Random Gymnastics Athletes Generator

So the tool gave you a gymnast

You wanted a gymnast and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. It is bigger and broader than most people expect, taking in the artistic gymnasts you see on the beam and the rings, the rhythmic gymnasts with ribbons and hoops, and the trampolinists, who are in the Olympics and whom almost nobody can name.

The tool is the simple part. Gymnastics deserves a proper explanation, because the single thing everybody thinks they know about it stopped being true two decades ago.

The perfect 10 does not exist any more

Ask anyone what a perfect gymnastics score is and they will say ten. It is one of the most durable images in sport, fixed in the public mind by Nadia Comăneci at the Montreal Olympics in 1976, when a fourteen-year-old Romanian scored the first perfect ten in Olympic history and then scored six more.

You cannot score a ten today. It was abolished. The reason is that the ten had become a ceiling, and once several gymnasts in a final were capable of a flawless routine, the judges had nowhere to put the difference between them. A safe, easy, immaculate routine and a terrifyingly hard, immaculate routine scored the same. The system was rewarding caution. So in 2006, after years of judging controversy, the sport threw the ten away and adopted a scoring system with no upper limit at all. Modern scores land somewhere around fourteen or fifteen, and there is no maximum. Nobody has ever quite got over it.

How a routine is actually scored

A gymnast now receives two separate scores that are added together. The first is the difficulty score, usually called the D score, and it is calculated from the skills the routine contains, each of which has a value laid down in a document called the Code of Points. Harder skills, and harder connections between skills, add value. There is no cap, so a gymnast can simply choose to attempt more.

The second is the execution score, the E score, which does start at ten, and from which judges deduct for every bent knee, wobble, step on landing and imperfect body line. Add the two and you have the total. The consequence is a permanent strategic tension that governs the whole sport: do you attempt the harder routine and accept the deductions, or the easier one performed beautifully? A gymnast with a monstrous D score can fall and still beat somebody who was flawless. That, precisely, is the trade the old ten could not express, and it is why the tool's older names and its modern names were competing under different laws of physics.

Land it first and it takes your name

Here is the loveliest convention in the sport. If a gymnast performs a genuinely new skill at a major international competition and lands it, the skill is entered into the Code of Points under their surname, permanently.

So the Code is a kind of graveyard of ambition, full of names: the Yurchenko, the Produnova, the Amanar, the Tkatchev. Coaches say them daily without thinking about who those people were. Simone Biles has five separate elements named after her, across vault, beam and floor, which means five times she stood in front of international judges and did something no human had done in competition before. It also creates a strange incentive, because the committee that sets values has sometimes deliberately under-valued the most dangerous new skills, precisely so that less capable gymnasts are not tempted to attempt them and break their necks. Draw a name from this tool and it is worth checking whether the Code of Points contains it too.

Forty-one medals, and the day she stopped

Simone Biles has eleven Olympic medals and thirty world championship medals, which makes her the most decorated gymnast in history by a distance, in a sport where the greats have historically had short careers and shorter bodies.

What she is likely to be remembered for is a day she did not compete. At the Tokyo Olympics, favoured to win almost everything, she withdrew mid-competition. She had the twisties: a sudden loss of the sense of where her body is while she is inverted in the air. In a sport where you land head-first if you are wrong, it is not nerves, it is a genuine danger, and gymnasts have historically been expected to push through it. She said no, in public, at the Olympic Games, and the reaction split the world. Then she came back three years later, at an age at which gymnasts have traditionally long retired, and won three golds in Paris. She changed what the sport is permitted to ask of the people in it. That is a larger achievement than the medals, and the medals are the largest in the sport's history.

Three sports wearing one name

Finally, a warning about this list. Gymnastics at the Olympics is three distinct disciplines that share a word. Artistic gymnastics is the familiar one, with vault, bars, beam and floor. Rhythmic gymnastics is a different sport entirely, performed with ribbons, hoops, clubs and balls, dominated for decades by athletes from the former Soviet states, and judged on criteria most viewers cannot follow. Trampoline gymnastics is a third thing again, in which competitors reach heights of eight metres and perform triple somersaults with multiple twists.

This list contains all three, so a random pull might hand you an Olympic all-around champion, a rhythmic specialist known to almost nobody outside the sport, or a trampolinist. They train differently, compete differently, and would be helpless in each other's events.

What a random gymnast is good for

• Olympic sweepstakes. Draw gymnasts for a group and follow them through the team and all-around finals.
• Quiz and trivia prep. Ask which skills in the Code of Points are named after people. It is a very good round.
• Discovering the sport. Draw a name and go and watch a rhythmic or trampoline final. Neither is what you expect.
• Settling a debate. Pull two gymnasts and argue the greater career, across eras in which the scoring system was entirely different.
• Teaching and school projects. Draw a gymnast and research why the perfect ten was abolished.

Gymnastics questions

Why can't gymnasts score a perfect 10 any more?

The ten was abolished in 2006 because it had become a ceiling that could not distinguish between a flawless easy routine and a flawless difficult one. Scoring is now open-ended, combining a difficulty score with an execution score, and totals typically land around fourteen or fifteen.

Who is the most decorated gymnast?

Simone Biles, with eleven Olympic medals and thirty world championship medals. She also has five skills named after her in the Code of Points, awarded for landing new elements in international competition.

Why are gymnastics skills named after gymnasts?

Because a gymnast who performs a genuinely new skill at a major international competition has it entered into the Code of Points under their name, permanently. The Yurchenko, the Tkatchev and the Amanar are all named this way.

Can I pull several gymnasts, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a starts-with letter or a keyword the name has to contain.

References

1. International Gymnastics Federation. gymnastics.sport
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, gymnastics. britannica.com