Why Team China suffered its worst performance in artistic gymnastics at Rio 2016?

Abstract

China’s artistic gymnastics team had its worst showing at Rio since returning to the Games in 1984. This article explains the reasons for China’s underperformance at Rio by drawing on multiple sources of data. We analyze the scores that international gymnasts received at the World Championships and the Olympics. We also draw on interview data of Chinese gymnasts, coaches, and officials. Our study shows that the collapse in Rio primarily resulted from misinterpreting changes in both the new competition system for the team final and the open-ended Code of Points (CoP) introduced by the International Federation of Gymnastics (FIG) after Beijing 2008. The misinterpretation led to poor strategies when preparing for the Rio Olympics. Further, we believe there is something hidden in their defeat that reveals larger developmental trends in international gymnastics. Thus, by addressing China’s downfall at Rio, we identify important developments in international gymnastics such as the increasing importance of all-arounders, the necessity of execution, and extending the careers of both men and women gymnasts. The conclusions we draw from Team China’s failure at Rio 2016 have broader implications for how other gymnastics nations can prepare for international competitions.

Keywords

International Gymnastics Federation,rules of sport,scoring systems,underperformance

Introduction

Historically, the Chinese artistic gymnastics team was dominant at the Olympics. They swept gold medals at eight consecutive Summer Olympics following their debut at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. The team’s pinnacle occurred at the 2008 Beijing Olympics where they won nine out of fourteen gold medals. However, their astonishing run ended in Rio with a total of only two bronze medals in the men’s and women’s team finals. For the first time in more than 30 years, China did not win a single gold medal.¹ The outcome at Rio is especially striking because China won 7 gold medals across three World Championships during the Rio Olympic cycle (World Championships 2013–2015). When China defeated Japan by 0.1 points at the World Championships 2014, it marked their sixth consecutive team title at the World Championships.² China’s history of success prior to the Rio Olympics coupled with its sudden decline raises an important question for sport science; what could cause such a successful team to fall so rapidly in international competition?

Sport training theory argues that the final result of an individual athlete or a team in competition is determined by three primary factors: 1) the performance of the athlete(s), which includes the athlete(s) competitive ability and how well they execute according to the rules of the discipline; 2) the performance of other competitors, including their competitive abilities and how well they execute according to the rules of the discipline; and 3) the method of judging the competition that includes the rules or regulations of the competition and how the rules or regulations are applied by the onsite judges.³ Of the three primary factors determining results, people in China usually place emphasis on the method of judging for their downfall in Rio, especially unfairness or mistakes by the onsite judges.⁴ However, the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) revises the scoring system (Code of Points) every Olympic cycle to better promote the development of artistic gymnastics. This can include the allocation of E-judges (Execution-judges) to different panels by draws in the four rounds of competition (i.e. Qualifying (Competition-I), All-Around Final (Competition-II), Apparatus Final (Competition-III), and Team Final (Competition-IV)) and the R-judges (Reference-judges) who provide automatic and time saving corrections in the case of problems with Execution Scores.⁵ Since there are multiple E-judges that change across each round of competition, it cannot be assumed that the collapse of the Chinese artistic gymnastics team resulted from either unfairness or mistakes of the onsite judges. Instead, we explain China’s collapse at Rio by the performance of Chinese athletes since they represent the principal factor in determining their own outcomes at the Games.

The increasing importance of all-arounders with smaller teams

Generally speaking, artistic gymnastics is shaped by both the competition system and the scoring system. The competition system determines how the limited number of gymnasts per country compete in both the team and the apparatus finals; the scoring system identifies how a routine performed by a gymnast is judged on each apparatus. Both systems are embodied in the Technical Regulations and the Code of Points (CoP), respectively, which get enacted and revised by the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) each Olympic cycle.

In the competition system, the team final format at both the Athens and the Beijing Olympic Games was 6-3-3, i.e. each country sends a team of 6 gymnasts, and 3 compete on any single apparatus and their scores count towards the team’s total score.⁶ The FIG shifted to 5-3-3 at the London and Rio Olympics.^5,6 Compared to the 6-3-3 system in Athens and Beijing, the 5-3-3 format allows fewer participants, which places greater importance on all-around. This means in the London and the Rio Olympic cycles, fostering all-arounders (especially excellent ones) had a far-greater significance for countries that wanted to contend in the team finals.^7,8 In this sense, the competition system of the team finals not only specifies team size, it also determines the degree of importance each country attaches to all-arounders in a given Olympic cycle.

