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WORK TITLE: The End of the Perfect 10
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WEBSITE: http://dvorameyers.com/bky
CITY: Brooklyn
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http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Dvora-Meyers/483039966 * https://www.linkedin.com/in/dvorameyers * http://www.flogymnastics.com/article/43241-q-a-with-dvora-meyers-author-of-new-release-the-end-of-the-perfect-10 * http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/books/2016/07/dvora_meyers_the_end_of_the_perfect_10_reviewed.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Brooklyn, NY.
EDUCATION:University of Pennsylvania, B.A.; New School, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist and writer. Work has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, Elle, ESPN, and Slate.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Journalist Dvora Meyers has contributed to numerous print and online media, including the New York Times, Atlantic, Elle, ESPN, and Slate. She is the author of both a self-published book of essays and a book on women’s gymnastics.
Heresy on the High Beam
Meyers draws on her childhood experience as a gymnast and avid fan of the sport in her essay collection Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess. Though the traditional narrative about gymnastics follows the arc of hard work, determination, and ultimate success, Meyers focuses instead on the more common–though little-acknowledged–frustrations, ironies, and failures that beset girls who dream of gymnastic glory. Growing up in the pre-Internet era, the author obsessively recorded televised gymnastics events, watching them alone at home. She played gymnastics with her Barbie dolls, forcing them to practice hard before sending them to the Olympics, where the doll named Kim always won gold and the Israeli doll won silver.
Much as Meyers loved to attend gymnastics practices and meets, the demands of the sport clashed with the demands of her Orthodox Jewish upbringing. Her yeshiva school schedule made it impossible for her to attend classes at the most competitive gyms. Wearing a leotard at competitions was a problem, because the Orthodox tradition of modest dress requires girls to wear long skirts and long sleeves. For that matter, most competitions were held on Saturdays, the Jewish Shabbos, and Meyers was not allowed to compete in them. These strictures, however, only fueled her desire to be part of the sport. If she had been allowed to participate fully, the author said in an article posted on the Jewish Book Council Web site, she would have quickly learned that she had little talent for the sport and would have turned her attention elsewhere. Writing on the Web site Flo Gymnastics, Danny Sierra observed that the author “hilariously illustrates the life and times of the unaccomplished gymnast, achieving a fresh and honest take on growing up as a sports fanatic. “
The End of the Perfect Ten
In The End of the Perfect Ten: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics’ Top Score–from Nadia to Now, Meyers chronicles the development of women’s gymnastics in the decades following Nadia Comaneci’s perfect score during the 1976 Montreal Olympics, when the athlete was age fourteen. As the author makes clear, this feat led to a new era in the sport. Unlike previous years, in which female competitors were usually in their twenties, gymnastics began focusing on much younger girls whose smaller, exceptionally flexible bodies could perform creative and demanding routines that were both extremely athletic and astonishingly beautiful. Girls around the world were captivated by Comaneci’s athleticism, grace, and charm, and they began to dream of gymnastic glory for themselves. Many countries, particularly the United States, launched elite programs and in time became dominant in the sport.
The darker side to this story has been documented. Eating disorders, abuse, and emotional distress have plagued many girls in training. But Meyers offers a more positive view. She writes that gymnastics has become much more diverse as girls of different ages, body types, and ethnicities have been attracted to the sport. She also notes that gymnastics has shifted away from the strict coaching style of Béla Károlyi, who had trained Comaneci and later moved with his wife to the United States, where he became head coach of the U.S. Olympic team for the 1988 games in Seoul, South Korea. In addition, writes Meyers, gymnastics has adopted a new system of scoring that emphasizes athleticism over aesthetic style and that gives girls with more muscular bodies than the waif-like Comaneci a serious shot at gold; the success of U.S. star Simone Biles proves this point.
Reviewer Meghan O’Rourke, writing in the Atlantic, found the author’s argument oversimplified. “Her sanguine analysis of rising pluralism in the sport turns out to be something of a disjointed muddle,” said O’Rourke. “She makes stabs at isolating causes and effects that are more complex than she indicates.” The reviewer questioned Meyers’s point that gymnasts can remain in the sport longer than in previous generations and commented that the author “treats the Károlyis gingerly, skirting controversies that suggest reasons to wonder what the pressure behind the scenes is really like.” In conclusion, O’Rourke stated that the new gymnastics scoring system is more complex than the author acknowledges, pushing competitors to “prioritize challenging combinations” that allow for extra points.
A reviewer for Publishers Weekly also expressed a mixed response to The End of the Perfect Ten, observing that the author “has facts and data and quotes aplenty, but what she is missing is the heartbeat of a story.” Gymnastics is replete with intrigue and drama, said the reviewer, but Meyers does not bring this into her book. Library Journal contributor Erin Entrada Kelly, on the other hand, praised the book as a thoroughly researched and detailed work that “feels like a backstage pass to the mysterious world of Olympic athletics.” Stated Sarah Marshall, writing in the New Republic: “The End of the Perfect Ten is about something even bigger than the gymnastics world itself. It shows us that we now live in a world where a young woman may captivate millions not through her alleged perfection, but through her dedication, daring, and strength.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Atlantic, July-August, 2016, Meghan O’Rourke, “Extreme Gymnastics: Has Athleticism Eclipsed the Aesthetic Spirit of the Sport?,” p. 46.
Library Journal, July 1, 2016, Erin Entrada Kelly, review of The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics’ Top Score from Nadia to Now, p.90.
New Republic, August 5, 2016, Sarah Marshall, “The Last Perfect Gymnast: How Olympic Gymnastics Beat Score Inflation and Became a Sport.”
Publishers Weekly, May 30, 2016, review of The End of the Perfect Ten, p. 51.
Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2016, Patrick Cooke, “Raising the Bar.”
ONLINE
Active + Nourished, https://activeandnourished.com.au/ (March 12, 2017), review of The End of the Perfect Ten.
Bklyner, http://bklyner.com/ (July 5, 2016), Justin Fox, “Meet Dvora Meyers: Clinton Hill’s Resident Expert on Olympic Gymnastics.”
Dvora Meyers Home Page, http://dvorameyers.com (March 12, 2017).
Excelle Sports, http://www.excellesports.com/ (July 10, 2016), Lauren Green, review of The End of the Perfect Ten.
Flo Gymnastics, http://www.flogymnastics.com/ (July 5, 2012), Danny Sierra, review of Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess; (July 4, 2016), Rebecca Johnson, “Q&A with Dvora Meyers, Author of New Release: The End of the Perfect 10.“
Jewish Book Council Web site, http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (May 14, 2012), Dvora Meyers, “A Nice Jewish Girl on the Balance Beam.”
Keene Sentinel Online (Keene, NH), http://www.sentinelsource.com/ (September 4, 2016), Maya Sweedler, review of The End of the Perfect Ten.
Missoulian Online (Missoula, MT), http://missoulian.com/ (September 4, 2016), Maya Sweedler, review of The End of the Perfect Ten.
National Public Radio Web site, http://www.npr.org/ (July 10, 2016), Michael Martin, “How the ‘Perfect 10’ Became a Thing of the Past in Gymnastics.”
Simon & Schuster Web site, http://www.simonandschuseter.com/ (March 12, 2017), author profile.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (March 12, 2017), Rebecca Schuman, review of The End of the Perfect Ten.
Smart Bitches Trashy Books, http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/ (March 12, 2017), review of The End of the Perfect Ten.
Unorthodox Gymnastics Web site, http://www.unorthodoxgymnastics.com/ (May 9, 2012), review of Heresy on the High Beam.
Q&A with Dvora Meyers, Author of New Release: The End of the Perfect 10 Q&A with Dvora Meyers, Author of New Release: The End of the Perfect 10 Photo: Carla Phillips
Jul 4, 2016
Rebecca Johnson
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On July 5, Dvora Meyers is releasing a new book to the gymnastics world and beyond--a look inside the history of the score that defined our sport for decades.
Meyers dives into the history of the Perfect 10 with its birth in 1976 by Nadia Comaneci and uncovers its demise while analyzing the changes and progression of the U.S. gymnastics system. As a journalist, history buff, and gymnastics enthusiast, Meyers combines years of research and analysis with a passion for gymnastics and storytelling.
We caught up with Meyers to hear about this exciting release...
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Photos by Carla Phillips
FloGymnastics: Why did you decide you wanted to write a book?
Dvora Meyers: At first I didn't want to write a book on gymnastics. I had just come off of doing coverage in 2012 for Deadspin and Slate and I was feeling very content. Then I was having a conversation with my friend Lindsay Green and we were just chatting about the Olympics.
We realized the 40th anniversary of Nadia is coming up and we don't have the perfect 10 anymore, and aside from memoirs from gymnasts, there really hasn't been an in-depth look at the story in a while. She was really enthusiastic about the idea, so I decided to write a proposal.
How did you narrow down to writing about the code?
For me, the 40th anniversary of Nadia was really significant because the sport has changed a lot. A lot of people became aware of the sport 40 years ago and it became associated with very young gymnastics and in many respects, the reputation of the sport hasn't really shifted in the last 20 years.
If you talk to people in the street, they still think that everyone is 14 years old and everyone is tiny, but in reality the gymnasts are getting older, the girls are more athletic, more muscular than they've ever been before. I really felt that we needed to go back to where that narrative started with Nadia and update the story for people who are just coming to the sport now.
What chapter is your favorite?
I really like the NCAA chapter. I think that even though it's not elite gymnastics and it's not part of the Olympics, I think in the United States, NCAA gymnastics is such a huge part of the gymnastics world and so frequently ignored.
I really liked talking about the role that the NCAA plays--this very strange role of being sort of parallel to the elite track in the Olympic program but also feeding into it. I do wonder, and I also give an answer to this in the book, but how successful would the United States be without this parallel track if the only thing a girl to aspire to was the world of Olympic team, which is so hard to make because there are so few spots? I feel like NCAA is just a really important part of the gymnastics ecosystem that is often ignored by the mainstream.
Who is your target audience?
I would say that I'm trying to serve two different masters and we're going to see how that goes. On the one hand, I'm definitely trying to reach more mainstream readers. I really think that gymnastics is an interesting topic and I read a lot of sports journalism because I enjoy it.
I definitely hope that if a book is well written about gymnastics, even if it's a topic that a lot of people don't think about that much outside the Olympics, it will reach those people too.
Obviously at the same time I am a gym fan, I am a gym nerd, I am one of you. I think the nitty gritty of the scoring system, I try to present in an accessible way will also be interesting to a lot of gym fans because I didn't know a lot about the politics and the wheeling and dealing that went into the scoring change, even though I follow the sport really closely. So that was somewhat surprising and I think people would be interested--gymnastics fans would be interested in the way their sport has changed the scoring system.
What is the main goal of the book?
I think I wanted fans to understand the history of their sport and where it fits in the world. I didn't want gymnastics to be treated as this sort of separate sport with judging that we don't understand and very young athletes--it's treated as though it's the athletic other.
The second part of it is that I'm a reader, and I was very passionate about gymnastics but I was really terrible at it. So for me, I was trying to almost write the book that I wanted to read, and I hope I pulled that off. I want to read a really interesting book about gymnastics that isn't focused exclusively on eating disorders or abuse, which is really a lot of the long-form work on gymnastics is kind of looking at its pathology as opposed to treating it as a holistic sport.
