Full Twist
A Gymnastics Blog
A Gymnastics Blog
Jul 29th

BBC Sport have posted this article regarding the Chinese age scandal from 2000 Olympic Games where China were stripped of their women’s team bronze as Dong Fangxiao was found to be 14 years old – two years too young to compete in the Games.
The Chinese officials have promised to enforce rigorous checks and processes to verify their gymnasts ages. These processes such as x-ray bone analyses have already come into action for the upcoming Youth Olympics in Singapore where the delegation have gone through stringent checks.
Two age scandals in four Olympics Games has caused China great embarrassment and it’s good that they are proposing to prevent this from happening again. What are your thoughts?
Jul 28th
Over the last few years, the interest in gymnastics seems to have increased. There are many possible reasons for this, obviously Spelbound winning Britains Got Talent has caused a surge in interest in gymnastics among children in the UK and Ireland. I think another major factor that has added to this interest is the new level of competition involved in the sport at Olympic level. For many years it was the Romanians, USA and Russia etc dominating the sport but as we have seen in the last few months, countries like the UK are catching up quickly and making things a lot more interesting, thus the media becoming more interested in gymnastics!
With that in mind, it makes me think about funding in gymnastics. I was reading this article from the BBC Sport website yesterday which includes a small section about the amount of funding given to gymnastics and what it means to the sport. Sport England has allocated £11,388,481 to gymnastic national governing bodies for 2009 until 2013, with the hope that the numbers increase and gymnasts perform better although gymnasts such as Daniel Keatings and Louis Smith are still waiting for their gyms to be refurbished, with the Olympics coming closer and closer, they’d want to secure funding very soon to move passed the initial phase.

Admittedly, I haven’t looked too much into it but how much funding does gymnastics receive from governments / sports bodies in your country? We can see above what BBC Sport have reported, I’m sure there is more to find out. In a previous post, Irish Gymnastics secured an allocation for 2010 of €169,545 for the sport – encouraging as gymnastics was one of only 11 sports out of 59 funded that maintained their funding levels this year in a year where the Irish Sports Council’s budget was cut by 4%. In Ireland, gymnastics is considering more of a minority sport as the country has it’s main sports rugby, football and the GAA sports (Gaelic and Hurling). It would be interesting to see how much more successful Irish gymnasts could be if more money was pumped in, providing better training facilities and national support etc. I’d love to know how much funding USA Gymnastics, Australian Gymnastics etc receives and how the money is spent.
So it leaves me asking:
How much funding does gymnastics receive in your country?
What difference do you think more funding could make to gymnastics in your country?
Do you feel that the allocated money is being wasted and could be used more resourcefully?
If it was you who makes the decisions, what would you spend more money on? better coaches? better facilities?
I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts.
Jul 27th

This day 2 years, will mark the beginning of the London 2012 Olympics. I’m keeping an eye today on the BBC website which has some live commentary throughout the day of todays events. At 2.15pm BBC One will be broadcasting a special show to mark the occasion. Follow the live commentary here.
Jul 26th
Tomorrow will mark the day when it will be exactly 2 years until the London 2012 Olympic Games begin. Tim Jones Performance Director speaks to the Guardian about how British Gymnastics has developed over the past year and what it must do next to meet the Olympic medal target.
In the next two years we will … continue building on the successes of the first years of this cycle and ensuring our results are progressive towards London, work towards keeping our gymnasts injury-free and illness-free, qualifying for as many places as possible through the series of World Championships in the Olympic disciplines during 2011, and focusing our resources towards a successful Olympic outcome.
Jul 24th
Today FIG began to draw the lots for the Artistic World Championships 2010. Many thanks to The Couch Gymnast who have posted the WAG qualifying round.
Subdivision 1 -ITA, CHN, ARG, MX1
Subdivision 2 -JPN, NZL, SLO, UKR
Subdivision 3 -POL, ROU, BRA, ISR
Subdivision 4 -ISL, IND, SIN, BLR
Subdivision 5 -AUS, DEN, MX3, GRE
Subdivision 6 -RUS, SWE, FRA, GBR
Subdivision 7 -HUN, USA, RSA, PRK
Subdivision 8 -CAN, COL, AUT, CZE
Subdivision 9 -ESP, POR, BEL, ECU
Subdivision 10 -SUI, KOR, TUR, MX4
Subdivision 11 -MEX, GER
Subdivision 12 -UZB, NED, MX2, FIN
Jul 22nd
Shawn Johnson’s stalker is sent to mental hospital
Trampolining gets a mention in todays Irish Times newspaper (good that gymnastics gets some sort of mention in the main stream news!)
Top FIG coaches visit Trinidad and Tobago for a 8 day Level 1 Men’s and Women’s Artistic Gymnastics courses