Strategies for the new scoring system

As far as the scoring system is concerned, the reform conducted by the FIG in 2006 was the most profound in its history. The traditional “perfect 10” format, where a start value of 10 was the highest possible score for a routine provided the routine covered all required elements and without deductions in execution,⁹ became a relic of the past. In the open-ended CoP, the Final Score on each apparatus is the total of Difficulty Score (the sum of a certain number of difficult elements (10 for men and 8 for women), special requirements and additional awards for high value connections) and Execution Score (average values of judges’ deductions from 10 points based on errors in exercise presentation).^10,11

The old scoring system created very little range in the D-Score start value of routines at the international level. The open-ended CoP intended to solve this problem by rewarding differences in the difficulty of routines.⁹ The new emphasis on Difficulty Score made increasing the Difficulty Score of a routine more important for ranking competitors’ performances.¹² Competitors thus began increasing the difficulty of their routines, and some were willing to “sacrifice execution for difficulty”.⁹ As a result, Difficulty Scores in World Championships and Olympic Games have increased consistently since 2006 and the uppermost Execution Scores in both the men’s and women’s finals have declined.¹³

This trend of “risk for difficulty at the expense of execution” was, however, controlled to some extent as the FIG attached more importance to the performance quality of a routine following the introduction of the open-ended CoP in 2006. The key aspects are both the stricter deductions for errors and the scoring of artistry introduced into the women’s CoP in 2009 (on both the balance beam and the floor exercise) which makes the performance quality significantly affect the results in the finals.^12,14–17 This means that teams should strategize around changes in the open-ended CoP since 2009 when preparing for international matches. For example, more attention should be paid to artistry since that is emphasized in the open-ended CoP^12,17 and to extending the competitive careers of senior gymnasts.^12,14,15,18

Following from our review of how rules changes impacted performance strategies, this article set forth the hypothesis that the collapse of the Chinese gymnastics team in Rio resulted mainly from China misinterpreting changes in both the competition system for the team final and the open-ended CoP following the Beijing Olympics, which led to poor strategies when preparing for the Rio Olympics. We test the hypothesis in this article in order to explain why the Chinese team’s performance dropped so much at Rio 2016. Further, we believe there is something hidden in their defeat that reveals larger developmental trends in international artistic gymnastics. In this sense, by addressing the first question we identify some features in the development of international artistic gymnastics today. Thus our analysis of Team China’s collapse at Rio 2016 has broader implications for coaches and athletes in artistic gymnastics to better prepare for international competitions.

Methods

This article draws upon multiple sources of data to understand China’s sudden decline at the Rio Olympics. We analyze the scores that international gymnasts received at both the World Championships and the Olympics. We also draw on interview data of Chinese gymnasts, coaches, and officials to better understand the strategies of the Chinese team. Our goal is to provide a data-driven image of the Chinese team’s performance relative to other leading gymnastics teams with subjective explanations for why the team implemented those strategies and tactics.

Quantitative data collection and analysis

The Final Score (F-Score) a gymnast receives on any given apparatus is determined by a combination of Difficulty Score (D-Score), which includes difficulty, composition requirements and connection value, and Execution Score (E-Score), which represents the execution and artistry of the performance.^10,11 We analyze the D-Score and E-Score of exercises performed by gymnasts on each apparatus in each competition from the 2008 Beijing Olympics to the 2016 Rio Olympics and the 2013 to 2015 World Championships. We retrieved these scores from the results book at the USA gymnastics official website.⁶ Moreover, the age of the medalists of men’s artistic gymnastics (MAG) and women’s artistic gymnastics (WAG) at the Rio Olympic Games was collected from the official website of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.¹⁹ Finally, falls and supports with 1 or 2 hands during any landing (deductions as high as 1.0 points) by the Chinese artistic gymnastics team and their major competitors were collected from videos of the 2013 to 2015 World Championships and the Rio Olympics.

