Analyzing Claudio Fragapane

It has recently come to my attention that the British media is billing Claudia Fragapane as the next floor champion. The British analyst used to be very unbiased back when their teams were horrible but now that their teams are competitive everything is changing. It is sad that things are evolving this way and I hope that they can manage to bring back their fair analyzing for the Olympics because the US analyst are incompetent with actual analyzing of the performances.

Claudio Fragapane is quite the innovator on floor, she has some skills that are hardly ever done on that apparatus and they appear as though she's breakdancing or something of the sort. She is definitely not a typical gymnast or a pixie type gymnast but at the same time her form isn't there either. I saw both of her performances at the Euros and thought that her form could have been better yet the judges didn't overly call her out on that.

She was given a 6.0 D-score and 14.766 E-score on both qualification and team final. She must be commended for sticking almost all of her landings some of which were really complicated. Her first tumbling pass is a full twisting double layout - an H rated element. Followed by a double layout, which is valued at an F. The problem with doing big elements is that in today's gymnastics combinations and bonuses are everything. A gymnast can do two whips into a double arabian with a stag jump out and get the same eight tenths without risking landing deductions.

My real criticism of her is that her toes aren't pointed as much as they should be - Aly Raisman's aren't either and she still won the gold medal. I find that her splits don't really look like they are fully hit but maybe it is just her body that makes it look like it isn't hitting the full split. Then there is the fact that her D-score is only 6.0, that is not nearly as high as it should be if a gymnast intends to win on floor. It is just not going to happen, that D-score needs to be at least 6.3 to challenge some of the big guns like Simone Biles, Larisa Iordache and a healthy Ksenia Afanasyeva.

Check her at the Euros 2014 below. Do you think that she was given too high of an E-score or just about right? I think that it was probably a tenth too high but those sticks make judges forget a lot.