree of difficulty. Bhavsar's high bar routine wasn't terribly difficult: "Sloppy," opined someone behind me, probably for leg separations on his releases, but he magnet-footed his dismount and exchanged high-fives with his coach and teammates like a man who thought he'd done his utmost. He took the same attitude after his floor exercise, but I thought it hoppy; none of his passes really hit the ground and stayed there. Third on the night in the all-around, he struck me as less impressive than Justin Spring, who competed in five of six events and took third or fourth on four of them and sixth on the other, with more difficult routines and generally higher execution scores.
Jersey boy Durante let off a monster of a vault to begin with, scoring well into the middle-15s, and requested more applause from the audience on his walk back, which they were happy to supply. He was equally pumped after his rings routine, who-da-man-ning the crowd, which hollered its approval. His performance on the high bar was nothing to write home about -- not bad, but not spectacular. This relative slump continued on the floor, though he stepped in with great deliberation and had no awful mistakes. He left encouraging the crowd to cheer him more loudly again -- I began to wonder a little about his showboating, but it never quite crossed the line into obnoxiousness, and how often do you get to reach for the Olympic rings in front of your home crowd? Durante had a long wait prior to getting the green flag on the horse (during which time he was treated to a tinny soprano chorus of "We love you, David!"), which probably had something to do with the broadcast schedule, because we were live by that time. The camera guys came charging across the well at last, having just finished recording Bhavsar on high bar, and Durante proceeded to win the night on pommel horse -- not a bad thing to have shown on television. He patted the beast appreciatively afterward (did he slip it a treat beforehand? :-) His last event was rings, which I imagined swayed a little from the noise that greeted his advent -- you really can't blame someone for lapping up the hometown-hero vibe on a stage this important. He was justly pleased with his routine, which helped place him second overall on the day. Had he had a better first night, he would have challenged more seriously for a spot on the Olympic team.
As Alexander Artemev stepped up for his first event, the high bar, I noted, "Let's see where his head is today." Sadly, he missed regrasping the bar by a whisker after his release, which took his score down below 14 (Morgan Hamm won this apparatus with a 15.5 -- I noted that he "has to windmill to keep it, but sticks his dismount"). It set the tone for an off night. On floor, I commented that "his flair goes on for longer than seems possible, but his finishing moves [are] ragged." Distractingly, his coach-father had a fan in the section to my left who repeatedly called, "Vladimir! Vladimir!" afterward until the man looked around and offered her a preoccupied (or perhaps bemused) wave. When Artemev launched his routine on the pommel horse, he did well until he had to convert from legs-together circling to a flair sequence -- he popped right off and his father looked dyspeptic. When he relaunched, however, his flair was gorgeous -- fast and nicely extended -- and he hung on for fifth place on that apparatus, his best finish on any of the events. On rings, I noted a number of small problems as well as one fairly large form break; a score in the mid-fourteens dropped him to ninth. His vault landed off-balance to the right, then hopped out of bounds to the left, leaving him nowhere against a field loaded with vault specialists. He finished on the parallel bars -- I was underwhelmed, since he seemed to keep having to stop and think or regrip between elements, and I prefer the routines that move more smoothly. And that was that -- first all-around on day one, he finished sixth all-around today. Given his inconsistent history, I doubted his performances at this meet did him any good with the selection committee.
Among the people whom nobody watching on television got to see, Yewki (spelled thus) Tomita had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad first day, with a visible form break on high bar, a butt-first landing during his floor routine, and a chomp from the pommel horse. I had written him off myself, but was re-engaged by his demeanor on the parallel bars: deliberate without hesitations, a slower rhythm than some of his competitors but (to my inexpert eye) graceful. "I like this," I wrote in my notes, and I perked up again when he took the same attitude into his high bar routine. Attitude isn't everything, unfortunately, since he failed to break 15 on that event. Yet he kept it together for the horse, performing his elements with wonderful control and had only the briefest of wobbles getting up to a handstand for his dismount. He knew he'd nailed it the moment his feet touched the podium and hung around for a good minute accepting the adulation of the crowd. (I broke out into fangirl Japanese, myself. Hey, sometimes it's warranted.) He left the podium eventually, but had to return because he'd forgotten his shoes. I thought he had a shot at making the team as a specialist, but that must have been fangirl enthusiasm, since the NBC broadcast ignored him completely.
They also ignored Sean Golden, which was a crying shame. He began on rings with one of those entrances where "And the crowd goes wild" is less cliché than sober statement of fact. "His horizontals are exceptionally horizontal," I commented, but unfortunately in this field the best he could do was tie for fourth. That out of the way, he proceeded to land the night's best vault: a 6.6 degree of difficulty combined with a 9.8 for execution. Can you applaud, children? Because the audience did, loudly and at length. The luck of the draw had him close out the competition on floor, and I could spit nails at NBC for failing to show him work. They had time to do so after Bhavsar's routine, and you can hear a little of the enormous applause that greeted his routine -- not just because he was the hometown hero, but because he did very, very well: first on the night. The roof blew up a few inches from the hootin' and hollerin' after his salute. Again, I thought he had a shot as a specialist, but the broadcast choices should have warned me otherwise ...
A pause followed, and then they brought the entire field back out onto the floor, plus Paul Hamm, to announce that he and Horton had been selected for the Olympic team. Being a little anxious still about my car, I left before NBC began interviewing the two of them. On the train back, I was surrounded by twenty-somethings who were chuffed to hear via cell phone that they had been shown on television. They and tens of others, I expect, but everybody loves the camera, even though it doesn't always love them back.
My car was safe, so I met friends and went to dinner with a glad heart, and thence to bed ...