Since athletes seek higher rankings in competition, we studied the effects of difficulty value and performance quality on the performance outcomes following the open-ended rules in 2006 by using Spearman’s Rho to measure the correlation coefficient of D-Score rank and E-Score rank with F-Score rank. Since D-Score and E-Score in team finals and all-around finals of both the Beijing and London Olympics cannot be obtained from the result books, we use the results of apparatus finals from the Beijing to Rio Olympics as the sample data for Spearman’s Rho analysis. The final E-Score in the Spearman’s Rho analysis of this paper includes penalties, as F-Score equals to D-Score plus E-Score minus any penalties which typically occur when going out of bounds on floor exercise and vaulting table or exceeding the time limit for a routine. Also, since gymnasts perform two vaults in the apparatus final, we averaged both scores.

Expert interviews and data production

With the exploratory nature of the study and the focus on the subjective experiences of the participants, an inductive qualitative approach was needed, in which we were guided by Charmaz’s constructivist approach to grounded theory.²⁰ Additionally, an information-oriented selection procedure was employed to make full use of a small sample of available cases.²¹ Selection standards were two: interview participants must have been directly involved in the process of preparing for the Rio Olympics and they needed to represent different roles on the team, specifically athlete, coach, and executive. Jun He drew on his social networks to recruit WQ (MAG) and JD (WAG) who are gymnasts that competed for China at the Rio Olympic Games; ZF (MAG & WAG) and RM (MAG) who are their coaches; and BG who is an executive of the Chinese Gymnastics Association (CGA).

Individual semi-structured interviews with the national team were conducted in Beijing in September 2016. The central questions Jun He asked were the reasons for the Chinese gymnastics team’s failure in Rio. The interviews ranged from 15 to 30 minutes and the contents were transcribed word for word, based on initial, focused and theoretical coding procedures,²⁰ which began after the first interview was completed and lasted throughout the duration of the study.

Results

Apparatus-athletes versus all-arounders of Team China

The Chinese gymnastics team emphasized the development of apparatus athletes following the Beijing Olympics rather than all-arounders. Team China had titled on 6 apparatuses at Beijing in addition to the MAG team winning gold in the team and all-around finals. Similarly, the WAG team was confident that at London they could contend for the team and apparatus final despite the switch to 5-3-3. As a result, they lacked strong all-arounders in both the London and the Rio Olympic cycles. As ZF stated:

Placing great emphasis on specialists after 2008 constrained the development of all-arounders, and forced many gymnasts in China to abandon some apparatuses and become “pure apparatus athletes” from a very young age.

This disadvantaged China in international competitions when the 5-3-3 team format was promulgated. On the men’s side, the lack of all-arounders disadvantaged China at the 2012 London Olympics where they narrowly won the team title and no gymnasts qualified for the all-around final. On the women’s side, China had historically been weak on both floor exercise and vault, which made fostering excellent all-arounders even more difficult. Whereas China took first place in the team finals at Beijing, they fell to fourth in London.

China became intentional about the lack of all-arounders in the Rio Olympic cycle,²² however developing elite all-arounders took longer than apparatus athletes. So although the Chinese all-arounders like DENG Shudi, LIN Chaopan, and WANG Yan have made strides on the international stage since 2012,²³ they are still far from becoming top world all-arounders. As RM stated:

Actually, both DENG Shudi and LIN Chaopan are young all-arounders, but it is too late to train more all-arounders, we don’t have so much time since we did not start the plan of fostering all-arounders until late in the London Olympic cycle when we realized what an excellent all-arounder means in the 5-3-3 format to a team like China to contend in the Games.

Difficulty versus execution of Team China

The D and E Scores of Top 8 MAG/WAG teams at the 2014, 2015 World Championships and the Rio Olympics are listed in Table 1. It shows that in total D-Score China’s MAG team was in the lead at the three matches and China’s WAG team almost matched the USA. While in total E-Score, both of China’s MAG and WAG teams ranked low in the top 8 teams. The total E-Score of the Chinese MAG team dropped from 3rd place at the 2014 World Championships to 7th place at the 2015 World Championships and the 6^th place at the Rio Olympics. Similarly, the Chinese WAG team ranked 6th in terms of total E-Score at the 2014 World Championships, and despite rebounding to 3rd at the 2015 World Championships, they fell to 7th place in Rio. WQ and JD each addressed the declining performance due to the physical toll that resulted from emphasizing difficulty:

Table 1.