Do you think the Code is in a good place right now?
I think this code makes more intuitive sense in the fact that a routine that is more difficult will be worth more and the gymnast taking the risk to go for harder skills will be rewarded for it.
Do I think the code is in a perfect place? No, I can definitely speak of a few things that I don't like, such as connecting skills where you don't connect from the momentum of one to the other. Those kinds of cheaper connections I don't like.
I'm kind of happy with it, but I wouldn't say that I'd give the new scoring system a 10 in execution. I think there's work to be done.
Do you think it separates the top gymnasts too much?
On the one hand you're allowing a gymnast to really demonstrate true supremacy. So the current setup allows Simone to show just how far ahead she is of everyone, and on one hand that's great because you want to see that--you don't want her to be bunched closer to gymnasts who are really not nearly as good as she is. You want her really show how dominant she is. But on the other hand, it makes the competition less exciting when the winner is something of a foregone conclusion. So in a way the sport is definitely less exciting scoring wise because the 10 caps how far ahead one gymnast could get.
Anything else you'd like to include about the book and its release?
I hope that people who know gymnastics will learn something new at the very least or just see another side to the sport we all love.
Dvora Meyers
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Dvora Meyers
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Content Writer
Dynamic Yield
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Simon & Schuster/Touchstone
May 2014 – Present (2 years 9 months)Greater New York City Area
THE END OF THE TEN, a book about women's gymnastics, to be published in 2016.
Writer/Researcher/Creative Producer
Red Arrow Entertainment Group
March 2016 – July 2016 (5 months)New York, NY
Freelance writer, editor, and consultant
Self-employed
2008 – May 2015 (7 years)
I write and edit content for newspapers, magazines, and websites and for private clients.
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Jewcy
2012 – April 2013 (1 year)
I write about the intersection of feminism, religion, and pop culture for a bi-monthly column.
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JTA
2011 – 2011 (less than a year)
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Education
New School University
New School University
Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Creative Writing
2006 – 2008
University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), English Language and Literature/Letters
2000 – 2004
Dvora Meyers
Dvora Meyers is a New York-based writer and journalist. In 2012, she provided all of the Olympic gymnastics coverage for Deadspin and Jezebel, chronicling the results of the competition as well as her own commentary. Her work on the sport has also appeared in ESPN, Slate, VICE, and The Atlantic. Her other non-gymnastics related writing has been published in The New York Times, Elle, Tablet, New York magazine, and several other publications.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dvora Meyers
Dvora Meyers
Dvora Meyers is a journalist and writer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, ESPN, and Slate. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, where she lives with her dog, Lizzie. Neither one speaks with a Brooklyn accent.
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Introduction I'm a writer/gymnastics addict/b-girl living in New York City. I'm a columnist for Jewcy where I write about all things Semitic and womany. I'm also the youngest child so I crave attention. I've also written a book about Judaism and gymnastics (cause it goes together, you know, like peas and carrots). It's cheap. Like me. Buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00804NIMK
Interests Gymnastics, breaking, dancing, daydreaming on the subway, skipping down busy New York City Streets, changing my hair color.
Favorite Movies Legends of the Fall (the greatest of the Brad Pitt oeuvre); Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (oh, if I could only possess Charlie Kaufman's mind); The Forty Year Old Virgin, Wedding Crashers, Old School- my sense of humor seems to be permanently lodged in grade school.
Favorite Books The Things They Carried; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; Fierce Attachments; Memoirs of Catholic Girlhood; Angels in America; Housekeeping.
Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?
Meet Dvora Meyers: Clinton Hill’s Resident Expert On Olympic Gymnastics
By Justin Fox - July 5, 20162
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Dvora Meyers (Photo by Carla Phillips)
Dvora Meyers (Photo by Carla Phillips)
A Clinton Hill resident’s new book takes a deep look into how changes to scoring have thrown the world of gymnastics for a back flip.
The End of the Perfect Ten, by Dvora Meyers, is being released today and she will be discussing the tome at Greenlight Bookstore (686 Fulton Street) tomorrow night as part of a panel on women’s sports. The book explores the evolution of women’s gymnastics and especially the way the sport has grown and changed since a major change in the scoring system was implemented a decade ago.
Meyers and I sat on the patio of Hops Hill, joined by her best friend, Lizzie, an unusually amiable canine who intermittently yowled and begged for treats while we discussed Dvora’s work.
Meyers says that the book was born out of her lifelong affinity and connection to gymnastics, but that the idea came about during a conversation with a friend in 2013. During the conversation, Meyers realized that 2016 would mark both the 40th anniversary of Nadia Comaneci’s perfect score and the 10th anniversary of the new scoring system which has impacted everything about the sport.
Meyers had already covered gymnastics during the 2012 Olympic Games for outlets like Deadspin and she saw that as an opportunity to cover gymnastics with a seriousness that she feels is too often left out.
“[Gymnastics] was treated as a sport and not as this weird thing that little girls do once every four years. It’s really important to me as someone who has been involved in gymnastics for basically my entire life to see it treated that way,” said Meyers.
Lizzie in Fort Greene Park (Courtesy Instagram/dvorameyers)
Lizzie in Fort Greene Park (Courtesy Instagram/dvorameyers)
Much of the The End of the Perfect 10 was written in and around Fort Greene and Clinton Hill.
“I do a lot of writing at Primrose Cafe,” said Meyers, who added that “a lot of my choices are dictated by who has outdoor seating and who is friendly to dogs.”
Meyers grew up in Brooklyn, but she doesn’t have a trace of an accent. She says she didn’t think much of Clinton Hill when she was growing up, other than associating it with “being stuck on the G train.”
“Even though I’m a native Brooklynite, we didn’t explore these other neighborhoods in Brooklyn. I lived in Canarsie, I lived really far from everything, I went to school in Flatbush,” said Meyers.
Meyers attended the University of Pennsylvania for undergrad and received her MFA from the New School. After a sojourn to the Upper West Side, she was looking to return home to Brooklyn but Clinton Hill wasn’t on the agenda.
“I just kind of ended up here by accident. I’m really really grateful Park Slope was too expensive in 2009 when I went looking,” said Meyers.
She says that she loves living in the area, often returning to favorite haunts like The Great Georgiana and Emily.
“I’m obsessed with the burger at Emily, but they sell out,” said Meyers.
Be sure to spot Meyers in the neighborhood tomorrow night, as she discusses her book and women’s sports at Greenlight.
How The 'Perfect 10' Became A Thing Of The Past In Gymnastics
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July 10, 20165:18 PM ET
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Dvora Meyers' book The End of the Perfect 10 looks at the new scoring system for international gymnastics competitions and the evolution and demise of the iconic "perfect 10" score.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Let's talk Olympics picks now. Today, young women compete in San Jose, Calif. for the chance to represent the USA in one of the most popular sports of the Summer Games, Women's Gymnastics. The drama, artistry and strength of these young athletes have drawn spectators to the sport for years, hoping to catch an historic bars routine, a record breaking vault.
But what observers outside the sport might not know is that the rules of the sport, rather the way it's scored are changing. A score of 10 was, well, perfect. You couldn't get any higher than that. But now with an open-ended scoring system that rewards daring and risk, 10 is no longer the benchmark of success. Dvora Meyers has a new book out which describes all of this, including the history and past controversies in the sport. It's called "The End Of The Perfect 10: The Making And Breaking Of Gymnastics' Top Score - From Nadia To Now." And Dvora Meyers is with us now from NPR New York.
Welcome thanks so much for joining us.
DVORA MEYERS: Thanks so much for having me.
MARTIN: So let's just start with a piece of that subtitle from the book "From Nadia To Now." We're talking about Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian gymnast who made history in Montreal in 1976 on the uneven bars. Let me just play a little bit of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: Oh, look at that amplitude. Oh. She is really moving well. Another handstand - look at that, right to the handstand.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: (Unintelligible) Beautiful and the crowd loves it.
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #2: And it is...
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: A perfect 10.
MARTIN: Tell us what that moment meant for gymnastics. First of all, what made it a, quote, unquote, "perfect 10" - thing one. And then
MARTIN: in a minute we'll talk about what impact that had on the sport.
MEYERS: That routine - it was a compulsory exercise, which means that every single gymnast in the competition was doing that exact routine. I think if you sat through all of the competition in Montreal - the compulsory round - you have seen that routine 86 times. But she just did it so much better than everyone else that she was awarded a 10.
MARTIN: Do you think that the 10 changed the sport?
MEYERS: I wouldn't say that it changed the training at all, but the 10, obviously, made the sport so much more popular than it had ever been before and became this global symbol of perfection. It became a brand. You know, in the early 90s, she appeared on a billboard in Times Square Jockey for her 10 years of a perfect fit on a perfect 10. Like, she still to this day represents some sort of physical perfection.
But the sport itself, I don't think the 10 changed the way gymnastics functioned as a sport.
MARTIN: Do you think it brought more people into the sport?
MEYERS: Absolutely. Nadia and her predecessor, I mean - her - the first global superstar which was Olga Korbut were arguably more popular in the West than they were in their native countries and had a greater impact because after Olga and then four years later after Nadia, you see gym memberships skyrocket. A lot of young girls want to be involved in gymnastics now.
MARTIN: Talk a little bit more about the scoring. You say that one of the things that's happened, though, is that even when a routine sort of does look perfect, I mean - for example, McKayla Maroney's vault in London during the last games, it gets this long score of nine point something, getting closer and closer to the 10, but not quite reaching it. Why is that?
MEYERS: This was a really interesting conversation I had with some judges because I think when you're seeing the audience and you see this amazing vault and your gut reaction is give it a 10. It's perfect. And it really did deserve a 10. But talking to judges you sort of figure out why it didn't get one.
And it's because judges aren't sitting in the audience and just reacting, having a gut reaction to what they see. They are not even charged with looking at the vault as a package, right? There's one judge who makes sure that they do the vault that they're supposed to do. And the other judges are there to take deductions. And I feel like if your job is to take deductions, you find deductions to take. That is your job.
And so they found, you know, I imagine - I've looked at the vault so many times, I imagine it's the separation of her legs slightly on the preflight and that's probably the only deduction in the whole vault.
MARTIN: So how do people feel about this new system? I mean, I'm sensing, though, that viewers don't like it. The audience kind of wants the emotional satisfaction, if you would, of a 10. What are you hearing?
MEYERS: I know a lot of gymnastics fans and a lot of them actually really like this system. It makes more intuitive sense at least. So you at the '92 Olympics, for instance, a full-twisting vault was worth as much as a double-twisting vault. So if you took a step on your double-twisting vault, you would lose to a gymnast who had stuck a full-twisting vault. And that doesn't really make much sense.
MARTIN: So the new system is designed not just to look for error, but to reward risk...
MEYERS: Yes.
MARTIN: ...To reward daring - right? - and boldness, right? So for people watching the upcoming games, what should we be looking for?
MEYERS: You should be looking for some astounding acrobatics, especially from a young woman that everyone has heard a lot about already named Simone Biles. She is, I think, the paragon of what the open-ended scoring system is about, someone who can do you incredible difficulty, but does it with such ease of execution. Like she, you know - a lot of people - the complaints a lot people have about the scoring system is that it incentivizes risk. It pushes people to do things that are beyond their abilities, perhaps. And so there's a lot of falls, and there's mistakes.
