Theyâll be dancing on the streets of ROC tonight after they beat the Yanks in the womenâs team gymnastics.
The big question now will surely be will Simone Biles compete in the all round championship, or at all in the rest of these Olympics.
First time sticking on the Olympics and fucking rubby is on and low and behold thereâs a serious head injury
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My lass said Simone wasnât her usual perfection the last day. What an awful shame. She appears to defy gravity. Iâve never seen anyone like her before.
So itâs basically your fault
@Cheasty
when is Gnat playing Wang in the Badminton do you know?
Gnat is fucking box office in fairness to him
I stuck at it until the rugby football 7 a side game at 0300- ive been invogorated by Timmy McCarthy and Seanâs commentary of Serbia and Canada last night and also Gnat earlier in the day.
as an aside - Swimming is an atrocious spectacle- aside from the superb analysis from Ian Paisley Jnr and Earl it is woeful otherwise
Swimming is like horseracing. If youâre invested itâs mighty, it youâre not itâs eight flies up a wall.
Romania is to womenâs gymnastics what Argentina is to football, France is to rugby, the West Indies is to cricket. Actually Romanian womenâs gymnastics is all those things to the entire Olympics. But for the second Olympics in a row, there was no Romanian team in the team final.
This is the only lady keeping the flame alive. And sheâll only get one go, in the beam final. If her leg holds up, which it might not.
This is the Olympics.
By Maggie Astor
Published July 24, 2021Updated July 27, 2021, 2:36 a.m. ET
In October 2014, a video of the Romanian gymnast Larisa Iordache went viral. She was saving Simone Biles from a bee.
They were both standing on the podium of the world championships in China to collect their medals â a gold for Biles, a silver for Iordache â when the bee buzzed in Bilesâs bouquet. Iordache pointed to it. Screaming, Biles threw the bouquet down and ran toward Iordache as if seeking protection. The bee flew off.
But the clip, which has been viewed more than three million times, showed something more than a funny scene. It captured what is still, seven years later, the closest any gymnast has come to beating Biles in an international all-around competition.
Iordache, 18 and carrying the once-storied Romanian gymnastics program almost single-handedly on her shoulders, had given an outstanding performance that day â one that might well have won in another era.
There was hope she could beat Biles the following year, in 2015. For the most talented Romanian gymnast of her generation, it seemed like a reasonable goal.
Instead, she spent the rest of the decade stymied by injuries at every crucial moment. Biles became unbeatable. And as recently as last year, it looked as though Iordacheâs gymnastics career had peaked on that podium in Nanning, China, 0.466 of a point short of gold.
The last of the Romanians
Iordache, left, was the runner-up to Simone Biles in the all-around at the 2014 world championships.Credit⌠Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
Before Biles came around, Nadia Comaneci was the gymnast against which the best were measured â a fact not lost on Iordache, whom the Romanian news media called âthe new Nadiaâ before she was even old enough to compete internationally.
Commentating during NBCâs coverage of the 2014 world championships, Nastia Liukin, the 2008 Olympic all-around champion, quoted Iordache as saying, âAlthough Iâm flattered to be compared to her, Iâm Larisa, and I want to be myself.â
That, it turned out, was a lot to ask. Comaneciâs performance at the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal â where she became the first gymnast to score a perfect 10 at an Olympics and then did it six more times before the closing ceremony â made her the first in a line of Romanian stars stretching four decades. By the time Iordache won her silver world championship medal in 2014, it was clear that she might be the last.
Romanian gymnastics fell apart gradually, and then suddenly. Its development programs weakened, and leaders started turning away from promising young gymnasts, leading some to quit when their coaches coaxed veterans out of retirement rather than invest in the next generation. When the veterans retired for good, there was no one to replace them.
As the program crumbled behind the scenes, it fell to Iordache to maintain appearances.
In the team competition at the 2014 world championships, Romania placed fourth, continuing an unmatched streak: 40 years of finishing in the top four at every world championships. But without Iordache, it would likely have been eighth at best.
The next year, the facade collapsed. Romania finished 13th at the 2015 world championships, failing to qualify a full team for the Olympics for the first time since 1968. So complete was the meltdown that Iordache, who won a bronze in the all-around final at the 2015 meet, got the teamâs highest score on three of four events despite falling twice.
Afterward, in tears, she apologized before leading the team away.
A few years earlier, at 16, at the 2012 London Games, Iordache had been expected to contend for gold medals in the all-around, on balance beam and on floor exercise.
Iordache at the 2012 London Games.CreditâŚGetty Images
Instead, she was hindered by plantar fasciitis in her left foot, and it wasnât clear until the last minute that she would even be able to compete on every apparatus. She finished ninth in the all-around and sixth on beam and did not qualify for the floor final.
âItâs very, very difficult,â Mariana Bitang, one of Romaniaâs head coaches at the time, told reporters. âShe was the most important piece of the team.â
This would become a theme for Iordache: high expectations, and then ill-timed injuries. She was successful in national and continental competitions, winning more European Championship medals than any gymnast except Svetlana Khorkina, a three-time Olympian from Russia. But again and again, world titles eluded her.
After its meltdown in 2015, Romania had one more chance to qualify a team for Rio: the Olympic test event in April 2016. But a broken finger kept Iordache home, and without her, the team finished second to last. Its highest-ranked member was 24th in the all-around.
As Iordache recovered from the broken finger, and a concussion a few months later, and a knee injury after that, the Romanian Gymnastics Federation chose Catalina Ponor â a five-time Olympic medalist from 2004 and 2012 â for the countryâs one spot in Rio. And under arcane qualification rules, Iordacheâs all-around medal at the 2015 world championships was not enough to qualify her to compete as an individual athlete, even though a medal on a single apparatus would have.