D- and E-Scores of top 8 MAG/WAG teams at 2014, 2015 World Championships & 2016 Olympics, sorted by team rank in Rio.

	Country	2014 Championships		2015 Championships		2016 Olympics
	Country	DS	ES	DS	ES	DS	ES
Rio MAG Rank
1	JPN	116.3(3)	157.369(1)	116.2(3)	154.818(2)	118.7(2)	155.394(2)
2	RUS	115.5(4)	151.203(7)	115.5(4)	153.262(3)	116.1(4)	155.653(1)
3	CHN	119.1(1)	154.269(3)	120.5(1)	149.759(7)	119.2(1)	152.522(6)
4	GBR	113.6(5)	155.670(2)	115.3(5)	155.245(1)	116.4(3)	153.652(4)
5	USA	116.5(2)	154.069(4)	117.1(2)	151.053(5)	115.4(5)	153.860(3)
6	BRA	111.7(6)	152.162(5)	111.4(6)	148.377(8)	112.9(6)	151.628(7)
7	GER	109.3(7)	147.260(8)	—	—	108.4(7)	153.175(5)
8	UKR	—	—	—	—	85.0(8)	117.378(8)
WAG Rank
1	USA	73.7(1)	105.580(1)	75.0(1)	106.338(1)	76.1(1)	108.797(1)
2	RUS	70.9(3)	101.162(3)	71.6(3)	100.464(5)	72.6(4)	104.088(3)
3	CHN	72.6(2)	100.087(6)	74.8(2)	101.464(3)	75.2(2)	101.103(7)
4	JPN	66.1(7)	99.622(8)	69.6(5)	100.387(6)	72.1(5)	102.671(5)
5	GBR	67.7(6)	101.095(4)	70.6(4)	101.780(2)	73.7(3)	101.162(6)
6	GER	—	—	—	—	69.6(7)	104.072(4)
7	NED	—	—	63.5(8)	99.330(7)	67.8(8)	105.047(2)
8	BRA	—	—	—	—	71.2(6)	100.987(8)

Note: there is no team final in the 44th World Championships; “DS” and “ES” mean D-Score and E-Score respectively; “—” means this NOC did not enter top 8 in team final at this Championships; the number in brackets indicates the rank among the top 8 teams.

WQ: The increasing of D-Score on both parallel bars and rings [before the Rio Games] caused me to suffer pains in my shoulders and wrists all the time, which, to a large extent, affected my performance.

JD: Uneven bars is my strongest apparatus, so my coaches and leaders placed high expectations on me. To improve the chance of winning in Rio, I increased the D-Score to 7.1 during winter training the year prior to the Games, but at the cost of suffering some problems with my right forearm.

Apart from increasing the risk of injuries, enhancing D-Score up to the limit also drove the failure rate of routines up enormously. Table 2 compares the falls committed by China, Japan, and the USA in the all-around, apparatus, and team finals from the 2013 to 2015 World Championships (held in the Rio Olympic cycle) plus the Rio Olympics. It shows that the average rate of falls and supports with 1 or 2 hands during landing by both the Chinese men’s team (11.6%) and women’s team (19%) were higher than that of the Japanese men’s team (4%) and the US women’s team (2.1%), respectively.

Table 2.

Percentage of falls and supports with 1 or 2 hands during landing by China, Japan and America from C-II to C-IV among four artistic gymnastics world competitions in the Rio Olympic cycle.

Competitions	Men		Women
Competitions	CHN	JPN	CHN	USA
2013 World Championships	11.8	0.0	27.3	0.0
2014 World Championships	11.4	0.0	20.8	0.0
2015 World Championships	11.4	8.6	20.0	3.8
2016 Olympics	11.8	5.9	12.5	3.7
Average	11.6	4.0	19.0	2.1

It can be concluded that China did not balance the development of difficulty with execution in preparation for the Rio Olympic cycle, as BG and ZF indicated:

BG: Our young gymnasts have been walking fast on the road. They desperately want to enhance difficulty value, but they ignore the special care needed for a delicate and refined execution.

ZF: The direction of world gymnastics has developed toward performance quality, but we have not been aware of it, and have attached more attention to difficulty rather than quality, which was an important fact causing our defeat at Rio.