But she's this rare specimen who can do this high level of difficulty and do it with such complete mastery. So you should be looking out for her doing things that are going to blow your mind, and she's going to make it look like it's a walk in the park.
MARTIN: That's Dvora Meyers. Her new book is called "The End Of The Perfect 10," and she was with us from NPR New York. Dvora, thanks so much for joining us.
MEYERS: Thanks so much for having me.
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Extreme gymnastics: has athleticism eclipsed the
aesthetic spirit of the sport?
Meghan O'Rourke
The Atlantic.
318.1 (JulyAugust 2016): p46.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Atlantic Media, Inc.
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Full Text:
THE END OF THE PERFECT 10: THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF GYMNASTICS' TOP SCOREFROM
NADIA TO NOW
DVORA MEYERS
Touchstone
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
IN 1976, at the Montreal Olympics, the young Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci flew off the uneven bars in a
dismount of astonishing height and extension, landing confidently, even if she took an "almost invisible hop," as she
later called it. The crowd roared, and she turned to look at the scoreboard: 1.00. For a moment, she later told the
Associated Press, she was confused. She didn't think it had been her best routine, but it hadn't been that bad. Then a
judge signaled that the score stood for a 10. At the time, a faultless routine was so inconceivable that the board had
been designed to accommodate only a single numeral followed by two decimal points.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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Comaneci wasn't the only gymnast to get a 10 during the Montreal Games. The Soviet Nellie Kim received two, one for
performing a novel and difficult vault and the other for her floor exercise.
But Comaneci14 years old, light and quick and pliable as a rubber band, with a ribbon in her ponytailis the winner
we remember. She went on to earn seven 10s during the Games, scores she received both for her aesthetic grace and for
her innovative, daring athleticism. On the uneven bars, she pioneered a release move (now known as the Comaneci
salto). On the balance beam, she did elegant back handsprings and precise aerial cartwheels. During her floor exercise,
she performed a fulltwisting back layout, as well as a beautiful Arabian pike (a kind of twisting forward flip). As the
Soviet competitor Olga Korbut had in 1972, she captivated audiences with her seemingly effortless airborne movesan
irresistible juxtaposition of tiny girl and intrepid physicality.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Comaneci marked the arrival of an entirely new era of gymnastics, which had been in the making at least since Korbut's
dominance at Munich. She was one of a team of very young Romanian gymnasts trained by the iconoclastic, mediasawy
Bela Karolyi at his school in Onecti. Inspired by his days as a boxer, he made the girls work very hard at
conditioning, and taught them acrobatic skills usually reserved for men.
Other countries took note. Gone, suddenly, were the matronly 20somethings like Larisa Latynina, who had competed
in the 1958 World Championships while pregnant. By 1977, Comaneci writes in her memoir, Letters to a Young
Gymnast, the new gymnast "was smaller, younger, leaner, and focused not only on mastering technique but also on
pushing the envelope on each apparatus to achieve the maximum level of difficulty and the highest possible score." She
added, "it also meant that there was very little margin for errorif a gymnast made the slightest mistake, her chances of
victory were dashed."
Girls all over the world, and especially in the United States (I was one of them), wanted in on the revolution. The
conditions were right for what we might call the Roger Bannister effect: Once Nadia did it, others thought they could
do it too. Feminist stirrings in the 1960s and the passage of Title IX in the '70s meant girls were encouraged to be more
athletic than ever, making the oldstyle women's floor and beam exercises look staid. And radical improvements in
equipmentthe addition of springs to the floor mat and bouncy fiberglass to the wooden barsfurther enabled physical
innovation.
Within the span of a few years, women's gymnastics became a hugely popular and fastpaced sport, featuring not only
demanding dance elements but risky, highflying moves that had been unthinkable in the early '70s. At the 2012
Olympics, the American gymnast McKayla Maroney performed an Amanar vaultconsidered one of the most difficult
skills for womenand got more air than Kohei Uchimura, the male allaround champion. Maroney's vault was also
evidence of another dramatic shift: Over the decades, as Romania's and Russia's teams have declined, the United States
has become a dominant force in gymnastics.
The initial Easternblocdriven revolution is the backdrop of Dvora Meyers's The End of the Perfect 10: The Making
and Breaking of Gymnastics' Top ScoreFrom Nadia to Now, but the book's real focus is the subsequent evolution of
the sport, in particular its more recent rise in the United States. Meyers, a journalist, offers a strikingly optimistic take,
very different from the sportswriter Joan Ryan's account in Little Girls in Pretty Boxes in 1995. Ryan portrayed an elite
gymnastic world rife with abuse, eating disorders, and emotional misery. She placed the blame largely on Bela Karolyi
and his wife, Marta, whose relocation to the U.S. in 1981 helped lift American women's gymnastics to new heights, in
part by extending the ruthlessly authoritarian approach Karolyi had honed at home.
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Writing two decades later, Meyers offers a much more upbeat view as she chronicles the growth of elite women's
gymnastics in the U.S. in the postSoviet era. Today that world is home, she argues, to a greater diversity of body types,
races, and ages, as well as of coaching practices. She also makes the case that highlevel American gymnasts have more
choices and agency than ever before. Much of the credit for this, Meyers suggests, can be ascribed to another striking
change in the sport: the introduction of a new scoring system that emphasized athleticism and rendered the "perfect" 10
obsolete. As she points out, Simone Biles, American gymnastics' current "It Girl," is, at 19, more muscular and broadshouldered
than the waifish 14yearold Dominique Moceanu was in 1996, in the Karolyis' heyday. If Romania had
qualified for Rioshockingly, the team failed to make the cut in April's qualifiersBiles would likely have competed
against 28yearold Catalina Ponor. Little girls no more.
The story of this transformation, Meyers notes, really begins with the Karolyis' defection from Romania. In 1984, Bela
trained the stars of the American women's Olympic team, and in 1988 was named head coach. To hear Comaneci tell it,
"Bela singlehandedly refashioned the U.S. system of gymnastics. In order to be competitive with the Soviets and
Romanians, he told the American girls that they had to practice six hours a day, not three." The Karolyis' intensive and
controlling ethos (they enforced silence during practice and were rumored to have searched girls' gym bags for food)
meshed with rising American meritocratic anxieties: Parents across the country were ready to devote time and money
to turning their children into competitive standouts.
The Karolyis' tyrannical approach seemed vindicated when the American women's squadknown as the "Magnificent
Seven"won its firstever team gold medal, at the 1996 Olympics. But the triumph was shortlived. A stressedout,
injured, and tense U.S. team went on to a poor showing at the 2000 Olympics, with Bela in a new role as "national team
coordinator." Time was working against the Karolyis. The dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and the Eastern bloc, as Meyers
vividly describes, had brought a flood of coaches to the U.S., who by now ran wellestablished gyms of their own. And
more coaches began opening gymsamong them a former member of the Chinese national team, Liang Chow, and Kim
Zmeskal Burdette (a 1992 U.S. Olympicteam member who had trained with Bela)further weakening the Karolyis'
hold on the sport. In a turnofthemillennium restructuring, Marta assumed the role of national team coordinator.
Aspiring elite gymnasts now have an assortment of training styles to choose from. Chow, for example, doesn't believe
in excessively long days of practice. Zmeskal Burdette and her husband, Chris Burdette, hold weekly yoga sessions and
encourage chatter at the chalk bucket (the gym's watercooler). Simone Biles's coach, Aimee Boorman, saw right away
that Biles needed to have fun in order to improve. Select gymnasts travel to the Karolyis' gym once a month, which
means coaches no longer have to "figure out everything ... from drills to progressions to training plans to competition
schedules," Meyers writes. Each coach has his or her individual strengths, and Marta works with the gymnasts on
consistency and takes care of larger strategic decisions. In turn, the gymnasts get a chance to benefit from multiple
advocates. Whether or not the U.S. is any sort of model for other teams facing their own organizational struggles (most
notably the Russians and the Romanians), the division of labor has served the Americans well so far.
But the new heterogeneity should not evoke visions of seamless harmony. Meyers's own account undercuts her sunny
and often toosimple emphasis on a sweeping, scoringdriven transformation of women's gymnasticsthe authoritarian
ways of the past replaced by a more federated, Americanstyle model of female empowerment. Her sanguine analysis
of rising pluralism in the sport turns out to be something of a disjointed muddle: She makes stabs at isolating causes
and effects that are more complex than she indicates. For example, she argues that gymnasts can stay in the sport longer
than ever. Yet three members of the "Fierce Five"2012's goldwinning teamhave retired (or moved to college
gymnastics), citing physical and motivational obstacles to maintaining their peak training levels. She treats the Karolyis
gingerly, skirting controversies that suggest reasons to wonder what the pressure behind the scenes is really like.
And eager though Meyers is to attribute the new pluralism to the advent, in 2006, of the new, and still contested,
scoring system, she doesn't clinch the case that the system is the main source of change. Under the old code, an athlete
couldn't earn above the "perfect" score of 10. Gymnasts now receive one score for execution (still capped at 10) and
another for difficulty (uncapped), assessed by separate panels of judges and then added together. A gymnast's total
score includes as many points as she can accrue for her 10 most difficult moves; top scores now range into the 16s. The
effect is to give competitors a real incentive to prioritize challenging combinations.
Because scoring in gymnastics (unlike in baseball or basketball) is almost entirely subjective, its structure profoundly
influences what the sport looks like, shaping and reflecting its shifting valueswhether that might be originality or
perfection of technique. No wonder, then, that advocates and critics alike are tempted to link a big swerve in the sport
to the now decadeold system. In the eyes of detractors, current scoring (besides confusing spectators) has allowed
athleticism to eclipse the aesthetic spirit of the sport. In the eyes of Meyers and other defenders, a system that allows a
gymnast to make up ground after a fall has encouraged a culture of risk taking and bold physicality. The numeric
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flexibility, proponents add, means that a gymnast needn't be as much of an allaround artistathlete, trained from the age
of 3 to master both an exquisite releve and a panoply of tough skills.
There is no question that the wider array of scores reflects, and more accurately assesses, the range of difficulty
exhibited by today's gymnasts. The twopronged judging approach also helps minimize inevitable scoring distortions.
(Meyers cites a study suggesting that judges can't see all the mistakes a gymnast makes; a single error by an athlete
whose execution is nearly flawless is bound to get noticed, but detecting all the mistakes in a slipshod routine is almost
impossible.) As for those engaged in the sport's culture war, it's worth remembering that some version of the aesthetic/
athletic debate has enlivened gymnastics ever since it took off 40some years ago. Before we rush to ascribe decisive
causal power, for good or for ill, to the new scoring system, we should pause to appreciate that the sport continues to
thrive on such contention.
Today's best gymnasts, like Simone Biles, still have it allboth the grace and the tumbling chops. Whatever problems
the system may have, Meyers persuasively endorses one important benefit: It emphasizes daring accomplishment over
meticulous flawlessness. An obsessive and illusory perfectionism may lie at the heart of many girls' dreams of being a
gymnast, but so does a more primal urge, the desire to just see if you canor, as one former gymnast puts it in Meyers's
book, to get as close to flying as possible. The desire to witness that convergence of elan and power will have many of
us glued to the women's Olympic competition this August. When Biles takes the floor mat, what you'll seeI hopeis
not a stressedout, anorexic little girl, but a 19yearold athlete soaring through the air, fully enjoying herself.