Iordache, 20, and battered from so many injuries, could have retired.
But she didnât.
âThe feeling of proving to myself that I am better than I think has never diminished in my soul,â she said in an email this month, adding that she had felt an urge to keep going for her teammatesâ sake. âSo I couldnât let my thoughts overwhelm me, and I got up every time.â
Triumph and tragedy
Iordache dominated several competitions in 2017, winning medals at World Cup meets and beating her nearest competitor at the Romanian national championships by more than five points. And with Biles on a post-Olympic hiatus, she was a favorite to win the world all-around title.
She knew, her competitors knew and her fans knew this might be the best chance she would ever have.
On the first day of the 2017 world championships, she was introduced in front of a crowd in Montreal, where Comaneci had made history 41 years before. Somewhere in the crowd was Comaneci herself, cheering her on. Iordache headed to the floor to warm up.
It was nothing, not even a full tumbling pass â just a timer, a simple skill performed to get the feel for the equipment. But as she took off into the flip, something snapped.
Iordache fell to the mat.
âAt that moment,â she said in her email, âI felt like all my work and that of my coaches was gone in a second.â
Her devastation was captured on every screen in the arena as she was carried to the sidelines, crying into her coachâs shoulder.
The injury was a ruptured Achillesâ tendon, and it would take three operations to repair it.
One after another, Olympic qualification opportunities passed. Had she been able to compete at the 2019 world championships, where 32 individual athletes could qualify, she would have been a shoo-in. She might also have had a shot through the World Cup series, but by 2020, it was too late for that too.
Then came the pandemic, and the postponement of the Summer Games in Tokyo. It dashed the hopes of many athletes, but for Iordache it was a gift. âI started to think seriously that I could do this again,â she said.
In October 2020, three years after she had torn her Achillesâ, she tested positive for the coronavirus. Her symptoms were mild, but her training schedule was upended yet again.
She competed at the Romanian national championships in November at partial strength. The European Championships in Basel, Switzerland â her last chance to make the Olympics â were fast approaching, and only two spots were available for Tokyo.
Iordache, left, returned to the podium at the 2020 European Artistic Gymnastic Championships. The 2021 championships would be her last chance to qualify for the Olympics.CreditâŚEPA, via Shutterstock
On April 21, 2021, the morning of the competition, she woke up with abdominal pain so severe she could barely stand.
Doctors on site suggested she withdraw from the competition and go to the emergency room, but Iordache refused.
âI did everything at my own risk because I could not give up,â she said. âI got up, I warmed up, I got used to the pain a bit, and in my mind it was just: âYou only have one exercise to do on each event â you can resist! You went through a lot until you got here, and you are not allowed to give up!ââ
On social media, she downplayed the illness as a âmild fever.â In reality, she said in her email, she was in agony.
Pushing through what turned out to be a kidney infection â one serious enough that she was hospitalized that night â she earned the last Olympic spot. Her doctors had to talk her out of competing in the balance beam final, Comaneci said.
As she received intravenous antibiotics in a Swiss hospital, Iordache posted a heartfelt thanks to her coaches, Cristian and Lacramioara Moldovan, who she said had âbelieved in me when I couldnât.â
She would go home âwithout a medal I can touch,â she wrote in Romanian, âbut the most important thing I will remember for the rest of my life is that nothing is impossible if you truly want it.â
But when you are Larisa Iordache, it seems, the blows keep coming.
The Romanian Gymnastics Federation announced on Wednesday that, because of an ankle injury, she would not compete in the all-around in Tokyo. Instead, she will focus solely on the balance beam, her specialty.
It was always her best chance to win an Olympic medal. Now itâs her only chance â and she will pursue it in the shadow of the biggest loss of all.
When Iordache, now 25, walks onto the competition floor in Tokyo around 2 a.m. Eastern time on Sunday, one supporter will be missing: her mother, who died four weeks before the opening ceremony.
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I think Peter Collins said Nhat is on at 10:40 tomorrow morning.
The swimming is lacking a crowd. But it is what it is. An Olympic swimming meet. And that demands attention.
Timmy and Sean are tremenjus. They are basically Cha and Miah.
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Hereâs Larisaâs dismount in the beam qualification. Talk about playing through the pain barrier.
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Charles Haugheyâs grandniece Siobhan Haughey, the second best time of the eight finalists in the 200 metres freestyle tonight. Sheâll surely get a medal. The 400 metres winner Ariarne Titmus, whoâs qualified fastest will be hard to beat.
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A hard woman.
She could play ladies football for Monaghan.
Nick OâHare was quietly scathing of Katie Ledeckyâs performance in the semi-final. He effectively said she has some big technical issues.
Great to hear Doris Burke commentating on the soft ball on BNC. I least I think itâs her.
That was mark kinsellas daughter getting bronze for team GB in the team womenâs gymnastics
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Is it just me but is the celebration of any hint of success by Irish media very bad this time around?
Mark Kinsellaâs daughter
Some bunch of twins who were born here and moved away shortly later
Mona McSharryâs family being visited for the swim final when it was obvious she would struggle. And then reporting it and asking the family to comment on her coming last.
No wonder we get nowhere with all that carry on.
Mona McSharry was an outstanding achievement. She deserves to be celebrated for finishing 8th in the world.
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I blame mainstream media aping social media
I donât think thatâs the reason we get nowhere. Mona McSharry was just the 2nd Irish person ever to make a swimming Olympic final, and the first who was clean. She was worthy of the praise she got
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