Inspired by watching the NCAA championships.
For women’s events, the vault. Everything has to be perfect and exact. There’s no room for error.
For men’s, the rings. The strength required is just mind boggling.
Olympic gymnastics is awesome.
Those guys end up with huge biceps, and it’s simply an incidental outcome of their sport (in fact, a gymnast doesn’t want to get big).
So seeing the men on the rings is very impressive.
As for the women, I’m amazed at their skill on the uneven bars. It’s nerve wrecking to watch.
On the women’s side, I would probably go with the uneven bars. That event absorbs my attention from start to finish. The floor exercise is a close second. I love anticipating what’s going to happen when the gymnast heads to the corner and prepares for her tumbling run down the diagonal, but there’s a lot of filler waiting for those runs. I don’t really pay a lot of attention to the men’s side. Floor, I guess, and the pommel horse can be kind of interesting, too.
I’ll go with the uneven bars, too. For most of the events, my general reaction is “I could do that… very poorly… If I restricted myself only to the simple moves”. For the uneven bars, my reaction is more like “How is it possible for any human to ever do any of that?”.
Men, I gotta go with pommel horse. Women, balance beam. I find the vault is my least favorite.
Tumbling - the 25 meter straight line tumbling run that for reasons that aren’t clear to me gets slotted in Trampoline Events. It’s not yet an Olympic event.