MCSMaria's Artistic Gymnastics Blog

Tonight, a new queen of women's gymnastics will be crowned. This is a tight race as Ragan Smith and Mai Murakami qualified in first and second, separated by only 0.001, Mai with a 55.933 to Ragan's 55.932. Also contending is Elena Eremina, Russia's newest little darling with her Nabieva on bars. And you can never leave out the home team as Ellie Black is a major contender as well as Brooklyn Moors with her beautiful nostalgic, wistful floor routine. Also look out for Morgan Hurd, Melanie De Jesus Dos Santos of France, Nina Derwael of Belgium and her ridiculous bars and Diana Varinska of Ukraine. Refresh the page every five to ten minutes for updates. Here are the starting rotations - Starting on vault - Ellie Black Ragan Smith* Mai Murakami Morgan Hurd Elena Eremina Melanie De Jesus Dos Santos Ioana Crisan Starting on bars - Aiko Sugihara Nina Derwael Diana Varinska Tabea Alt Giulia Steingruber Angelina Melnikova Starting on beam - Brooklyn M...

Xiao Ruoteng of China took his throne as the newest all-around champion in men's gymnastics after defeating his enemies at the Battle of Bosworth... ahem, I men the men's all-around final. The Gymnastics Wars of the Roses will continue tonight in the name of crowning the newest queen of women's gymnastics. The biggest contender for the all-around title was Larisa Iordache, Of course, this was before she tore her achillies in the touch warm up during qualifications. At that moment, there was the sound of the breaking hearts of gym-fans all over the world. Trying to put bad memories out of our heads, we must move on. The Americans, Ragan Smith and Morgan Hurd are big favorites to win the all-around. Neither of them had a perfect qualifying round. Ragan fell on her layout on beam and Morgan put her hands down on one of her floor passes. Even with this mistake, Ragan qualified in 2nd place to the all-around final with a 55.932 and still showed a strong performance eve...

Ok, it's time for the final session of the P&G Championships. The senior women. After night one, Ragan Smith was leading by 1.3 points over Riley McCusker. She's got a comfortable lead, so she really just has to stay the course and keep hitting and she'll probably win. Night one was a bit of a splat-fest for the seniors, so it will be most interesting to see if they've gotten it together for night two. So come on in and keep refreshing the page every 10 minutes or so for all the good stuff.

It’s that time of year again where all the elites go to the P&G National championships to allegedly compete to be national champion, but really go there and try and impress the selection committee to make a world’s team.

Next Saturday, 2016 Olympic Alternates Ashton Locklear and Ragan Smith will join  a field of 73 gymnasts to  compete at next Saturday's US Classic, the last chance opportunity to qualify for the P&G National Championships in August. For the senior athletes, this will serve as a stepping stone in the qualification process to earn a ticket to the World Championships, being held in Montreal, Canada.

USA Gymnastics announced the field of competitors for the upcoming American Cup.

Two of the most prominent US juniors, Ragan Smith and Jordan Chiles will be representing team USA at Top Gym in Belgium; a rare showing of USA juniors outside Jesolo and a few scattered international and national competitions.  Ragan, who will turn senior this coming year, placed third in the junior division at this year’s P&G Championships. She trains at Texas Dreams under the tutelage of 1991 World Champion, Kim Zmeskal and her husband, Chris Burdette.  Jordan will turn senior in enough time to compete for Team USA in Rio, but will turn senior in 2017. She trains at Naydenov Gymnastics in Vancouver, Washington.  She won the junior title at the Secret Classic in 2014. Top Gym will be held Nov 28-29 in Charleroi, Belgium.  Gymnastike will live stream the event. The competition format is unique due to the fact that all-around competition will be held on Day One. Day two will feature event finals and a team competition. The team composition will feature four athlet...

The good folks at USA Gymnastics have once again came through for the Gymternet at large and they have supplied us with training videos from the January training camp. This video features junior Ragan Smith training some pretty bad ass skills for such a tiny person. After watching this video, I now know two things.