On the evolution of gymnastics & spectacle

I've been watching women's gymnastics on YouTube, especially, of course, the gravity defying leaps and flips of Simone Biles.

Then I went back and watched some of the older gymnasts who I remembered from my childhood, like Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci, who got "perfect 10"s back then.

When I looked at the older performances, it almost didn't look like they were the same sport.  The older performers were doing less difficult stunts, but more gracefully, more slowly, and with more certain landings.

More recently, I started watching the rhythmic gymnastics.  Those hadn't run across my social media feed before today.  This seems to be because the USA didn't have any really strong contestants in that sport.  Instead, the dominant performances were from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Italy, China, Canada, Germany, Finland, Brazil, Austria, Uzbekistan, Estonia. In this sport, the competitors perform with apparatus: ball, clubs, ribbon.  I particularly liked the ribbons, which were very long and had to be kept airborne through twirling them into interesting shapes.

Interestingly, in this other sport the performances look more like the older ones in the ordinary gymnastics -- more ballet-like, less tumbling, more graceful.  There is something decided ungraceful about the necessity to run headlong across a mat in order to just barely manage to get multiple flips in the air without landing out of bounds.  These recent performances might be powerful, impressive, intimidating, amazing -- but certainly less graceful than the rhythmic gymnasts -- and less graceful than Korbut & Comaneci.

Also, I noticed that the women who were making these powerful jumps also looked powerful, with huge bulging muscles; while the rhythmic dancers were less muscular.

This reminds me of some earlier observations I have made in the area of fireworks.

When I was a kid, we went to a local park, in the small city where I lived, and they had fireworks.  Those were fired off at a rate of about one per minute or maybe one per 2 minutes.  We would watch each individual firework ascend into the air -- leaving a faint trail of sparks as it went up -- and then we would all say "oooo" very softly as it exploded.

The number of fireworks set of was decidedly less than what one would expect today -- there was also decidedly less noise, light, and smoke.  It was a much more laid back experience, where we took time to enjoy each individual firework.

I'm not at all convinced that the evolution of these spectacles so that the performances are bigger and more powerful is necessarily an improvement.