Meghan O'Rourke is the author of The Long Goodbye and the poetry collections Halflife and Once.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
O'Rourke, Meghan. "Extreme gymnastics: has athleticism eclipsed the aesthetic spirit of the sport?" The Atlantic,
JulyAug. 2016, p. 46+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457972949&it=r&asid=38abf1f90c71e24703ef6b97f9772200.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2017.
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Meyers, Dvora. The End of the Perfect 10: The
Making and Breaking of Gymnastics' Top Score
from Nadia to Now
Erin Entrada Kelly
Library Journal.
141.12 (July 1, 2016): p90.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Meyers, Dvora. The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics' Top Score from Nadia to Now.
Touchstone. Jul. 2016.336p. notes, index. ISBN 9781501101366. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781501101403. sports
Anyone with a limited understanding of Olympic scoring would view the 1976 performance of Nadia Comaneciin
which she earned the first "perfect 10"and ask themselves, how could Comaneci's performance earn her a perfect
score while the unbelievable vault launched by McKayla Maroney in 2012 came up short? Furthermore, how did
gymnasts evolve from slight girls such as Comaneci into tumbling machines such as Maroney? And how come fans can
no longer celebrate simple, easytounderstand evaluations (perfect tens) and are instead left with overly mathematical
algorithms with five digits after the decimal point? Meyers, a former gymnast and current journalist, answers all these
questions, as well as those you didn't know you had. VERDICT Welltimed and wellresearched, with exhaustive detail
and useful anecdotes, this book feels like a backstage pass to the mysterious world of Olympic athletics. Particularly
ideal for fanatics, athletes, coaches, and competitors.Erin Entrada Kelly, Philadelphia
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Kelly, Erin Entrada. "Meyers, Dvora. The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics' Top Score
from Nadia to Now." Library Journal, 1 July 2016, p. 90. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457302736&it=r&asid=953cd8eb3a66ddb8efb938736e4dee0f.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A457302736
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The End of the Perfect 10
Publishers Weekly.
263.22 (May 30, 2016): p51.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The End of the Perfect 10:
Dvora Meyers. S&S/Touchstone, $26 (320p) ISBN 9781501101366
Meyers, a former gymnast who writes on sports for ESPN and Slate, offers this sterile history of women's gymnastics
from 1976, when the first perfect score of 10 was awarded, and 2003, when the last 10 was given. Meyers has facts and
data and quotes aplenty, but what she is missing is the heartbeat of a story. Gymnastics is a sport full of intrigue, plots,
and characterstiny young girls driven to perfection and the coaches and parents who drive themand yet only readers
who care a great deal about filling gaps in their knowledge of the sport will enjoy it. For everyone else, here's the gist:
routines in elitelevel gymnastics used to be scored on a scale of 110. Nadia Comaneci earned that first 10 on the
uneven bars at the 1976 Olympics. Scandals, controversy, and accusations of political bias followed over the next years
as many imperfect routines were given 10s. After an especially messy 2004 Olympics, elite gymnastics adopted an
openended scoring system. The book has tremendous detail, but wading through it is tedious. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The End of the Perfect 10." Publishers Weekly, 30 May 2016, p. 51. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454270627&it=r&asid=e90449c0b9b4642852587448183cfe24.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454270627
A Perfect 16.223
440
73
34
Dvora Meyers explains why gymnastics’ perfect 10 went away—and why it’s not coming back.
By Rebecca Schuman
perfect 10 illo.
Sonny Liew
Simone Biles is, by all reasonable accounts, the best female gymnast of all time. She is so much better than the rest of the field, in fact, that in order not to win the upcoming Olympics in Rio, she wouldn’t just have to fall. She’d have to pull a Preacher and explode halfway through her bar set.
Biles’ floor exercise routine, for example, is so good that not only is her half-out double layout named after her in the gymnastics Bible, the vaunted Code of Points—she launches into that insanely difficult skill on her second tumbling pass, because, oh, hey, she’s got a trick that’s even harder to do first. (It’s a double layout with a full twist in the second flip, and it’s spectacular.)
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The difficulty of Biles’ routine is without compare, and when she “hits” (gym code for “does every skill in her routine the best she ever has”), her execution is flawless.
So, she’s a near certainty to follow in the footsteps of, say, Olympic legend Nadia Comaneci and score a perfect 10 in Rio, right? Wrong. If you can remember all the way back to the more innocent days of 2012, you might recall McKayla Maroney, who sulked famously on the silver-medal stand after a surprise butt-plant during the event finals. Earlier that week in the team competition, however, she’d performed a two-and-a-half twisting Yurchenko the very best it had ever been done, by any gymnast, male or female:
Get Slate in your inbox.
Her score was a … 16.233.
Meanwhile, four years prior, Nastia Liukin clinched the all-around gold in Beijing after a triumphant floor routine that caused Béla Károlyi to commit first-degree assault on Bob Costas—with a score of … 15.525. What?
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How can anyone who doesn’t have dual master’s degrees in gymnastics and math even tell who’s going to win? Why can a gymnast such as Simone Biles conceivably fall down in Rio and still win gold? It’s actually been 12 years since the gymnastics scoring system turned indecipherable, but I guarantee you that during the gymnastics competition this summer, the millions of viewers who tune in to the marquee sport will still be wondering: What the hell happened to the perfect 10? The answers—long, complex ones, requiring a meticulous charting of gymnastics history from Olga Korbut’s heyday in the early 1970s to the current seemingly unstoppable domination of the American women’s squad—are readily manifest in The End of the Perfect 10, a magisterial new book from Slate contributor Dvora Meyers.
The perfect 10 was a “brand,” according to veteran University of Utah coach Greg Marsden, one so powerful that “you could not go out and get a marketing firm and pay them one hundred million dollars” to replicate it. “You don’t walk away from that brand. That was the stupidest thing we ever did.” (Can you imagine Don Jon calling Scarlett Johansson a “16.223”?) Meyers’ greatest difficulty—one that’s got to be worth at least a 16.233—is to walk readers who agree with Marsden, many of whom will be only casually familiar with gymnastics, through the lengthy, agonizing decision to kill the 10.
The first surprise in The End of the Perfect 10 is that even the most famous 10 of all time wasn’t truly perfect. Comaneci’s perfect uneven bars routine, which momentarily flummoxed the Montreal Olympics’ three-digit scoreboard, displaying a “1.00,” had a mistake.
If you look closely at the footage, you’ll see Nadia had the minutest slide forward on her landing. What gives? Meyers explains—with the help of countless interviews with officials, coaches, and Comaneci herself—that Nadia earned those 10s because she was just so much more perfect, so to speak, than the other gymnasts who’d gone before.
Comaneci demonstrated a technical perfection that had heretofore not been seen in the sport. And to that, she added an ease of performance. Comaneci gave the impression that not only could she do the extremely difficult skill perfectly but also that she could do it repeatedly without error. Her perfection was not spectacular—it was mundane.
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But then, Meyers writes, thanks both to new precedent and a long-suspected judging bias that inflated Soviet gymnasts’ scores, elite international gymnastics fell prey to, well, grade inflation. The 1988 Olympics and 1989 World Championships handed out so many 10s you’d think they were trying to coin their own metric system. For example, Belarusian icon Svetlana Boginskaya is a goddess, but she clearly parted her legs on her full-in double-back somersault in this stunning avant-garde floor routine from the 1989 World Championships. That exercise got a 10, though, because Boginskaya’s artistry was unparalleled, better even than that of the other Soviets—and because the judges knew how much better she had to be to rotate that double flip with a frame nearing 5-foot-5.
So what choice did the judges have? With every elite athlete’s score capped at 10, what was left to distinguish a technically perfect routine full of relatively “safe” elements that met minimum requirements from a truly spectacular one that pushed the boundaries of the sport? What does one do when Soviet legend Valeri Liukin (Nastia’s father) hits a triple somersault on floor for the first time in international competition? How to reward the “elites among the elites,” those who “performed routines worth more than ten points,” but couldn’t get credit for many of their skills? Well, you reward them by forgiving the tiny errors that come as a price for pushing the sport past its limits.
Dvora Meyers.
Dvora Meyers.
Carla Phillips
As the faults in the scoring system continue to show, Meyers weaves in the story of a mild-mannered Canadian named Hardy Fink—an experienced judge who also happened to be a mathematical genius—tinkering with a new sort of Code of Points, an open-ended system that allowed one score for execution (out of, yes, 10), and a completely different score based upon the difficulty of the skills performed in a routine. (Maroney’s difficulty score for that legendary vault, for example, was a 6.5.) It sounded pretty reasonable to Fink—but for years, he was laughed out of the room.
Until, that is, Russian gymnast Alexei Nemov’s high-bar score caused the audience to boo for 10 straight minutes at the 2004 Sydney Games, after a blindingly difficult routine garnered a mere 9.725. But the score wasn’t truly unjust, under the rules as they stood. “Nemov performed a crowd-pleasing style of gymnastics,” Meyers explains. “His routine was chock full of spectacular release moves—four of which were performed consecutively. This is the kind of difficulty that is comprehensible to an audience. Swing, let go, flip, regrasp.” It was also the kind of gymnastics that, under Fink’s unpopular proposed code, could have used its difficulty to make up for the slight form breaks—breaks that Nemov could have avoided if he’d played it safe with bare-minimum skills that didn’t challenge him. The system was unjust because it favored the unambitious.
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Finally, in 2006, propelled in part by the scoring scandal in Sydney, elite-level gymnastics adopted an open-ended system, and once-every-four-years gymnastics fans weren’t the only ones scratching their heads. Once, Meyers writes, “everyone understood that the closer a gymnast scored to 10, the better he or she had performed.” But now, “gymnasts were receiving marks like 13.667 or 14.825, and you had no way of knowing if these were good or bad scores.” Even “über-fan” Meyers took years to learn to interpret the new scores, so what hope do viewers who only watch gymnastics at the Olympics have?
Meyers clearly lays out the permanent and dramatic changes the open-ended code has brought—or hastened—to the sport. Simone Biles, for example, is almost the prototypical athlete of the new code: At 19, she’s a good measure older than the prepubescent children who dominated the sport after Nadia (and especially in the 1990s); one look at both her otherworldly physical condition and her style confirms that she’s both many measures stronger than, say, flea-sized 1992 darling Tatiana Gutsu. And, thanks in large part to the Károlyi-branded style of American “power” gymnasts, she and her teammates pay not the slightest mind to the balletic drama that the Bolshoi-influenced Eastern Bloc once made standard.
Because the new code favors difficulty above all else, countries that have long struggled on one event but made up the deficit on others—such as Romania and its perpetual nemesis, the uneven bars—haven’t been able to catch up. This year, the home country of Nadia Comaneci did not qualify a women’s gymnastics team.
Top Comment
Marty: Why don't you just make ten louder, and make ten be the top number, and make that a little louder? Nigel: [pause] These go to eleven. More...