How Team China approached high D-Score versus other countries

Chinese gymnasts in both qualification and finals at Rio scored lower than gymnasts from many other countries, especially Japan, Russia and the USA, even when they were cleanly performed, which was not expected prior to the Games. Team China’s underperformance resulted from over-emphasizing high D-Scores without accounting for scoring changes in the CoP, which then negatively impacted E-Scores. For example, on parallel bars Team China favors the use of skills with somersaults to land on upper arms as a way to build the D-Score, especially applying these elements of roll backward with salto backward tuck (or piked) to upper arm hang (Dimitrenko or LI Xiaopeng) to meet the requirement of Element Group II (i.e. elements starting in upper arm position). However, the CoP specifies deductions for such skills due to the lack of extension before regrasping after saltos. This meant that judges were likely to deduct 0.1 or 0.3 points for every one of those skills.¹⁰ In contrast, most gymnasts in the Rio Olympic cycle did not include those skills, particularly Dimitrenko or LI Xiaopeng in Element Group II, in their routines. Uchimura Kohei, for instance, switched from Dimitrenko at the 2013 and 2014 World Championships to Harada (i.e., roll backward with ½ turn tuck to upper arm hang) at the 2015 World Championships. Furthermore, the top 8 gymnasts on the parallel bars final at Rio (see Table 3), except for the Chinese gymnasts, used movements in Element Group II such as Harada, Richard, Backward uprise and salto forward piked to support, etc., rather than Dimitrenko, since these elements emphasize extension before regrasping after salto.

Table 3.

Movements of Element Group II performed by the top 8 gymnasts on parallel bars Final at Rio.

Rank	Name	NOC	Movements performed in Element Group II
1	VERNIAIEV Oleg	UKR	Backward uprise and salto forward piked to support
2	VERNIAIEV Oleg	USA	Roll backward with ½ turn tuck to upper arm hang (Harada)
3	BELYAVSKIY David	RUS	Forward uprise with 1/1 turn to handstand (Richards)
3	BELYAVSKIY David	RUS	Backward uprise and salto forward piked to support
4	DENG Shudi	CHN	Roll backward with salto backward tuck to upper arm hang (Dimitrenko)
5	LARDUET Manrique	CUB	Backward uprise and salto forward piked to support
6	MUNTEAN Andrei Vasile	ROU	Forward uprise and straddle cut backward to handstand
7	KATO Ryohei	JPN	Backward uprise and salto forward piked to support
8	YOU Hao	CHN	Roll backward with salto backward tuck to upper arm hang (Dimitrenko)

The Chinese WAG team also over-emphasized D-Score. On uneven bars a composition characterized by “long flight” and “multi flight” (i.e., continuous flight elements between high bar and low bar) is advocated in the CoP and applied by most women gymnasts across the world.²⁴ Although Team China began to move in this direction, the routines still heavily depended on giant circles with turns. However, the deduction for such elements in the Rio cycle became much stricter. This is particularly clear in the technical directives regarding giant circle with turn to handstand position that is considered reached only when all body parts are vertically aligned, and deductions are scored if the angle of the body against the vertical plane is more than 10°.¹¹ This is a very difficult execution since very few gymnasts can control their bodies in swings with turns to reach handstand in such a precise manner every time. Thus, increasing the number of these elements in a routine increases the rate of errors presented to the judges. Which is why the Chinese women’s difficult but error prone uneven bars routines did not win high scores despite success in the past.

Correlation of D-Score and E-Score ranks with F-Score rank in the last three Olympics

We used Spearman’s rho to quantify the relationship between F-Score rank and D- and E-Score ranks of the top 8 athletes in both MAG and WAG apparatus finals at the latest three Olympic Games (see Table 4). Our analysis shows that both D-Score and E-Score ranks significantly and positively correlate with F-Score rank (P < 0.01). While the correlation coefficient between D-Score and F-Score for both genders decreased across the last three Games, the intensity of the relationship between E-Score and F-Score for both genders remained constantly higher than 0.60 from Beijing to Rio.

Table 4.

Spearman’s rho of DS and ES ranks with FS rank in C-III of both MAG and WAG from 2008 to 2016 Olympics.

