Rhythmic Gymnastics – After the Final

After all the waiting we finally had the national final yesterday. Luna’s performance overall was maybe her best of the season. She had the pressure and the misfortune of being the first in the rotation. We were very worried about this because it is so hard to be the first off but Luna’s free routine (Zonder Materiaal) was her best of the season as far as we were concerned. That made the shock of the score hard to take. During the national finals they show the scores as they come in. She was given 7.800 for free, her lowest score of the season with a D score of only 1.00. It was very hard to understand the D score because she got 1.50 in the first qualifier and 1.25 in the semi-final where she made more mistakes. It’s impossible to know how the jury scored this but the only likely explanation is that the most difficult elements she executed (catching straight leg from behind and split roll at the end) were not scored. It is known that juries often score the first performer very strictly and maybe they thought that she was not perfect in executing those elements. We will never know but it is really disappointing because other routines which were much simpler were given higher D scores.
She performed her clubs routine very well but dropped twice towards the end which led to deductions. Her jury score of 7.750 was okay but, incredibly, the coordinator gave her a 0.200 penalty because the music was timed at four seconds too long. The reason it is incredible is because it was the same music that was used all season and even by her clubmate in the B final without any issues, the timing on the CD supplied is also as stipulated. Against the rules of the competition there was only one timekeeper. Due to this technical penalty Luna had a total score of 15.35 which put her in sixth place. Fifth place was just 0.15 ahead of her so you can imagine how pleased we were with this penalty. The ridiculous thing is that another girl got a penalty too who had the exact same music as three of her clubmates. You couldn’t make it up. If it was the difference between fourth and third place there might have been an official appeal against the penalty but when it is the difference between sixth and fifth it is not as big a deal.
Having outlined the frustrations with the scoring I should say that the top three were deserved winners of the medals. They had dynamic routines with lots of difficulty built in to gather points. Even if Luna had have been given a better D score in free and not been given a time penalty the highest she could have come was fourth. The top three girls were all in their second year and they showed their higher skill level. Four of the finalists, including Luna, were in their first year and they will all be back next year. Our club will have four girls in the category next year and hopefully Luna and one or two of her teammates will be back in the Ahoy in 2014 and maybe with a better chance of reaching the podium. Luna will be doing a ball routine next season and she loves that apparatus. If she keeps improving and keeps believing she will have a shot. In any case being the sixth best in the country in her age category is a great achievement for her first year and we are really proud of what she has done.

Rhythmic Gymnastics – Almost There

It’s been a long season of gymnastics with many highs and some lows. This weekend we can enjoy the highlight of the season, the national finals. For us as parents it has probably been more stressful thinking about the finals than for Luna because we have tried to keep her thinking about enjoying the occasion as qualifying for the individual final was her dream at the start of the season and now she has made it.
The months of training have taken their toll and Luna is complaining about some aches and pains. Under other circumstances you would want her to rest now and not make things worse but the final only comes around once a year and your first ever final only comes around once in a lifetime.
The final is sure to be very competitive because there have been various girls on the podium in the qualifiers. There are two girls competing who were second and third last year and they are even better this year. For Luna it’s all about giving it her best shot and hopefully avoiding any big penalties Wherever she comes she can be proud of a fantastic debut season.
The two duo finals are tomorrow and, again, we are not expecting too much there. They managed to get a bronze medal in rope in the semi-final but we don’t expect a repeat of that unless they put in an outperformance. Competing in the duo finals will allow Luna to get familiar with the floor and the set-up in the Ahoy so that is good preparation for Sunday too. So, almost there now and Luna can enjoy a well-earned rest after Sunday.

