What to Watch - Aug. 9 (Part I)

I'm breaking this into two sections today since tonight is one of my favorite events - the women's gymnastics team final!

There's no chance the U.S. doesn't win gold. Absolutely none. Team USA dominated in the qualifying round. I watch gymnastics consistently. I've watch all the national and world championships, plus some other meets, in between Olympics. I know how good they are. But still, I've never seen anything like what they did on Sunday. It was unreal how much better they were compared to everyone else. It's like other teams didn't even arrive at the Olympics to try and compete with them.

The U.S. won the qualifying round by almost 10 points. Y'all, that's A LOT! You automatically lose one point if you fall/come off the apparatus. That means that the U.S. could have counted nine falls, there were only 12 total routines that night, and still qualified in first. But of course, no one fell.

I expect the U.S. to win by even more than that tonight. While the scores are all wiped clean, you send up only three gymnasts in each event in the team final and all three scores count. In qualifying, teams were able to drop the lowest score, i.e. falls, and count the other three. Tonight those teams have to count everything, including if gymnasts fall. If you had included all four scores of each event for each team in qualifying, the U.S. would have probably won by close to 20 points. In a sport that comes down to tenths and hundreths of points that's just unheard of.

The real competition tonight is for second and third place. I expect Russia and China to also be on the podium, as they traditionally are, but they both looked so unprepared in qualifying. Both teams put together good sets on the bars but that's all I saw that looked competitive.

Besides the fact that Romania did not qualify to the team finals at the wold championships last year, and consequently the Olympics, the other shocking fact at worlds was that Russia did not earn a team medal.

For the last six to seven years, Russia's top gymnast has been Aliya Mustafina. She's a gymnast with as big of an attitude to match her talent. She goes out and puts up some incredible routines sometimes, but other times you just watch her obviously quit on an event. She did this the other night on the beam. She didn't even try to fight and in turn it looked like she basically jumped off the beam. Even with a fall, she qualified in fourth to the all-around finals (technically third since Gabby Douglas can't compete). I think Russia's medal color depends on Mustafina's performance tonight.

China was so strong in Beijing in 2008. Eight years later it's clear they invested everything into peaking in front of their home crowd and winning gold then. They finished third in 2012 and have declined drastically over the last two Olympic games. However, China finished better than Russia in qualifying and claimed the second spot with Russia in third. Again, it starts fresh tonight but China got the favorable rotation spot as the second qualifier.

Great Britain won its first ever team medal at worlds last year with the bronze. The other spots on the podium are completely up for grabs, so GBR could easily end up there after qualifying in fourth.

Brazil qualified fifth. While they've never been very competitive as a team, the home crowd could easily help boost them to a medal.

Germany, Japan and Netherlands round out the eight teams in the final. Just over three points separated second place China from eighth place Netherlands, so really, it's anyone's meet.

Well, it's anyone's meet except for the fact that the U.S. will win. If this doesn't happen, there won't be a previous instance to compare it to as far as an upset. But I'm confident, along with everyone else, including the other teams, that Team USA will be wearing that gold medal.