With two gold medals, on bars and beam, and a bronze on floor, Liu Tingting was the best gymnast at the the 2017 Melbourne World Cup. Her polished, clean lines and good execution helped her finish ahead of team mate Luo Huan in the bars final, won by Tingting with a 14.3/6.0 score. In the beam final Tingting repeated the clean performance from qualifications with very minor breaks in the beginning of the routine but very strong connections of acro and dance elements as well as a hint of choreography (not always a given in the Chinese routines of the recent history). She finished first with a score of 14.766/6.0. Equally impressive on this event was the silver medalist Sanne Wevers. She managed to upgrade significantly compared to her qualifications performance and hit her beautiful pirouettes (14.500/6.0).
Emily Little was one of the big winners of the competitions with three medals: silver on vault, bronze on beam and gold on floor. She had a wonderful opening of her floor with a stuck double layout followed by an impressive full in double back tuck. Her two other series were a fair effort albeit a couple of hops. Her score of 13.4 and a 5.1 difficulty were a bit depressing considering the effort but it’s a new code and new rules apply. Give it a few more months and the low floor scores should seem less harsh. Little also had the finest vault of the competition, her double twisting Yurchenko was rewarded with a 9.166 execution (14.199 average for the two vaults) and helped her win the silver medal in the vault final behind Wang Yan. Yan had higher difficulty with her usual Tsukahara double full and Rudi and won with an average of 14.250. She did not compete in the floor final despite having qualified with the first score. Hopefully nothing serious happened and she will be able to compete in the World Cup Circuit over the next weeks, as planned.
Here are the winning routines:
Wang Yan, vault:
Liu Tingting, bars:
Liu Tingting, beam:
Emily Little, floor
Article: Bea Gheorghisor
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