The disease that dare not speak its name

Every so often I get a newsletter from my old school which generally celebrates the wonderful achievements of said institution, nurtures the myth that all who schooled there had the time of their lives and encourages feelings of inadequacy among those pastmen who may not quite have enjoyed global success in their chosen careers. It’s a masochistic pleasure reading that newsletter. There is one part though that makes for very sober reading, the obituary page. As you would expect the majority of the obituaries are for men who have reached a natural end but in every newsletter you read about one or two past pupils who “died tragically” or “died suddenly”. In English there are few domains where the tendency to obfuscate is as prevalent as in the obituary. In obituaries euphemisms are used where the truth hurts too much. Sudden or tragic deaths mean suicide more often than not.
Suicide is something that every society has to deal with but in Ireland it has reached epidemic proportions in recent years. Suicide is the main cause of death for young men in Ireland with a particular peak in the 16 to 20 age range as detailed in the report Suicide in Ireland 2003-2008. The media of the country struggles to find explanations mainly because the causes seem to be so diffuse and finding a consistent and effective approach to stemming the disease is so challenging.
‘Cause suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please.
…and you can do the same thing if you please.
MASH was a really popular show in the seventies when I was growing up in Ireland and there wasn’t a person who couldn’t sing those lines. Suicide was always there, the bizarre ‘drownings’, the shooting ‘accidents’, the ‘falls’ off the cliffs, the unambiguous bodies found hung in barns, farmers who couldn’t bear the toil. The language was confusing at first but gradually it became clear that these were all people choosing their own exit route. I don’t remember too much discussion about it, it was done and dusted and we moved on. In the wider world the likes of Ian Curtis lent the process a certain glamour. The idea that it was irrational never occurred to me personally. I suffered severe depression at the age of seventeen when I had what you might call a ‘lost’ year when everything was coloured black. In 2012 the media reported widely on the death of Don Richie, the so-called ‘angel of the gap’ who prevented hundreds of Australians from taking the fatal jump. Luckily the world has more than one angel and I was lucky to have two rocks who helped nurse me back to a semblance of mental health. I didn’t ever go as far as attempting to harm myself but that I wanted to leave the world was pretty clear from the kinds of letters I was sending home talking about ‘social suicide’, retreating from society, having nothing to do with anybody. It was no surprise that I ended up with a girlfriend with depressive tendencies who had been hospitalized for an attempted suicide months before I met her. She glamorized her ex-boyfriend’s drug overdose and started talking regularly about a double suicide.
For whatever reason I started to get better and I distanced myself from her. I don’t understand it now but my mind started to heal itself and I came back into the world. I learned to live and I learned to hope but every time I read about a suicide I always think that there but for the grace of God go I. As the years have gone by the list of names of people I once knew who died by their own hand has grown. It scares me to think that it is an embedded part of the Irish cultural psyche to think of suicide as an acceptable way out. In Ireland there are many initiatives to try to tackle the problem. One of the most inspiring is the Pieta House organization which aims to prevent suicide and self-harm by providing a counselling environment where those at risk can find a way back before it’s too late.

Rhythmic Gymnastics – About the Jury

Gymnastics sports, like many others, are jury-based with all of the disadvantages that brings. In sports like soccer with quite simple, objective scoring criteria the role of the referee is often subject to fierce scrutiny. In jury sports the inherent subjectivity makes the judging role even more precarious. The rhythmic gymnastics scoring criteria are changed after each Olympics cycle so there was a big transition after London 2012 to a new version of the so-called Code of Points. Rhythmic gymnastics is unusual in that many of the people watching the sport have ideas about what constitutes a good performance that do not match very well with what the jury is actually scoring. I have even heard people saying that they don’t even want to know all of the details of the points system because it would mean that they would start to focus too much on flaws and penalties.
At this stage I can normally judge the performances by rank but I can never judge what the actual score of a performance will be. It is helpful at least that I am rarely too surprised with the outcome but there are still the odd shock scores that I can’t understand. Luckily the subjectivity in scoring is balanced by the fact that there are four judges each for difficulty and execution and the top and bottom scores are always dropped. That reduces the likelihood of major overscoring or underscoring.
Judging is normally done by parents who have followed a jury course. In our club the trainer is trained and one mother sits on the jury at several competitions each year. It’s not ideal to have the trainer sit on the jury because then she is not available for preparing the gymnast on the day of the competition. The consequence this year is that our trainer will be on the jury panel in Luna’s final.
In order to address the undersupply of jury members there will be a jury course after the season ends and I will join a few other parents in trying to get jury credentials. It is obvious that spreading the workload is a win-win for everybody. It means that we have flexibility in attending domestic and foreign competitions. Most of all though having more trained jurors will relieve our main juror who has given up so much of her free time this year to attend competitions at home and abroad. I am sure that I am not alone in appreciating her great work which demands so much in service of others. Like so many volunteer tasks in clubs there has to be a willingness on the part of parents and club members to contribute more than their membership fees for a club to function effectively. It’s something we are acutely conscious of and my doing the jury course will be a small step towards redressing some of the balance.

