This month, NBC will once again attempt to pull one of the greatest tricks in television: convincing people to care about sports that they have ignored for the past four years. Millions of Americans will turn on their televisions in the coming days to watch Ping-Pong and beach volleyball and women’s gymnastics, which consistently ranks among the highest-rated Olympic sports despite the fact that only a very small number of Americans can tell the difference between a Produnova and an Amanar. In gymnastics and other sports, NBC often compensates for the viewer’s lack of knowledge by inserting drama—in 2012, the network notoriously made it seem as if the American women’s hopes for gold were in greater peril than they actually were by simply not airing the fact that a Russian gymnast had fallen during her floor exercise—and by spending time on every topic except for explaining the sports themselves.
But building any drama into the women’s gymnastics events may be NBC’s biggest challenge of the summer: in qualifying, the Americans scored ten points more than their closest competitors, the Chinese, meaning that each of the American gymnasts could have fallen off both the balance beam and the uneven bars and the team would have still scored well enough to win the day’s competition. Barring the interference of an ill-intentioned gymnastics god, the Americans will easily win gold in Tuesday’s team final. In the individual all-around, later this week, Simone Biles, whom I profiled in May, should win with similar ease. There isn’t much drama in greatness.
Here’s a suggestion for NBC, though: How about celebrating this group of American gymnasts, perhaps the greatest ever, by explaining to Americans exactly what makes them so great? I’m not a lifelong gymnastics fan—true gymnerds refer to the rest of us as “Four-Year Fans”—but earlier this year I spent several months engrossed in the sport while writing about Biles. I now consider myself safely in the ninetieth percentile of gymnastics comprehension, meaning that I understand about ten per cent of what is going on. But every bit I’ve learned has made the sport wildly more interesting to watch. On Sunday, for instance, I watched the qualifying round with two Four-Year Fans and was able to pass along an insight that Biles’s coaches have pointed out many times, but that NBC didn’t. As good as Biles is on her world-beating Amanar—a vault in which she twists two and a half times while flipping through the air—she will never get a perfect score because of the tiniest flaw: she crosses her toes.
This is the kind of information we might expect to learn from NBC’s broadcasts. There’s no questioning the credentials of the network’s analysts: Tim Daggett won a team gold medal at the 1984 Olympics, and Nastia Liukin won the individual all-around in 2008. But their expertise is often muted by the strictures of a prime-time broadcast. “My producer always puts a note card in front of me, like, ‘Talk to Madeleine in Middle America, who doesn’t know gymnastics,’ ” Liukin told me when we spoke in February. Poor Madeleine is often treated as if she would like to know nothing more than whether Aly Raisman did well or poorly, and what she posted on Snapchat earlier that day. “I don’t spend any time at all learning what an Amanar is,” Al Trautwig, NBC’s longtime gymnastics play-by-play man, said in a recent interview. This willful ignorance has affected viewers. Ask Madeleine what she looks for when watching gymnastics, and she will likely say that the worst thing a competitor can do is not stick a landing, which is often as specific as NBC gets in identifying anything wrong with a routine. It might interest her to learn that a tiny hop is far less harmful to a gymnast’s score than spinning through the air with her legs crossed (“helicopter legs,” in the vernacular) or spread wide apart (“cowboying”). “Impressive how little technical information Tim Daggett can impart during gymnastics routines,” Bryan Curtis, the media critic for The Ringer, wrote on Twitter during Sunday’s broadcast.
In defending its coverage of gymnastics and other Olympic sports, NBC often falls back on the fact that more women than men watch the Olympics, which the network believes should affect the way it covers the events. "They're less interested in the result and more interested in the journey,” John Miller, NBC’s chief marketing officer for the Olympics, said last month, explaining the network’s coverage. "It's sort of like the ultimate reality show and miniseries wrapped into one.” Setting aside the problematic gender assumptions, the idea that viewers staying up late into the night to watch a sport they barely understand have little interest in learning more about it seems wrong-headed, at least as suggested by the popularity of Leslie Jones’s Snapchatting about the Olympics, which has been driven in equal measure by her unfettered enthusiasm and by her willingness to ask out loud the most basic questions about the strange sports we all find ourselves watching. (Jones on handball: “What are the fucking rules? Are there fouls? Can you double-dribble?”)
Biles is perhaps the greatest gymnast of all time, and these Olympics may be the only time most Americans will get to see her perform. Might they want to know what makes her so good? There is, for instance, the fact that she requires fewer steps and less speed to get into the meat of tumbling runs, enabling her to fit more skills, and score more points, in her routines. Or that her lift off the floor is so huge that Jonathan Horton, a 2008 Olympic medallist, told me that he was embarrassed to work out with her. Or that Martha Karolyi, the American national team’s coördinator, believes Biles could be world-class on the uneven bars, the only event in which she is not the gold-medal favorite, but that for a long time Biles was too scared of the bars to commit to the apparatus. Biles’s toe-crossing on her vault may seem minor, but it’s a tic no less notable than Michael Jordan sticking his tongue out on his jump shot, except that it actually affects competitions—she loses a tenth of a point each time.