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World-class gymnastics, Meyers makes clear, can’t have the same scoring system in place in Nadia’s time. Why would it? It’s a totally different sport, in a totally different world. “The 10 is not a time machine,” Meyers writes. “It won’t make the once-great nations—Romania and Russia—great again, because the material conditions and infrastructure that helped those countries excel have eroded since the fall of Communism across Eastern Europe.”
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The End of the Perfect 10 is so exhaustively researched, its narrative so thoughtfully woven, its intellectual commitment so present (in a sport whose penchant for removing young girls from school reflects its distaste for intellectual inquiry—Al Trautwig, I’m looking at you), that despite a few tiny missteps—chapters about the Károlyis that deviate far from the scoring-system narrative, for example)—it still blows the lid off any book of its kind. Granted, Meyers is in a genre largely populated by either frilly ghostwritten biography or gritty tell-all memoir—but all the more reason to treasure this, the Simone Biles of gymnastics books. If only there were some sort of easily recognizable metric I could assign it that would immediately signify how good it is.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Another Heresy on the High Beam Review
Gymnastike was kind enough to review my essay collection, Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess for their site. (Definitely check it out if you haven't already since they have tons of videos and meet coverage.) If you haven't already purchased it after all of my nagging and needling then hopefully their account of it persuade you to do it.
They sent along a few questions to answer and they included my favorite answer in the review. When asked if I will continue to remain connected to the sport as I get older, I replied, "I like to joke that my relationship with gymnastics has been the most enduring one of my life, much more so than any of the romantic ones. (Cue the sound of my Jewish mother sobbing.)"
Sorry Mom! Again. I can't resist. And until you learn how to use a computer and surf the net, I will continue to make this type of affectionate jokes.
Read the rest of the review here and then get thee to the Amazon store! (That's totally what Shakespeare would've written if he had to shill for Hamlet in the 21st Century.)
Posted by Dvora Meyers at 5:23 PM
A Nice Jewish Girl on the Balance Beam
Monday, May 14, 2012| Permalink
Dvora Meyers is the author of Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess. She will be blogging here all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.
When you tell someone that you used to do gymnastics, she frequently answers that she, too, did it. When she was seven. And hadn’t thought about it in years. The implication is clear — gymnastics is the sort of sport you’re supposed to outgrow. In most instances, you start doing it before you know how to sign your own name and it’s over by your first adolescent growth spurt, joining the childhood hobby trash heap, which for me includes rollerblading and playing with Barbie dolls.
But in my case, I couldn’t seem to shake the sport unlike the rest of my practice peers, who ended their involvement with gymnastics by the end of high school. There I was, about to start grad school in Creative Nonfiction at twenty-three, still checking the online message boards devoted to the sport daily in order to learn which Romanian gymnast had a new vault or who was injured and or who quit and so on. (The gymnastics community, both online and in real life, is especially tight knit for the same reasons that Jews tend to cluster together — there are so few of us who give a damn.)
As I was trying to figure out the topic for the first essay I wanted to write for my workshop, my mind drifted to the sport, which I hadn’t really written about much (even if I talked about it ad nauseum and watched YouTube videos of competitions from two decades prior merely to admire the way a particular Soviet pointed her toes). Hey, I said to myself, I’m still as obsessed with gymnastics in my 20s as I was at seven. In a very Seinfeldian way, I wondered — What’s that about?
So I wrote my first essay exploring the role of the sport in my life. Like Genesis, I started at the beginning, or at least what I thought was the beginning — my seemingly coming-out-of-nowhere obsession with gymnastics. In those earliest examinations, it seemed like I had woken up one day and decided that I must learn how to flip over my hands. It was a pretty unsophisticated piece, both in writing and insight, and thankfully none of it made its way into any formally published work.
But even in those early efforts, what was becoming very clear was the role that my family’s strict observance of Orthodox Jewish rules was playing in my participation in the sport and how it added fuel to the fire of my obsession. There was the fact that I couldn’t go to a real competitive gym because their afterschool classes started too early for someone with the longer hours of a yeshiva student. Or that leotards posed a religious problem to someone who wore only skirts and longer sleeved skirts outside of the gym. And nearly all competitions took place on Shabbos. When it came to the lower level ones, I simply wasn’t allowed to compete. As for the elite, televised ones—I had to learn how to program the VCR so I could eventually watch them after the stars came out on Saturday night. All of these limitations imposed by Judaism simply made me want to do and think about the sport even more. I like to imagine that if I had been totally unfettered by religious doctrine, I probably would’ve left the sport behind when it became apparent that I simply wasn’t any good at it.
During one after class drinking sessions at a local bar, my workshop professor, who had been subjected to a semester-long barrage of gymnastics, tipsily looked me in the eye and said, “You’ve got this whole Potok thing going on. Except with a weird thing about gymnastics.”
While my personal essay collection, Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess, bears little resemblance to Potok’s novels—fiction vs. nonfiction, male vs. female protagonists, different eras—I’d like to think that perhaps had Potok been enamored with gymnastics instead of the national pastime then maybe Reuven Malter, the main character in The Chosen, would’ve hit his head on the balance beam instead of getting nailed in the eye by a baseball. That would’ve been cool.
Dvora Meyers has written for The New York Times, Deadspin, and Tablet. She was never allowed to compete professionally, but she is the recipient of a gold medal for gymnastics obsessiveness. Her new book, Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess, is out now.
Review: "Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess" Review: "Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions
Jul 13, 2012
Danny Sierra
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This
The gymnastics story we often hear is one of guts, glory and gold--tales of intense physical exertion, mental fortitude and long hours in the gym. But what about the long hours spent at home during Shabbos, the Jewish Sabbath? How about the long hours spent watching and re-watching your favorite gymnastics competitions on VHS?
For Dvora Meyers, this is her gymnastics story, and if you've ever traded tapes or hosted the "Barbie Invitational" in your bedroom, you may find it surprisingly similar to your own.
Her collection of essays, Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess, reflects on her life as an avid gymnast and fan of the sport, and demonstrates how a passion for gymnastics helped her navigate a strict Jewish upbringing.
In a short and sweet 78 pages, Meyers hilariously illustrates the life and times of the unaccomplished gymnast, achieving a fresh and honest take on growing up as a sports fanatic.
Meyers traverses love, loss and redemption in the sport, and does so with a wit and vivacity that endears the reader to her.
"Though I stank up the gym as an athlete, I felt like I had something to contribute as a writer," Meyers told us. "And as much as I love learning about the elite athletes and have read many of their bios, I thought it would be interesting to put writing out there about gymnastics that didn't follow the champion narrative, which is inspiring but difficult to relate to."
For others who have grown up in the sport, Meyers' essays are sure to hit home.
Like many, the world around Meyers didn't halt to accommodate her gymnastics dreams. With a light heart, she recollects the financial, cultural and physical limitations she encountered while scraping the bottom of the gymnastics barrel.
"I like to joke that my relationship with gymnastics has been the most enduring one of my life, much more so than any of my romantic ones. (Cue the sound of my Jewish mother sobbing)."-Dvora Meyers
A common theme is the role of sport in molding and shaping its most dedicated admirers. A fascination with sport follows us like a shadow, and in many ways, impacts our decisions and beliefs.
Meyers' story is a thoughtful and clever narrative of a life lived through the lens of gymnastics.
In one of my favorite sections, she illustrates the tug-of-war between her religion and her obsession using--what else?--her doll collection.
Meyers doesn't shy away from disclosing all of the details about her imaginary gymnastics competitions, and the dolls she put through hell to achieve make-believe Olympic glory. The champion was always Kim Zmeskal, and the frequent runner-up a fictional Israeli gymnast she named Michal.
She writes:
"In my own small way, by inventing an Israeli gymnast who could actually win a medal at the Olympics, I was honoring my early pro-Israel impulses. Perhaps if I had been a true Zionistic kid I would've made Michal the champion. But--and this might've been an early warning sign of where things were headed--I could not make her the gold medalist. I loved Kim more than I loved Israel."
Meyers' work is teeming with "confessions" every bit as entertaining and candid as this passage.
Her book also serves as a colorful timeline of gymnastics fandom, chronicling the days before the Internet when super-fans stockpiled VHS tapes to record rare television broadcasts of gymnastics.
Meyers describes this time as "fun but also terribly isolating."
The Internet, she says, changed the game for our sport, bringing together droves of gymnastics junkies who previously missed a sense of community.
To gymnastics fans, Meyers' essays read as a familiar, if not unconventional, coming-of-age story. A celebration of imperfection, Meyers' writing will surely earn tens from many readers.
To me, Heresy on the High Beam represents another notch on the gymnastics timeline, further connecting the gymnastics community and reminding us of the continuity we all share--an ever-present infatuation with the incredible sport of gymnastics.
In short, I really liked it.
The Last Perfect Gymnast
How Olympic gymnastics beat score inflation and became a sport.
BY SARAH MARSHALL
August 5, 2016
When Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci competed at the 1976 Olympics, the legend goes, she was powerful enough not just to dazzle an audience of millions, but to break the very equipment that was meant to calculate her score. In this case, the legend is true. After Nadia dismounted from the uneven bars, the digital scoreboard displayed a 1.00. Despite the fact that Olympic gymnastics routines were scored out of 10, the manufacturers of the equipment used at the Montreal Games had apparently never imagined that there might be a gymnast who would actually receive a perfect score.
THE END OF THE PERFECT 10: THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF GYMNASTICS’ TOP SCORE FROM NADIA TO NOW by Dvora MeyersTouchstone, 336 pp., $26.00
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In the forty years since, we have grappled with the question of what such a score really means—what kind of athlete it is reserved for, and which aspects of gymnastics it is powerless to describe. Now, on the eve of the Rio Olympics, sports journalist and former gymnast Dvora Meyers has written The End of the Perfect 10, a gripping analysis not just of the gymnastics world, but of what our desire for perfection does to us as athletes and as viewers.
The perfect 10 made fourteen-year-old Nadia Comaneci a living legend, and made women’s gymnastics one of the most hotly anticipated and avidly watched events in American Olympic coverage. For one brief moment, national borders and lingering Cold War hostilities ceased to matter. The world was in love with Nadia. At the Games, scalpers sold tickets to the gymnastics events, originally priced at sixteen dollars, for two hundred. When ABC’s Wide World of Sports unearthed an obscure piece of instrumental music, renamed it “Nadia’s Theme,” and paired it with a montage of Nadia’s Olympic performances, the association alone was enough to propel it to the top of the Billboard charts.
Even Nadia’s dimensions were interesting. She had, E.J. Kahn wrote in The New Yorker, “become her country’s most valuable foreign exchange asset, worth incalculable times her weight (eighty-eight pounds) in gold.” She was, Newsweek’s Pete Axthelm wrote, a “child-heroine,” a “princess,” a “ballerina,” and a “doll-like symbol of what’s still right with the Games.” She was better than stunning, better than beautiful, better than great; she was perfect. Who could resist such a force?
As it turned out, the only person who wasn’t spellbound by the perfect 10 was Nadia Comaneci herself. How did it feel, reporters asked breathlessly, to have won so many gold medals, to be so adored, so admired? “It’s nothing special,” she said. “I feel just the same as before.” Had she ever worried the gold might elude her? “No,” she said. “I knew I would win.” How had she become so strong, so talented, so successful? “I am so good,” she responded patiently, “because I work very hard for it.” The rest of the world might have seen Comaneci as a child wonder strewn with pixie dust, but she saw herself as an athlete.