Rhythmic Gymnastics – What’s given up

When people start to question the validity of pursuing excellence in sport or music or art or anything else for that matter you have to keep your wits about you. Some people think in simple, economic, terms. What’s good for a child is inevitably linked to some future economic benefit so being a good footballer seems vaguely reasonable but aiming for the top in a sport with a handful of professionals is just ludicrous. I don’t try to explain. It’s like talking to atheists about religion and God. They have their viewpoints and I have mine and ne’er the twain shall meet.
I have to keep believing in the element just like I have to keep believing in God. That doesn’t mean that my beliefs don’t get tested. Your child is giving up so much and there are no guarantees. Luna will stand as one of the eight best rhythmic gymnasts in her age category on Sunday. Each of those girls have given so much of their time to the sport and there are many others who have trained just as hard who won’t ever get to the Ahoy. Still you have doubts when you weigh up the success against the sacrifice.
In “Double Fault” Lionel Shriver’s wonderful novel about a tennis career gone wrong a certain scene grabbed me by the throat. The tennis starlet Willy meets her future husband Eric for the first time and hits balls with him on the tennis court. In the first getting-to-know-you interchanges he shrewdly diagnoses that a girl who hits ball like her can’t have friends and tells her so. It was a chilling thought, to think that so many of the stars we admire are also people who have pursued the element and lost the chance to have regular friends. The hope you have as a parent is that your children can find friends in their sport but, even then, rivalry makes friendship that much harder.
Luna has had three birthday party invitations this year. The first two were turned down because she had competitions. The third party is on Friday, the night before she has her duo finals in the Ahoy. The party is a swimming pool party and the last time Luna was at one of those she ended up going to hospital after splitting her head doing a dive she should never have attempted from a springboard. The risk is too great so, after much discussion, it was agreed that she can’t go. Last year Luna missed her school tour because of a competition in Poland. This year there was another competition planned for the same weekend they have the school tour but it looks like it won’t go ahead and she will get to go on the tour.
The future is predictable if she keeps getting better at her sport. She will end up training most days and having to look after herself on the others. The sport itself has to be the reward, the element has to be found in doing what you love. If you don’t have the element then the day will surely come when when giving up the things that most people enjoy won’t seem worth it. Luna’s mother will be able to tell her how that goes. She was a great hurdler and was good enough to reach the Polish junior finals but the day came when all of the training was getting in the way of life. If you love what you do, if you are in your element then what you give up is worth the sacrifice. If people don’t understand what finding your element is about then allowing your daughter to turn down birthday invitations looks very cruel. Where we are now Luna loves the upsides and can accept the downsides but listening to how she feels is crucial so that we hear her if she needs to take a step back some day.

Gymnastics – The Club Championship

A year is a long time in sport. This time last year Luna won her first ever (gold) medal in RG at the Jahn club championship. Daisy was still at the recreation level in Artistic Gymnastics and we were happy that she was able to do well in her competition even without a medal. Last year we were so excited for Luna but this year the club championship came the week before the nationals, the biggest event of her life so far. We were really happy that she got competitive practice and that she took another gold medal but it was Daisy who made our day. Her improvement at Acro in the last months has been remarkable and she got a gold medal with her partner Roxanne in the E category against pairs who have come ahead of them before. It was sweet that Daisy’s dimples were showing again and that we could have a photo of our two golden girls together. The only downside was telling Nadia, who spent the day at a birthday party, that she was the only sister without a medal. She was so proud of them but once again we had to tell her that her day would come before long. What these sisters are doing is making us smile. These are the days of our life.

What I was reading while I wasn’t dreaming

 

This year I have been reading a lot more books in Dutch than in the past. It started almost by accident. I read somewhere that “The Dinner” by Herman Koch was on the NYT bestsellers list and then I saw the Dutch original (“Het Diner”) on a friend’s bookshelf so he lent it to me along with another Koch book called “Zomerhuis met zwembad” (“Summerhouse with Swimming Pool”). I have read some Dutch novels before but these two books were pretty special. Koch has a knack of writing about things that people think but wouldn’t dare to say unless they want to become very unpopular. It’s often very confrontational as you follow the trains of thought and find yourself smirking in recognition until the same train of thought makes the protagonist do something very nasty. Many of his characters are borderline sociopaths while others are not even borderline. I read a few more of his books after those too including one delightful one called “Denken aan Bruce Kennedy” (“Thinking of Bruce Kennedy”) written in the female voice in a really convincing manner.
After these books I read Tatiana de Rosnay’s book “Sarah’s Key” in the Dutch translation “Haar naam was Sarah”. I thought that this was a very well constructed novel which kept enough in reserve until the very end. It’s about a girl called Sarah who lose her family as a result of the Vel d’Hiv raids in Paris in World War II and the story is harrowing but very well told. I also read another one of Kluun’s books in record time but it was more of an entertaining whimsy than a novel so it’s not really worth talking about.
I have gone back to English now to read the first e-book I have ever bought – Chimamanda’s new novel “Americanah” which is pretty sweet so far. It’s nice to be reading a new book by my favourite writer so I am going enjoy this one for a while. I still have countless unread books lying around but life and sleep just keep getting in the way.