Members of the Gymternet, as the sport’s rabid online commentariat calls itself, often complain, rightly, that television coverage of the sport is hindered by an outdated image of gymnasts as teen-age pixies bouncing around the screen. This is a disservice to the athletes, the viewers, and reality. For starters, the average age of the female gymnasts competing in this year’s Olympics is just shy of twenty-one. The average age of the American swimmers is a little more than twenty-two. Yet much of the coverage encourages us to look at swimmers as some of the world’s premier athletes, and the gymnasts as the world’s most coördinated beauty-pageant contestants.
As I was preparing to write about Biles, I found it useful to think of top gymnasts less as young girls doing beautiful things and more as über-athletes doing very dangerous things. A typical floor exercise has less in common with a ninety-second dance routine—taxing enough as that is—than with a running back sprinting ninety yards for a touchdown that requires him to leap over, spin past, and barrel through opposing players. Just ask Biles, who was bent over at the waist after her floor routine on Sunday. And the sport seems to take less of a toll on her body than it does on anybody else’s: before the Games, Raisman posted a photo of herself holding a plastic bag filled with dozens of rolls of athletic tape that she needed for Rio. Biles stood next to her holding a single roll.
I also started to appreciate the sport more once I recognized that there is just as much behind-the-scenes preparation and maneuvering in gymnastics as there is in the N.F.L. or N.B.A.—and that Karolyi is as shrewd a coach as there is in sports. The dominance of this generation of American gymnasts is typically explained in terms of raw athleticism and resources, but they are also the beneficiaries of an extreme organizational advantage. Take the floor exercise, where every step and flourish is planned with an obsessive eye for detail. Scores are determined based on the execution of a precise combination of skills, performed in a particular order, and with connections between different elements, all of which is given a predetermined value as determined by the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique Code of Points. What the American team does better than anyone else is exploit the system for everything it’s worth: Karolyi and the other coaches pore over the Code with the same zeal that Bill Belichick, the New England Patriots head coach, scours the N.F.L. rule book for trick formations that push up against the boundary of the sport’s regulations. They both value even the tiniest advantage. “Martha is the Code-whore champion,” Jessica O’Beirne, who hosts Gymcastic, a gymnastics podcast, told me recently. “She’s a genius at creating the routines that will win.”
Take, for instance, the wolf turn, in which a gymnast crouches on one leg, attempts to stick her other leg parallel to the ground, and spins around. It’s an impressive move—if anyone could pull it off with any measure of grace. Biles does it better than perhaps any gymnast in the world, but even her version (see it here, at the one-minute mark) is wobbly. She does it, as do several other American gymnasts, because the wolf turn is awarded enough points that doing an ugly version is worth more than doing many more elegant maneuvers. (The F.I.G. has said that it will give fewer points to the skill when the Code is rejiggered, after the Olympics.) Critics charge that such tactical emphasis has taken the balletic grace out of the sport, to which Karolyi would respond that if you want to watch gymnasts perform like ballerinas, you’re welcome to watch the Dutch prance their way to an aesthetically pleasing off-podium finish later today. The Americans will happily optimize their way to gold.
Not enough drama for you? How about the fact that gymnasts risk their health every time they step onto the mat? “If you don’t think you’re gonna get hurt in gymnastics, then you’re being a fool,” Aimee Boorman, Biles’s coach, told me. “That’s why every single piece of equipment out there has a warning on it that you could be paralyzed.” In Rio this weekend, two female gymnasts landed on their heads and came up with the same dazed look as a wide receiver who had just been blindsided. When a French gymnast landed on his vault, a loud crack rang through the arena as his leg bent in the wrong direction. (Watch here, if you have the stomach for it.) Another male gymnast continued competing after he tore his A.C.L.
One of the factors preventing Americans from appreciating just how difficult it is to do what an Olympic gymnast does is the fact that competitors are expected to perform their routines without betraying any evidence of effort. Watching LeBron James drive into the lane, bounce off multiple defenders, and then rise above them seems so impressive in part because James grimaces along the way. Serena Williams growls with every shot. The effort is obvious. A gymnast, meanwhile, is expected to risk life and limb with a smile on her face. “You’re never supposed to show that it’s difficult,” O’Beirne said. She pointed out that there is no such requirement for male gymnasts. “You can trace that back to the eighteen-hundreds, when women wore corsets and they were supposed to act like they weren’t in horrible pain. Why can’t Nastia wear her bitch face?” When you’re dealing with perhaps the greatest gymnastics team of all time, explaining to Madeleine just how difficult it is to be as great as they are should be ratings fodder enough.
