World Championship Rosters Released – The Balance Beam Situation

The FIG released the nominative rosters for worlds today, which is probably a good thing because podium training begins in a cool 9.25 days. Might want to know who is going. Ish. I mean, it’s just nominative.

Case in point, the US women’s team, which won’t be selected until this weekend. The US nonetheless must submit placeholder names for the nominative roster in order to avoid a late-entry fine that exists for actually no real reason but is the same amount as the prize money for a bronze medal.

So we end up with a nominative roster submitted by someone in the US women’s program (Tom? Annie? A roomba with a little hat on?) that includes Shilese Jones even though she is quite definitely on tour right now and will be doing a double double off a rod floor in Chicago when the US women’s team is competing in qualification. So…we know this thing will change. Although, the roster does—by process of elimination—list Cecile Landi as Jones’ coach now instead of Christian Gallardo, so perhaps we got something useful out of it regardless. Skye Blakely also appears on the US nominative roster but will not participate at the selection camp, which will have just six competitors aiming for the four spots: Ciena Alipio, Kayla DiCello, eMjae Frazier, Olivia Greaves, Konnor McClain, and Leanne Wong.

You know that if this were the Martha era we would be like, “It’s a mind game! She’s saying to the other athletes, ‘I prefer someone who isn’t even trying for worlds over you.’” But in the Tom era we’re like, “Does Tom even know who Shilese is?”

Here are some of the other developments of note from the roster release. You can find the full rosters by subdivision in the worlds HQ.

• Currently there are 115 women registered for worlds. This would be the smallest world championship field since just 97 women competed at 2005 worlds in Melbourne.

• Great Britain will not replace Fragapane on the team and has registered just 3 women for worlds: Becky Downie, Georgia-Mae Fenton, and Ruby Stacey.

• Uzbekistan is not sending any athletes to worlds. No wonder Chuso has to come back for the 2022 Asian Games.

• Italy’s women’s roster features the return from injury of Desiree Carofiglio and Elisa Iorio, who were both in-progress coming back when the Olympic team was picked but ran out of time to get fully back. They’ll prospectively be joined by the D’Amatos on the team, which will make for a pretty strong contingent that can make some finals in this field.

• Brazil’s men’s nominative roster includes both Arthur Zanetti, who was not on the team announced by the federation, and Luis Porto, who

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  from Brazil’s team as of today. So it seems that despite registering four men, Brazil will have only Nory and Souza joining Andrade.

• The Romanian women have elected to send only Maria Ceplinschi, who recently won the beam and floor titles at the Mersin World Cup. Injury and illness have ravaged the Romanian senior women lately, which is a shame because this would have been a great opportunity to send Silviana Sfiringu and Ioana Stanciulescu to a world championship.

• Diana Varinska does not appear on Ukraine’s roster, but Ukraine is sending a deep men’s gang with Olympians Petro Pakhniuk, Igor Radivilov, and Ilia Kovtun all going.

• Yeo Seojeong does not appear on South Korea’s women’s roster, though the presence of Lee Yunseo provides an opportunity to right the wrong of Olympic qualification. And while the women’s team may be lacking in the vaulting department, the men are sending a simple two Olympic vault champions with both Yang Hakseon and Shin Jaehwan on the team.

• Other Olympic event medalists taking a pass on worlds include Tin Srbic, Artem Dolgopyat, Artur Davtyan, Lee Chih Kai, Rayderley Zapata, Lukas Dauser, Eleftherios Petrounias, Ferhat Arican, and Max Whitlock, as well as the Chinese and Russian medalists.

• So what I mean to say is that Hashimoto Daiki, Kazuma Kaya, and Shin Jaehwan are the only Olympic medalists slated to compete at worlds on the men’s side. For the women, Angelina Melnikova, Vladislava Urazova, Rebeca Andrade, and Murakami Mai are the athletes bringing their Olympic medal energy to Exhaustion Worlds.