Artistry Fades as Gymnasts Push Boundaries

The American gymnast Aly Raisman won an Olympic gold medal in the floor exercise Tuesday with a score of 15.6, well above the silver medalist Catalina Ponor’s 15.2 (a huge margin in the fractional point differences of gymnastics) and the bronze medalist Aliya Mustafina’s14.9. The difference in the scores reflects the difficulty of these women’s routines.
Raisman had a difficulty score of 6.5 compared with Mustafina’s 5.9. (The gymnasts are graded separately for difficulty and execution; for the execution score, the differences were much tighter, with Raisman only a tenth of a point above the two other medalists.)
Of course, the difficulty is the point. Raisman could jump higher, tumble and twist her body more times in the air, and stick her landings (gymnastic parlance for landing with feet together and staying put on the ground) with more accuracy and precision than her competitors. Like every other sport, women’s gymnastics prizes progress — in difficulty, in power, in strength, in speed — and you have only to look at video footage of the famous female gymnasts of the 1970s to see the differences in technical capacity and style.