	F-Score rank
	D-Score rank( $ρ_{MAG} / ρ_{WAG}$ )	E-Score rank( $ρ_{MAG} / ρ_{WAG}$ )
2008 Olympics	0.456/0.737	0.839/0.817
2012 Olympics	0.740/0.656	0.806/0.881
2016 Olympics	0.397/0.584	0.604/0.917

Note: Sample sizes for MAG and WAG are 48 and 32 respectively.

**Correlation coefficient is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

It can be inferred that when the open-ended CoP was introduced by FIG in 2006, most countries were unable to increase D-Score in the two years before Beijing 2008, especially in MAG (MAG consists of more apparatuses and more movements on each apparatus (except vault) than WAG). This meant for MAG, the differences in D-Score between countries were not huge at Beijing. However, countries had enough time to adapt to higher D-Score via special training before London 2012. As a result, fierce competition over D-Score became the key to winning medals at London.²⁵ In MAG compared to the results at Beijing, the positive relationship between D- and F-Score ranks at London increased significantly, with the correlation between E-Score and F-Score ranks remaining almost unchanged (around 0.80) due to the strict evaluation by the E-jury.²⁶ Whereas in WAG, probably due to the introduction of scoring artistry in 2009 as well as the strict deductions for errors, execution was more impactful at London.

In the Rio cycle, as Former FIG president Bruno Grandi stated at the 2014 Nanning World Championships, the FIG decided to give greater weight to the artistic aspect of gymnastics performances in the open-ended CoP.²⁷ As a result, the correlation between E-Score and F-Score ranks at Rio became much closer than that of D-Score and F-Score ranks for both genders (especially women). Observed performance data clearly shows that the FIG preferred elegance and artistry over difficulty in both MAG and WAG, which was a drastic change at the institutional level.

Length of the Chinese gymnasts’ career versus other nations at Rio 2016

Table 5 shows that all of the top 8 teams at Rio on the men’s side, except for China, had at least two gymnasts that competed in two consecutive Olympics; Japan had four. Although not as striking as on the men’s side, the women’s teams had a similar pattern. The Chinese gymnastics team retained less senior talent in the Rio Olympic cycle than other nations. Furthermore, we show the age distribution of medalists in gymnastics at the Rio Olympics by gender in Figure 1. Since most of the medalists on the men’s side were between the ages 22 and 28 (19 gymnasts account for 70.4% of all men’s medalists), these are probably the prime years for men’s success at international meets. Although women 16 to 20 won the most medals (12 gymnasts account for 63.2% of all women’s medalists), their decline between the ages 20 to 26 (7 gymnasts account for 36.8% of all women’s medalists) was more gradual than that of the men. This suggests that women gymnasts can extend their careers after the age of 20 despite popular beliefs to the contrary.

Table 5.

Consecutive gymnasts among the top 8 men’s and women’s teams at the Rio Olympics.

Rank	Men			Women
Rank	NOC	Consecutive gymnasts	%	NOC	Consecutive gymnasts	%
1	JPN	4	80	USA	2	40
2	RUS	2	40	RUS	2	40
3	CHN	1	20	CHN	0	0
4	GBR	3	60	JPN	1	20
5	USA	3	60	GBR	0	0
6	BRA	3	60	GER	2	40
7	GER	3	60	NED	1	20
8	UKR	2	40	BRA	1	20

Figure 1.

Age distribution of MAG/WAG medalists at the Rio Olympics.

In contrast, most Chinese men’s gymnasts are below age 24 and women are below 17,^28,29 and few Chinese gymnast (especially women) participate in the Games more than once. At Rio, the average age of Chinese men’s and women’s teams was 23.8 years (SD = 2.387) and 17.6 years (SD = 1.817) respectively. Except for ZHANG Chenlong who attended the London Olympics, every Chinese Olympic gymnast made their debut at Rio. In general, gymnast careers are typically shorter in China than in other top countries, and injury is a leading cause for the premature retirement of Chinese gymnasts.²⁸ In the Rio cycle, ZOU Kai and XIAO Ruoteng on men’s side and LIU Tingting and YAO Jinnan on the women’s side were all removed from the team before the Games due to injury.^30,31 And during the 2016 Olympics at Rio, the Chinese women struggled with illness and injuries.³² It is widely admitted that the lack of scientific training, which mainly refers to individualized training volume, intensity, and content, particularly in the transition towards coaching older gymnasts, contributes largely to the numerous injuries among Chinese gymnasts.^7,28,33–35 Although China made great improvements in scientific training and gymnast development policies in preparation for the Beijing Olympics, in which YANG Wei, HUANG Xu and LI Xiaopeng on men’s side survived three Olympic cycles (from Sydney 2000 to Beijing 2008) and CHENG Fei on women’s side competed in two Olympics consecutively (from Athens 2004 to Beijing 2008), these coaching practices were not maintained in the Rio cycle.

