In the team finals, each country fields three gymnasts, and every score counts. There is no room for error. Sam Mikulak performed a strong routine until the very end. Performing a triple-twist to finish the routine, it looked as though he was concerned about over-rotating. So he took off at a sharp angle (the smaller the angle when you strike the floor out of your round-off back-handspring — it’s called a blocking vector — the higher you will go and... Read more
Fantastic opening routine from Danell Leyva. He opened with one of the toughest skills that any gymnast will perform on the floor exercise in this competition: a double-twisting double-layout. Some nice corner work, including a manna-press-to-handstand, one of the skills I performed as well. A 15.20. Excellent score. Read more
The men’s team final is finally being broadcast. Looks like the American men are starting on the floor exercise. Has anybody else wondered whether the white floor exercise has anything to do with all the gymnasts over- and under-rotating so far? I imagine it must be difficult to keep track of your rotation when there’s a glaring white carpet underneath you — to go with the glaring lights overhead. Read more
As we all know, NBC Olympics made the understandable if slightly irritating decision to broadcast the London Olympics, including Olympic gymnastics, at a substantial delay. So I can only claim to be “live-blogging” in the loosest sense, blogging along with the East Coast broadcast. I have not yet seen the results — so if you know, don’t post the results! Earlier today, I argued both for the view that the view that Jordyn Wieber was robbed, and then made the... Read more
Jordyn Wieber Was Not Robbed — She Was Outperformed by Aly Raisman I argued the opposite case in a previous post, but there’s a strong argument to be made that Jordyn Wieber was a victim of nothing but her own mistakes and reasonable rules that everyone understood perfectly well in advance. If you missed the first post, Jordyn Wieber is the reigning all-around world champion and a dominant American gymnast for years, who narrowly missed qualifying for the all-around finals at... Read more
Jordyn Wieber was Robbed! Such were the cries of outrage after yesterday’s women’s gymnastics qualifying rounds at the Olympics in London. Jordyn Wieber, the reigning world champion and indisputably America’s most dominant gymnast for the past couple years, helped the United States team qualify for the team finals, and qualified herself for the Floor Exercise finals, but failed to advance to the all-around competition. Did she perform poorly? Not particularly. She stood in fourth after the qualifying rounds were over. The... Read more
Maybe individuals can be “good without God” — but can entire societies? This is one of the burning questions undergirding Os Guinness’ A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future. Guinness, in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville, is a foreign-born observer of American culture and admirer of the audacity of the American experiment. A Free People’s Suicide examines American society and its slow and disastrous drift away from its historic moorings. The following is the second (see the first) in a... Read more
What if freedom is its own worst enemy, and Americans’ abuse of their freedoms will undermine freedom in the proper sense and ultimately dismantle our society? This is the question posted in Os Guinness’ new book, A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future. Guinness, in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville or G. K. Chesterton’s “What I Saw in America,” is a foreign-born observer of American culture and admirer of the audacity of the American experiment. See the end... Read more
Note: This is a guest post from Jennifer A. Marshall, director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation. Further biographical information at the end. Many thanks to Ms. Marshall for this excellent piece. * A grease fire has flared up at a comment made by Chick-fil-A President and COO Dan Cathy. “We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit,” Cathy said in an interview posted July 16 by the... Read more
Daniel Siedell observes in “Art and Culture: Or, Politics by Another Means — Evangelical Style“: Evangelical participation in the arts and culture is, on the whole, graceless. It is characterized by an excruciatingly puritanical preoccupation with four-letter words and nudity, turning films, novels, and even paintings (although rarely) into means for political ends, presuming that the making of art is simply another form of politics. And so in their rush to use art and other cultural practices for political agendas,... Read more
Philosophical Fragments
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