Though Nadia was the first female gymnast awarded a 10 in the Olympics, she was soon followed by Soviet gymnast Nellie Kim, who left the 1976 Games with two individual gold medals to Nadia’s three. Yet her fame has faded, while Nadia’s legendary status has only grown. Why? For Dvora Meyers, this question is at the heart of The End of the Perfect 10, and its exploration of sports, strength, and gender. “Even in that magical Olympic Games when the first 10s were electrifying the audience,” Meyers writes, “the limits of the perfect mark were already in evidence.”
Nadia Comaneci and Nellie Kim may have shared a score, but they took very different approaches to gymnastics: Comaneci perfected her performance of the sport’s elements, while Kim was an innovator. Yet despite performing a vault at the 1976 Games that was, in Meyers’ estimation, “years ahead of its time…Kim’s 10 did not leap ahead of the field on the event.” The 10 was only enough to put her a around a tenth of a point above the event’s other competitors—a way of saying not that Kim was perfect, but that she had edged past the other gymnasts.
Part of the lure of the perfect 10, at least as far as audiences were concerned, was its simplicity. Yet, as Meyers explains, Nellie Kim’s 10 was as different from Nadia Comaneci’s as the two athletes were from each other. Unlike Comaneci’s score, Meyers writes, Kim’s 10
wasn’t about the purity of her technique or the lines of her body. It was a very hard vault done extremely well. For Kim, the 10 was more score than symbol. It didn’t necessarily signify anything about her as a gymnast… didn’t express perfection as much as a lack of missteps; but in the eyes of viewers, Comaneci’s wasn’t the errorless 10, it was the perfect 10—but, why?
That “why” is the engine of The End of the Perfect 10, and it takes us all the way from the 1976 Olympics to the upcoming Games in Rio.
Nadia Comaneci’s groundbreaking perfect 10 ushered in an era of imperfect 10s: perfect scores awarded for routines that had visible flaws, handed out by judges who had scored previous competitors so generously that they had no way to acknowledge a superior performance except by deeming it perfect. At the 1988 Olympics, forty perfect 10s were awarded to fourteen separate gymnasts. Even the idea of perfection began to lose its luster when it was marshaled not in service of a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, but awarded dozens of times in a single Games. “If everyone’s vaults are worth a 10,” Meyers asks, “then how do you reward a gymnast who has pushed the envelope?”
Beyond the issue of score inflation, Meyers notes, Olympic judges make mistakes, and national allegiances also have a way of influencing scoring. (These issues also plagued the figure skating world, and would come to a head in the pairs competition at the 2002 Olympics, spurring the adoption of a new scoring system in that sport.) “But,” Meyers notes, “there is a way to view the proliferation of 10s other than through the lens of incompetence or corruption. All of those 10s could also be read as a sign that Comaneci and her gymnastics descendants had mastered and surpassed the rules. And so started the cycle of rule revisions.”
Ultimately, The End of the Perfect 10 is far less about the death of a benchmark score than it is about the birth of a new era in gymnastics. The last perfect 10 to be awarded to a gymnast in Olympic competition went to Romanian Lavinia Milosovici, at the 1992 Games. Since then, generation after generation of gymnasts have continued to surpass the skills that earned Nadia Comaneci the first perfect 10. Women’s gymnastics changed, gradually but unrelentingly, from a performance that emphasized perfection—the perfect dismount, the perfect body, the perfect girl—to something far more recognizable as a sport. The scoring system currently in place may not be as simple as the perfect 10, but it reflects a sport that is anything but simple, and rewards gymnasts for pushing the limits of their discipline.
The idea of gymnastics being a sport women actually enjoy demonstrates how much has changed since 1976.
“Gymnasts have become athletes,” a fellow journalist tells Meyers in The End of the Perfect 10. “They perform solid routines, work hard, and go out there and enjoy themselves.” Perhaps more than anything, the idea of women’s gymnastics being a sport that its practitioners actually enjoy—an act not of feminine masochism, but of strategy, bravura, even play—demonstrates just how much the gymnastics world has changed since 1976.
Meyers’s book pays close attention to the gradual evolution, both technical and cultural, that allowed this change to take place. She explains not just the gymnastics world as a whole, but key details that distinguish this routine from that one—the elements of this dismount or that vault—and that mean the difference between winning and losing, and between an athlete being remembered or forgotten. Yet, for all its usefulness as a crib sheet for anyone who wants to understand this year’s Olympic events, rather than just marveling at them, The End of the Perfect 10 is about something even bigger than the gymnastics world itself. It shows us that we now live in a world where a young woman may captivate millions not through her alleged perfection, but through her dedication, daring, and strength.
As always, Nadia Comaneci is well ahead of us. When Dvora Meyers interviews her about those 10s, Comaneci simply says “I was rewarded for my work and innovation.” It took us forty years to realize Nadia Comaneci was not a “doll-like symbol” but an athlete. But she, at least, has always known this much to be true.
Sarah Marshall is host of the podcast The Feelings Club and is at work on a book about indigent defense in the South.
‘The End of the Perfect 10’: From Nadia to Simone, surpassing perfection in gymnastics
MAYA SWEEDLER Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Sep 4, 2016 0
+2
(MIS) Perfect 10 book cover
Amazon
Nadia Comaneci (MIS)
PAUL VATHIS, Associated Press
Nadia Comaneci, of Romania, dismounts from the uneven parallel bars during a perfect "10" performance July 18, 1976, at the Summer Olympic Games in Montreal.
(MIS) Simone Biles
DMITRI LOVETSKY, Associated Press
United States' Simone Biles performs on the floor during the artistic gymnastics women's apparatus final at the 2016 Summer Olympics on Aug. 16 in Rio de Janeiro.
Dvora Meyers’ “The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics’ Top Score – From Nadia to Now” begins, appropriately, with the carefully set scene onto which 14-year-old Romanian wunderkind Nadia Comaneci exploded in 1976.
Every move is described in precise, technical detail before climaxing, not on the dismount, as gymnastic routines tend to do, but on Comaneci’s score: a 10.0. Competing in a sport that had never before seen a gymnast combine artistry and technical proficiency as Comaneci did, the diminutive Romanian had scored the first perfect 10 in the Olympics.
Meyers returns to Nadia several times throughout her book, which explores the evolution of “Perfect 10” as the defining concept of its sport and neatly traces the history of gymnastics from the acrobatic-less dancing of the 1930s to the modern sport on display in Rio earlier this month.
A former gymnast herself, Dvora Meyers leverages her access to former elite gymnasts, coaches and officials to craft a detailed and thorough account of how and why gymnastics changed when it did. She takes her readers through every iteration of the scoring system, highlighting the competitors who were benefited or harmed by each adjustment, and presents the current method as a work-in-progress that has emerged from 40 years of tinkering.
As gymnasts began to throw harder and harder tricks in the 1980s, judges struggled to differentiate the challenging routines that pushed the boundaries of the sport from the simpler routines that were done more cleanly. Thanks to an increasing emphasis on difficulty, the lithe dancers that allowed the Soviet Union to dominate the sport gave rise to the stockier, more powerful gymnasts that have graced Wheaties boxes for the past 30 years. Gradually, athleticism took its place alongside artistry.
After opening with Comaneci, Meyers ends on Simone Biles. Biles, who completes tumbling passes that some male gymnasts cannot do, has won the past three all-around titles at the World Gymnastics Championships and won four Olympic gold medals at Rio.
“Comaneci had come to symbolize the Perfect 10, so her rivals were chasing the athlete, a score, and the idea that the score represented,” Meyers writes. “Without a symbolically meaningful score, it’s just Biles herself that everyone is chasing.”
Comaneci and Biles are, in many ways, perfect representatives of the sport Meyers so lovingly chronicles. Seething beneath the book’s surface is the Cold War-style binary that has defined women’s gymnastics for the past 40 years. It is difficult to refute the fact that the baton has passed from Russia to the United States – American women have walked away with the last three team titles at Worlds, plus Olympic gold in London – but Meyers’ deft explanation shows why the Americans have superseded the Russians.
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The one area her narrative glosses over is the modern iteration of this East-versus-West tension, which today exists on racial lines. Biles and Gabby Douglas, the 2012 Olympic All-Around champion, are both African-American in a sport that historically has not seen much success from women of color.
In 2013, Biles won gold on the balance beam at the world championship. After finishing out of medal contention in fifth, Italian Olympian Carlotta Ferlito suggested that “next time we should also paint our skin black so then we can win, too.” Although Ferlito later apologized, a member of the Italian Gymnastics Federation attempted to mount a cringeworthy defense before the matter was put to rest.
But other than this omission, Meyers offers an incredibly thorough yet accessible account of one of the most mystifying aspects of the sport. The publication of “The End of the Perfect 10” provides an opportunity for the casual fan to take a deep dive into gymnastics. While this casual fan still might not be able to notice the mistakes that professional judges do, he or she will undoubtedly be able to distinguish the good from the great.
‘The End of the Perfect 10’: From Nadia to Simone, surpassing perfection in gymnastics
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"The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics' Top Score - From Nadia to Now" by Dvora Meyers; Touchstone (226 pages, $26) (Amazon)
Posted: Sunday, September 4, 2016 8:00 am
By Maya Sweedler Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
steveonlife
Posted on Sep 4, 2016by Stephen Gilbert
“The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics’ Top Score — From Nadia to Now” By Dvora Meyers (226 pages, $26)
Dvora Meyers’ “The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics’ Top Score — From Nadia to Now” begins, appropriately, with the carefully set scene onto which 14-year-old Romanian wunderkind Nadia Comaneci exploded in 1976.
Every move is described in precise, technical detail before climaxing, not on the dismount, as gymnastic routines tend to do, but on Comaneci’s score: a 10.0. Competing in a sport that had never before seen a gymnast combine artistry and technical proficiency as Comaneci did, the diminutive Romanian had scored the first perfect 10 in the Olympics.
Meyers returns to Nadia several times throughout her book, which explores the evolution of “Perfect 10” as the defining concept of its sport and neatly traces the history of gymnastics from the acrobatic-less dancing of the 1930s to the modern sport on display in Rio earlier this month.
A former gymnast herself, Dvora Meyers leverages her access to former elite gymnasts, coaches and officials to craft a detailed and thorough account of how and why gymnastics changed when it did. She takes her readers through every iteration of the scoring system, highlighting the competitors who were benefited or harmed by each adjustment, and presents the current method as a work-in-progress that has emerged from 40 years of tinkering.
As gymnasts began to throw harder and harder tricks in the 1980s, judges struggled to differentiate the challenging routines that pushed the boundaries of the sport from the simpler routines that were done more cleanly. Thanks to an increasing emphasis on difficulty, the lithe dancers that allowed the Soviet Union to dominate the sport gave rise to the stockier, more powerful gymnasts that have graced Wheaties boxes for the past 30 years. Gradually, athleticism took its place alongside artistry.
After opening with Comaneci, Meyers ends on Simone Biles. Biles, who competes tumbling passes that some male gymnasts cannot do, has won the past three All-Around titles at World Gymnastics Championships and won four Olympic gold medals at Rio.
“Comaneci had come to symbolize the Perfect 10, so her rivals were chasing the athlete, a score, and the idea that the score represented,” Meyers writes. “Without a symbolically meaningful score, it’s just Biles herself that everyone is chasing.”