RM: Indeed, the length of our gymnasts’ careers are generally shorter than that of foreigners mainly owing to the lack of scientific training, which results in a great number of talented gymnasts retiring very early in their sporting life. However, on the contrary, in the Beijing Olympic cycle, a couple of older gymnasts, like HUANG Xu, YANG Wei, LI Xiaopeng, survived and took part in the Beijing Olympics after Sydney and Athens thanks to scientific training in the successive Olympic cycle, particularly in the Beijing Olympic cycle. But in the Rio cycle, we did not do well in this aspect.

Discussion

The Chinese gymnastics team won both the MAG and WAG team titles at the Beijing Olympics where the team final format was 6-3-3. But when the competition system for team finals changed to the 5-3-3 format at the London and Rio Olympics,^5,6 fewer participants on a team place greater importance on all-arounders. That is why countries that aspire to medal in the team finals in recent Olympic cycles have a core of excellent all-arounders. From Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson at Beijing to Gabrielle Douglas at London to Simone Biles at Rio, the U.S. women’s team dominates Olympic cycles when led by at least one top all-arounder. The Japanese men’s team also has seen two different top all-arounders since 2004, Hiroyuki Tomita and Uchimura Kohei. In contrast, Team China did not effectively respond to the structural changes in the competition system as ZF and RM said. To address this lack, China became intentional about developing all-arounders early in the Rio Olympic cycle.²² However, developing elite all-arounders took longer than apparatus athletes. So although Chinese all-arounders, like DENG Shudi, LIN Chaopan, and WANG Yan have made strides on the international stage since 2012,²³ they are still far from becoming top world all-arounders. During the Rio Olympic cycle, China’s top men’s all-arounders, DENG Shudi and LIN Chaopan, reached the total score of 90 points in all-around, but still fell by at least 1.5 to 2 points to their top competitors (e.g. Uchimura Kohei). At the Rio Olympics, neither SHANG Chunsong nor WANG Yan won medals despite performances without large errors and falls in the all-around final. By overlooking the increasing importance of all-arounders versus apparatus athletes since Beijing 2008, Team China faced a serious shortage of all-around talent, landing itself in a weak position when contending for the team final.^a

China also did not effectively adapt to changes in artistic gymnastics’ scoring system. Recognizing the increased emphasis on difficulty in the open-ended CoP introduced by FIG in 2006, China spared no efforts to develop new difficult elements and connections (stringing difficult elements together in a series of moves adds bonuses to a routine’s D-Score) for the two years before the Beijing Olympics. As a result, they topped D-Score standings in 5 out of 9 apparatus finals they entered at Beijing.⁶ Likewise, in London, China had the highest D-Scores in the men’s team final and beat second-place Japan by 3.2 in D-Score. Focusing on D-Score in preparation for the Olympic Games after 2006 was the foundation of China’s victories.³⁷ However, they over-emphasized difficulty value and did not realize the importance of performance quality in the “open-ended” CoP after Beijing (as argued by BG and ZF).

Actually, the problem of overemphasizing D-Score was lurking behind China’s success at the 2011 Tokyo World Championships. The Chinese MAG team had the highest D-Score in the competition and won the team final, but their E-Score was 0.7 behind second-place Japan and 1.049 behind third-place United States.⁶ The following year at the London Olympics, although the Chinese men took the team title without any falls, their E-Score was only 0.845 ahead of Japan that committed three falls (at least a 3.0 deduction in total E-Score) on two apparatuses in the men’s team final.³⁶ The problem of enhancing difficulty to an excessive degree crippled Team China at Rio. For one thing, improving D-Score beyond their capacity not only increased the risk of injuries (as WQ and JD said), it also lowered performance quality and success rate (see Tables 1 and 2). For another, the FIG has been weighting the performance quality in the open-ended CoP since 2009, which clearly manifested at the Rio Olympics (see Table 4). Correspondingly, Team China paid a bitter price in Rio for deemphasizing execution.

