Our Blog - Paris Olympics - Men's Gymnastics Individual finals

I think I would have preferred Women's gymnastics to Men's gymnastics, but I wasn't willing to shell out enough money for those events. It was held in Bercy Arena, and while I could see the parallel bars and high bar quite well, the other 4 events were on the other side of a BIG arena. I had taken binoculars to Paris but didn't take them to the event.

They continued to try to add some arts and culture, so here we have some ballerinas who had a mix of classical and modern music. I did them in 2 different videos, the first being classic and the 2nd being modern.

So there are 6 different apparatuses that the men compete on: floor, pommel horse, rings, vault, parallel bars and high bar. During the individual all-around event that we went to, the athletes compete on 4 of them at the same time. It makes it a little interesting to try to watch because you could be watching a floor exercise and miss a vault.

For the vault, unfortunately we were on the wrong side to get a good view of the landing of the vault, but I attempted to get a few. You can see the 2nd guy didn't have a good landing, stepping off to the side.

One example of a floor exercise ... this is one that I prefer the ladies, since they tend to have at least a few things of "artistic" content versus just basically one tumbling run after another. Mind you ... the ladies have moved more towards the men in that area over the years.

A couple Parallel bars examples .. the second one, you can watch a vault going on at the very end of his routine.

high Bar ... the first athlete was doing great with some amazing release moves until he missed the bar. In comparison, the 2nd routine was clean, including sticking the landing, but there was only 1 release move and it was somewhat easy (in my opinion).

And now a few "action" shots, trying to get a few interesting moments ...

Here is a grouping of a couple of release moves on the high jump.

He is WAY above the bar!

rings and pommel horse where the hardest to get good pictures/videos of, but here I attempted to get a rings exercise. I didn't really get a good pommel horse video (sorry).

There were quite a few falls off the high bar and the pommel horse (more than I would have expected on the horse since you really don't have release moves). But you had quite a few that lost their grip or something and slipped off the horse. While it was interesting being there live, I personally think I prefer watching on TV, since I get to really see close-up of all of the good exercises instead of missing some of them due to them all going on at the same time.