Comaneci and Biles are, in many ways, perfect representatives of the sport Meyers so lovingly chronicles. Seething beneath the book’s surface is the Cold War-style binary that has defined women’s gymnastics for the past 40 years. It is difficult to refute the fact that the baton has passed from Russia to the United States — American women have walked away with the last three team titles at Worlds, plus Olympic gold in London — but Meyers’ deft explanation shows why the Americans have superseded the Russians.
The one area her narrative glosses over is the modern iteration of this East v. West tension, which today exists on racial lines. Biles and Gabby Douglas, the 2012 Olympic All-Around champion, are both African-American in a sport that historically has not seen much success from women of color.
In 2013, Biles won gold on the balance beam at the World championship. After finishing out of medal contention in fifth, Italian Olympian Carlotta Ferlito suggested that “next time we should also paint our skin black so then we can win, too.” Although Ferlito later apologized, a member of the Italian Gymnastics federation attempted to mount a cringeworthy defense before the matter was put to rest.
But other than this omission, Meyers offers an incredibly thorough yet accessible account of one of the most mystifying aspects of the sport. The publication of “The End of the Perfect 10” provides an opportunity for the casual fan to take a deep dive into gymnastics. While this casual fan still might not be able to notice the mistakes that professional judges do, he or she will undoubtedly be able to distinguish the good from the great.
Raising the Bar
As difficulty became part of scoring, a new body type replaced the sylphs of the Nadia Comaneci era.
Simone Biles at the U.S. Olympic gymnastics trials in early July.
Simone Biles at the U.S. Olympic gymnastics trials in early July. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
By PATRICK COOKE
July 29, 2016 3:49 p.m. ET
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One of the most remarkable moments of the 1976 summer Olympics was the 90 seconds it took for a 14-year-old Romanian gymnast to change her sport. Although the judges at Montreal would see the same compulsory uneven-bars routine 86 times, only the 4-foot-11, 80-pound Nadia Comaneci would turn in a maximum score of 10—a “Perfect 10”—breaking a mystical barrier. She was the first but far from the last. Between 1976 and 1992, in a parade of pixies that would include Nellie Kim,Yelena Davydova and Kerri Strug, 10s would be awarded in international competition more than 100 times.
THE END OF THE PERFECT 10
By Dvora Meyers
Touchstone, 319 pages, $26
The paradox, as journalist and former gymnast Dvora Meyers notes in her delightful and insightful study “The End of the Perfect 10,” is that there is no such thing as a perfect performance. Upon further review, even Ms. Comaneci’s breathtaking routine reveals imperfections. Still, the crowd ate it up. From that day forward, the more 10s the judges handed out, the more popular the sport became.
The Perfect 10 was catnip to organizers and soon emerged as a branding tool. By the 1988 summer games in Seoul, however, the bar for the top score was so low that even casual observers were beginning to take notice. As one Sports Illustrated reporter wrote: “A total of 40 ‘Perfect 10s’ were awarded to fourteen gymnasts during the week, many for performances containing flaws that could be spotted from thirty-five rows back in the Olympic Gymnastics Hall.”
By then, the judging process had become outdated. For years gymnasts had received marks based on artistic presentation, but some routines were far more difficult than others. Bold competitors who tried to test the limits of the sport risked losing to safer, duller opponents. Giving crowds Perfect 10s was no longer enough. The sport needed a method of scoring that accounted for the diversity of routines and leveled the playing field for all competitors.
In 2006, the governing body of women’s gymnastics adopted a new scoring system, devised by a Canadian judge named Hardy Fink. It would be based on two scores, one for precision and execution, the other for degree of difficulty. That scheme provided a fairer measure of skill, but it came with unforeseen consequences.
For the sake of difficulty points, coaches began cramming more daring stunts into their gymnasts’ 90-second routines—and started seeing more injuries. More risk-taking meant more excitement, but it required more strength, which in turn required more muscle. Soon the sylphs of the Comaneci era were replaced by a new body type able to perform explosive routines in every event. Mens’ coaches were brought in to tutor a new generation of girls in an increasingly brawny version of the sport that continues today. Ms. Meyers observes that the current U.S. female superstar Simone Biles can (nearly) complete a double somersault from a complete standstill—“no run, no hurdle, no round-off, no momentum.” Try that in your backyard.
There was yet another consequence that came with the new judging rules: They confused fans. “Now the gymnasts were receiving marks like 13.667 or 14.825,” Ms. Meyers writes, “and you had no way of knowing if these were good or bad scores.” A competitor who put in what appeared to be a sloppy performance, perhaps even falling off an apparatus, might win an event because of the attempted level of difficulty. One coach noted that, despite the scoring inflation it entailed, the 10 system pleased the public: “Everyone understood that the closer a gymnast scored to 10, the better he or she performed.”
While scoring in elite gymnastics events like the Olympics continues to vex outsiders, Ms. Meyers tells us that at the college level 10 remains the measure of success. Marks are based on elements like proficiency, brio and heart. It doesn’t hurt that a few NCAA universities known for the sport are enticing spectators to arenas with flashing lights and thumping music akin to an NBA game opener.
Ms. Meyers describes LSU gymnast Lloimincia Hall’s 2014 crowd-pleasing routine set to a medley of funk and gospel music. The performance earned a 10 because “it wasn’t about scrutinizing every skill for flaws but about the overall impression of the routine . . . the swagger of her choreography, and the crowd’s excitement.” Elite, Olympics-level gymnasts, Ms. Meyers writes, aim at “pushing the envelope on innovation and difficulty.” College gymnasts emphasize “execution and team performance.”
Ms. Meyers is aware that many readers would score a Perfect 0 in gymnastics knowledge, so she offers explanations of arcane aspects of the sport. The uninitiated would be unlikely to know, for example, that nationwide “devo camps,” or development centers, serve as a farm system for Olympic gymnastics. As a backdrop to the Perfect 10 history, she also introduces us to athletes, judges and trainers, including the mercurial coach Bela Karolyi, who guided Ms. Comaneci to her Olympic triumph, and his wife, Martha. She is respectful of the talents that the couple has brought to American gymnastics since their defection from Romania in 1981, but the reader is left with the impression that her praise for “Coach Dracula,” as he is known, is rather faint.
The path to the Olympics can begin as early as grade school for some girls. “Female gymnasts peak younger than athletes in other sports do, typically before they get to university,” Ms. Meyers writes. Their sometimes lonely world becomes one of exhausting travel, constant training, home schooling, ligament injuries and high parental expectations. The odds of achieving the elite level are infinitesimally small, and even if a hyper-talented girl does make the cut, her career is likely to have, as the author notes, a “fruit-fly lifespan.” Less talented collegiate gymnasts at least have a shot at a scholarship and, it seems, a lot more fun. Either way, many gymnasts, post-competition, limp into retirement. Others may “sign contracts with Cirque du Soleil or move to Hollywood and get into stunt work.”
Ms. Meyers spends a good deal of time in gyms across the county observing long hours of practice. She has a prime seat for observing young hopefuls like those at a training center outside Dallas called Texas Dreams: “In a gym, the chalk tray is like the office water cooler—a place where everyone gathers at some point during the workout to chat. . . . The rougher your practice seemed to be going, the more time you needed at the chalk bowl to talk and collect yourself for your next attempt.”
For these girls, every move will eventually be scrutinized by panels of fallible arbiters in a system that is, by its nature, flawed. As one gymnastics judge tells Ms. Meyers: “You make mistakes because you’re human. . . . It seems in that respect, the athletes and judges have something in common. Neither can be perfect.”
—Mr. Cooke writes frequently for Weekend Journal.
Book Review: The End of the Perfect 10 by Dvora Meyers
By Lauren Green JUL 10, 2016
Ten years ago, international gymnastics moved from the 10.0 scoring system to an open-ended system. The 10.0 was recognizable for the casual fan who knew less about the intricacies of the sport but applauded perfection. When Nadia Comaneci earned the historic first perfect score at the 1976 Olympics, it was the first of more than 120 perfect scores in a 16-year span—from the 1976 Games to the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. Dvora Meyers explored the rise and fall of gymnastics’ perfect score in her book The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of the Gymnastics’ Top Score – From Nadia to Now and ultimately how the sport is now truly defined as the sky is the limit.
When most viewers watched McKayla Maroney’s vault during the team final competition in London four years ago, many were flabbergasted that Maroney was not awarded a perfect score in the new scoring system. Somehow the judges had found nearly three tenths in deductions. Without the perfect 10, it was difficult to comprehend exactly where those judges found those deductions.
Meyers delves into gymnastics history, chatting with Comaneci and her rival, Soviet gymnast Nellie Kim about their perfect 10s. She takes us through the 1988 Olympics where gymnastics saw 40 perfect scores handed out and to Barcelona where the final 10s were earned. In a sport where perfection is the ultimate goal, there was not a single 10.0 given during the 1996, 2000 or 2004 Olympic Games.
The 2004 Olympics, in which Romania repeated as gold medalists in the team competition on the women’s side and American Carly Patterson was the all-around champion, was the turning point for the sport. There were several judging snafus. The biggest came during the men’s all-around when South Korean Yang Tae Young’s start value was out of a 9.9 rather than a 10.0. The tenth of a point missing out of the start value was the difference between a gold and bronze medal. American Paul Hamm came away with the controversial gold medal.
Two years later, elite gymnastics had done away with the perfect 10.
Meyers also delves into the United States women’s gymnastics program that has been run by Martha and Bela Karolyi since the 80s. The semi-centralized training system that was put in place prior to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney was one that was not well received at the time. Now, it is a part of the women’s program that has helped mold the program into a dynasty over the last 15 years.
The story of the 2000 Olympic team is an interesting one. They were the guinea pigs for the new system after the Americans struggled at the world championships before the Sydney Olympics. And after having so much success in 1996, the prospect of no medals wasn’t something that the Karolyis were willing to accept. The U.S. women finished fourth at the Games. They were ultimately awarded with a bronze medal in 2010 after China’s medal was stripped away for having an underage athlete on its Olympic team. It is perhaps the most fascinating chapter of Meyers’ book as she spoke with gymnasts and coaches from that squad. They took readers through the process of the team being selected, through the treatment they got from national team coordinator Bela Karolyi and through how they regrouped after a disastrous qualifying round.
Meyers guides readers through the nuances of the new system and how the sport’s history forced the system to change. A 10.0 wasn’t a good enough way to distinguish between routines that were done well and routines that added more difficulty. Difficulty was not rewarded in the old system – after all, there were several combinations of elements that could create a 10.0 start value. In today’s scoring system difficulty is rewarded. As the elements got more difficult, the scoring system was forced to evolve in order to properly rank routines.
Nadia’s perfect 10 turns 40 this year. It was a moment that revolutionized the sport.
The only place that the perfect 10 still exists is in the execution score.
BOOK REVIEW: The End of the Perfect 10 by Dvora Meyers
September 18, 2016 / by Author Jules
We have just returned from the Australian National Clubs Gymnastics Carnival where my youngest daughter competed over the weekend. No perfect 10 scores. But it was once again fantastic to see all the amazing young girls across the country perform and do their best. Last year after national clubs, we reviewed “Grace, Gold & Glory – My Leap of Faith” by Gabby Douglas. This time, we are taking a look at “The End of the Perfect 10 – The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics’ Top Score” by Dvora Meyers. This an incredibly informative read about the history and development of gymnastics. In particular, it looks at the evolution of the scoring system.