Additionally, Team China failed to move with the times as they dropped to 11th place on the medal table behind host Brazil at Rio. They've remained trapped in a traditional style of training without improving the construction of their routines. Although Team China is perfect on geometric lines, eurythmy barely exists. Concomitantly the way in which Team China approached increasing D-Scores not only failed to build crowd-pleasing routines for the judges and spectators, they also negatively impacted E-Scores. The way Team China constructs their routines on the parallel bars and uneven bars, discussed above, led former FIG president Bruno Grandi to state that “if [Chinese gymnasts] stay like they are, they are robots”.¹

Finally, our study shows that the Chinese gymnastics team retained less senior talent in the Rio Olympic cycle than other nations (see Table 5). Many potential gymnasts retired early in their sporting career because of a lack of scientific training (as RM argued). Although artistic gymnastics is usually considered a sport that requires early entrance and intense training during childhood and then performance peaks before adulthood,^37,38 quite a few medalists of both the MAG and WAG teams at the Rio Olympics were senior contenders (see Figure 1). This means the prime ages for the success of both men’s and women’s gymnasts may be extended beyond the age of 20 (men can generally be older than women). These results are congruent with that of previous investigations.^14,15,18 It is agreed widely that the open-ended CoP since 2009 was beneficial for older gymnasts owing to the increased weight on the performance quality (especially artistry).^14,16,39,40 Therefore, extending the career of competitors is an important strategy for teams that aspire for medals in international matches because senior gymnasts enjoy a longer period of deliberate practice that is essential to achieving Olympic quality performances^39–41 and have potentially better capacities to express themselves artistically than younger gymnasts.^14,15 Clearly, Team China did not prepare effectively in the Rio cycle. The shorter career of Chinese gymnasts, to a large extent, can also be regarded as an ineffective response to changes in the scoring system. When coupled with the disproportionate weight attached to difficulty and execution and few improvements in the construction of routines, Team China does not follow the orientation of the open-ended CoP.

Conclusions

The Chinese artistic gymnastics team had its worst showing at Rio since returning to the Games in 1984. Our study shows that their conspicuous underperformance in Rio primarily resulted from their misinterpretation of changes in both the new competition system for the team final and the open-ended CoP introduced by the FIG following the Beijing Olympics, and that misinterpretation led to poor strategies when preparing for the Rio Olympics. The conclusions we draw from Team China’s failure in artistic gymnasts at Rio 2016 have broader implications for how other gymnastics nations can structure their preparation for international competitions. Effectively reversing the reasons for Team China’s decline in Rio requires grasping three conclusions about the development of gymnastics. First, all-arounders are more important for smaller teams since the 2012 London Games when team size went from 6-3-3 to 5-3-3, and especially at the upcoming Tokyo Olympics when team size will be 4-3-3.⁴² Second, in the context of the open-ended version of the CoP, E-Score rank among finalists correlated more strongly with F-Score rank than does D-Score rank in Rio. Therefore, performance quality is probably at present the most decisive factor for winning in the finals given the importance placed on artistry by the FIG. Thus, it is crucial to keep pace with changes in the scoring system by not only reducing errors but also constructing routines with harmony and creativity. Third, following from the second conclusion, the recent past has witnessed an increasing number of gymnasts, especially women, who have prolonged the development of their skills as they age, which confirms the possibility of continuous skill development into their mid-20s. Moreover, senior gymnasts, especially women, are more likely to continue developing the technical and artistic quality of their performances due to increased training time. Thus, coaches should be encouraged to redefine gymnasts’ skill development and to program their training for more than one Olympic cycle. Strategizing around these developments will generate significant differences.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Jun He received financial support from the Youth Fund Project of Humanities and Social Sciences by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China in 2019 (19YJC890015) (2019 年度中国教育部人文社会科学研究规划青年基金项目《社会学视角下拟制宗族与中国优势项目成绩获得研究》(项目批准号: 19YJC890015).

ORCID iDs

Jun He

Lei Zhang

Note

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

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