BOOK REVIEW: The End of the Perfect 10 by Dvora Meyers
Synopsis
There is actually so much information in this extensively researched book. I am sure anyone who reads it will learn something new about gymnastics!
The title itself, “The End of the Perfect 10 – The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics’ Top Score” is a precursor to the major motivation behind the book’s intentions. But in reaching it, the author discusses many other interesting facets about gymnastics along the way.
Through the journey to follow the change in the scoring system in gymnastics, from the Nadia Comaneci era of the perfect 10 through to the new Code of open ended points, the author takes us through the history of the sport, including how men’s gymnastics was key to triggering the change.
Part 1: New Ways to Score
In Part 1 of her book, Meyer looks at the change in scoring. She starts with the exemplary execution performed by Nadia Comaneci, the world’s first recipient of the Perfect 10. Click on the video below to see the routine that scored Nadia her first perfect 10 score. This was performed on bars at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games.
Source: Marcelo Kronberg
With the move to the new Code from 2006, Meyers also addresses the change in the sport itself. The new system has encouraged gymnasts to push athletic boundaries. New skills are continually developing to take advantage of the extra points awarded for added difficulty. As a result, typical gymnast physiques have also transformed. Bodies have changed from slim and slight, to strong and powerful, in order to perform these harder skills.
To highlight differences in both difficulty in skill and change in gymnast physique, click on the video below to view the current World Champion and Olympic Champion, Simone Biles. This is her floor routine from these recent 2016 Rio Olympic Games where she won gold. However, even though difficulty has increased significantly over the past 40 years, there are no longer perfect scores for execution.
Source: 7Olympics
Part 2: New Ways to Train
In Part 2 of “The End of the Perfect 10”, the author looks at how this new system has transformed the way gymnastics is coached. It discovers new training systems established to fully maximise the new Code. There is explanation around the shift of dominance from European countries to Asia and the Americas over the last decade. It looks at change in the US gymnastics elite system and how it has evolved over the years. There is also a contrasting comparison with the US college system. It maintains a different scoring system but successfully supports the sport of gymnastics in America.
Review of “The End of the Perfect 10”
The discussion around the Perfect 10
This book successfully promotes interest and discussion around the Perfect 10 in gymnastics.
Does it mean the errorless routine?
Or does it mean the perfect routine?
Otherwise, does it mean, no it wasn’t perfect but it was better than the rest?
I love the fact that this book stimulates such great discussion around the Perfect 10 as there are obviously differing views.
One of the main benefits of the 10 scoring system was its appeal to the lay spectator’s understanding. The public understands what the term of reference 10 means for execution, that is, how well the routine is done. I believe the system of scoring in diving may help overcome this issue. Divers are still awarded scores for difficulty. But it is only the judges’ execution scores out of 10 that are held up to the spectators. Myers touches on this point, somewhat only briefly though.
Another key argument against the new system is that “a gymnast could simply load up on difficulty, fall off the apparatus, and still win.” Did you know Simone Biles won two National championships, 2014 and 2015 with a fall each time? And by 4 and almost 5 points respectively too!
The author suggests that this new scoring system is meaningless if no one can match the difficulty levels of Simone, unlike chasing the 10 score of Nadia. I have to disagree. Why should it be flawed just because one athlete can push its boundaries? Shouldn’t she be rewarded accordingly for her talents? 10, after all, is just an arbitrary number anyway. This is also, one point in time. Who says there will not be up and coming gymnasts able to match Simone and even extend beyond. There does not seem to be a history of athletes in any sport not progressing over time. In fact, time and time again we have proven the question “Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger?”
Other topics of interest
Here are some other highlights in the book for me:
An interesting conspiracy theory around how Nadia’s perfect 10 score may have come about as a result of a backfired strategy by the Soviets at the time.
How judging impacted to shift to the new code of scoring.
Judging issues in human error and the ability to “evaluate a performance accurately in the short moment of time.” There is also discussion of the pressure of keeping in line with other judges.
In a side step, the book takes a look at the success of Biles and her coach, Boorman. How refreshing is this comment from Boorman, “I guess my whole philosophy with her from kind of raising and nurturing her was I always knew that it had to be fun. It had to remain fun in order to keep her in the sport.” I wish more coaches were as insightful as this! Perhaps we wouldn’t see so many talented young girls leave the sport before their time. Boorman also understood the need to innovate and extend Biles in order to prevent boredom with the sport.
How China was stripped of its 2000 Olympics All Round team medals. Find out why. The USA team was awarded their bronze medals 10 years later!
In addition to the history gymnastics from the 1970’s, an in depth look at the development of gymnastics in the USA was interesting. Particularly so, the impact of the Karolyi’s and the reasons why the US team has dominated the sport since the Sydney 2000 Olympics.
Interesting to hear that Liang Chow, who coached Gabby Douglas and Shawn Johnson, both gold medal Olympians, only trains his gymnasts a maximum of 4-5 hours per day. “I believe the intensity and the efficiency is the key”. Once again, a unique approach to the typical coaching of elite gymnasts. Would love to see it translated into the world of club gymnastics too.
Recommendation
The book covers the history of gymnastics, the story behind how the “out of 10” scoring became redundant and the reasons why it was replaced with the current system. The evolution of the sport from the artistic style and ballet like gymnasts, to the ever increasing difficulty and power athletes like Simone Biles, is highly engaging.
If you are interested in gymnastics for whatever reason (previous gymnast, parent to gymnasts, coach or judge) you should enjoy the wealth of information and discussion provided in this book. It appears to be extensively researched and interviews with key stakeholders provide unique insights.
It is in my view, however, suited more to the adult or older teen though. Younger gymnasts may not appreciate or understand the significance of the historic details.
For readers with an interest in sport, this book may also be of interest to you. Gymnastics is a popular spectator sport it may offer a greater understanding of the new scoring system and an interesting historic run down.
You can purchase a copy of “The End of the Perfect 10 – The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics’ Top Score” by Dvora Meyers from Simon & Schuster*.
The End of the Perfect 10 by Dvora Meyers
by Redheadedgirl · Jul 27, 2016 at 3:00 am · View all 7 comments
The End of the Perfect 10 by Dvora Meyers
SBTB Media Page
The End of The Perfect 10
by Dvora Meyers
JULY 5, 2016 · TOUCHSTONE
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A
GENRE: Nonfiction
As I write this review, the US Women’s Olympic team in gymnastics was just selected, and this is the sport I love more than all others (yes, more than polo). I watch it whenever I can, and I yell as loud as anyone at the absurd crapfire that is NBC’s coverage (SHUT UP AL TRAUTWIG NEVER SPEAK AGAIN) (EVER).
Now, those of us who watched gymnastic before 2006, or know our gymnastics history, know about the ideal of the Perfect Ten. Before 2006, gymnastics routines were scored out of a 10, and it wasn’t until The Queen of All, Nadia Comaneci burst onto the scene at the 1976 Olympics did anyone actually SCORE a 10.
Thirty years later, gymnastics now has an open-ended scoring system that seems really complicated to non-devotees. This book begins with Nadia’s first 10 and traces the events that led to the implementation of the current scoring method. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the men’s competition in 2004, but a lot of things led up to that, including a ridiculous number of perfect 10s awarded in Seoul in 1988, and a lot of asking, “what’s a 9.975 even MEAN?” in 1992).
Then we get a history of USA Gymnastics, from their ascendancy in the 1990s, to the disastrous 2000 Olympics. Short history: the 2000 Olympic team came in 4th in the team competition, and won no individual medals. The 2000 team was then retroactively awarded the bronze medal in 2010 at the US National Championships after it was discovered that the Chinese team had had an underage gymnast, and 2010 was the first time that team had come together and really talked about how awful the experience was for them.
From there, the US adjusted their system and became the powerhouse we are today. The past 3 All Around Olympic gold medalists are Americans (and it’s likely to be four, as long as 3 time World Champion Simone Biles continues to be Simone Biles). The US has won the team gold medal the past 3 World Championships in a row, and a US woman has won the all around in seven of the past nine Worlds. We’re pretty good at this.
Meyers traces this dominance to several things: the collapse of the Soviet Union brought a LOT of their coaching talent to the US, there are a lot of people who give gymnastics a try, there are a lot of people around the country on the lookout for exceptional talent, and the Karolyis have been the mainstays of the national program (for better and for worse). And the open-ended scoring system is something that American gymnasts have taken considerable advantage of. They walk into any competition with the potential of scoring multiple points more than any other country’s team, and this is a sport where things can and have been decided by fractions of a point.
There’s also a discussion on NCAA gymnastics, which is not something I know much about. NCAA gymnastics still uses the 10 scoring system, and it’s very team oriented. That chapter was fascinating to me, and media sources like NPR are covering the performances that go viral, such as Sophina DeJesus’ tumbling routine from UCLA’s meet against Utah.
Meyers is a gym fan (she writes the Unorthodox Gymnastics blog, and has written on gymnastics for Deadspin, The Guardian, The Atlantic… she knows what she’s talking about. She isn’t afraid to say that yeah, there are dark sides to the sport: injuries, abusive coaching methods, and difficulties with re-entry after retirement are all things she at least touches on. Some of her interviewees say “Oh, it wasn’t that bad in the mid-90s” and then in the next breath go, “It’s much better now.” But she clearly loves this sort, and she wants people who aren’t a part of the Gymternet, who don’t obsessively follow the sport, to understand what happened to the Perfect 10 and more importantly WHY. She talks with just about everyone but Martha and Bela Karolyi (not for lack of trying) and got all sorts of stories, from how Simone Biles developed into the powerhouse she is, to the guy that conceived of the current scoring system. She interviews multiple former Olympians, too – Kim Zmeskel-Burdette, 1991 World Champion and current coach to Olympic alternate Regan Smith is a particularly interesting case.
I think that this book will deepen the experience of anyone who will be watching the Olympics next month, even those of us who know lots of things. Meyers did a great interview with the Gymcastic podcast about the book (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. The creator and producer, Jessica O’Beirne, has been described as “wildly enthusiastic” and that’s the most accurate thing), and she’s a regular contributor there.
There are many places for people who want to know more than the vaguely insulting crumbs NBC will toss you, and places where the athletes selected for the women’s Olympic team has been hotly debated for the past year. There are so many blogs and discussion points about the dissatisfaction with NBC’s coverage that NPR even did a story on it. I’m vaguely hopeful that things might change, but that would involve getting rid of Al Trautwig as the “I don’t know nuthing about gymnastics” guy (But ALBERT you’ve been covering gymnastics for MULTIPLE OLYMPIC CYCLES YOU KNOW SOME SHIT BY NOW and also stop being gross about the young women who work their asses off. Having you say, when someone gets injured before a big event, “that’s like getting a tear in your wedding dress” is just… shut the fuck up, Al) (I hate him SO MUCH). The Gymternet is primarily women who decided they were going to make their own coverage, and discuss the real issues- that sounds familiar to me.
My point is, if you’re a casual fan, if you’re a rabid fan, if you just want to know more, this book has something for you.