Hi there, (中文筆記在英文PO以下)
I have looked through steemit a bit and I thought what can I do differently that will make this blog interesting. My daughter is training gymnastics up to 30 hours a week and because of that it's basically her life. She's there training so often and having to miss enough school hours that her school was not willing to accept that and now I homeschool her. Luckily she's a smart cookie so this part of her life is a breeze for me. The more I think about how we are doing things now, the better it seems anyway! We have to travel during competition season so I thought that could make this something worth blogging about. Visiting different cities in NZ and documenting our time so one day she can look back at it.
First a bit about me. I'm from Christchurch, New Zealand and right now I'm into poker, cryptocurrency, AI / the future, sound systems and related electronic music especially drum and bass. I studied maths and Japanese at university then made the obvious decision (lol) to move to Taiwan where I knew no one and try getting a job teaching English. I had loads of friends in Japan already from university as I didn't go directly there after finishing like many of them did and I had read that the cost of living in Taiwan compared to income was way better for English teachers so I went there instead. 2 years later I was married and another year after that we had the future subject of these posts come into our life.
I have learnt reasonably good conversational Chinese and can read around 2000 characters (that isn't much but a lot of people think it's good) so I will attempt to do a little bit of bilingual posting as well. 3 years ago we moved from Taiwan back to New Zealand for our children's education. We also have an almost 6 year old son called Jayce.
The kids around a year ago:
So onto Alyssa. She is currently 9 and doing what they call Step 7 gymnastics in New Zealand. It's her dream to one day make the Commonwealth Games and possibly the Olympics. Her mum, Claire, is (self admittedly) what is known in Asia as a "Tiger mom" and spends all her time obsessing about gymnastics. This can be a source of contention with us sometimes as I feel like she can take it too far but without her caring so much about it, perhaps Alyssa would not be where she is.
So rewinding a couple of days to where I'd be writing this if my account had been approved sooner. Saturday was the CSG Classic here. It was the biggest competition she's been in as far as who was competing with the best of NZ and also a couple of Australian teams coming over. From the research my wife did (I did say she takes it seriously remember) after the event, two of the Australian girls finished 2nd and 3rd all round in their national competition a month or so ago so they were also top of the field in their country.
Saturday was a day of qualification and also the all around section. 20 girls competed in the step 7 competition across the 4 events the girls compete; vault, uneven bars, beam and floor. Alyssa had a fall on the beam and her floor is not so strong but she finished 5th overall for all around (all 4 scores added together). What I should note here is that the age limit in this grade is 13 and under so some of the girls are 4 years older than her. Right now the age difference hinders her a little as her leg strength is not as high as the 13 year olds and this is important for the tumbling on the floor and getting high on the vault. She is the youngest competing at this level in both countries and holding her own which is another reason why I have decided to start this blog. Assuming she keeps going, one day she will be able to find this and read through and realise some stuff she probably doesn't contemplate now.
The top 8 on each apparatus were allowed to compete on day two. Luckily she managed to make the top 8 in 3 events, just scraping in on vault, getting 2nd overall on bars which is her favourite and also qualified top 8 on beam. Floor she finished 9th so was unable to compete in this event on day two but as mentioned before, this is not her strength at the moment.
The first event was balance beam and I was suitably nervous. It's not easy watching your daughter doing tricks on a 4 inch wide beam that's 4 feet off the floor. Her mother can't handle this pressure and doesn't attend the events so I am the one who does the travelling and recording of videos. The general format is to have a 10 minute practice / warm up on each of the apparatuses before the scoring round. After that they usually go to their first apparatus and get one final warmup before competing. For some reason that didn't happen and before I knew it, she was first of 8 to get on it and away she went. By the time I had the camera out and pressed record, I had missed the first 15 seconds of her routine.
Here is the video. As I missed the beginning, my wife stitched the qualification round beginning to day 2. I also had trouble with the camera on day 2 getting it to find the memory card so that is why the quality isn't as good as the intro (mounting of the beam)
The move at the 30 second mark is called a "front aerial" and is one of the more difficult tricks you can do. She didn't do it on day one and then added into her day two routine as the difficulty score if completed correctly is worth a lot as far as I can tell (I'm no scoring expert) I'm sure to get some grief one day about missing the beginning of her highest scoring routine thusfar!
Anyway she went first, nailed it and just lost some execution points (wobbling etc). Everyone starts with 10 points and then can add difficulty points. The Olympics girls will go for something like 16 in total. You start with your total maximum and then the judges deduct points for your flaws and misses etc. You can see the previous Rio Olympics top scores here:
https://www.olympic.org/rio-2016/gymnastics-artistic
She had a difficulty score of 4.9 and ended up with 13.467/14.9 which was first place so that was fantastic. Her bars which are usually her best chance of getting a medal were also good. She lost some points for missing a connection and for 'form' and got 3rd place for bronze.
Next up is the Wellington Open in the capital city of New Zealand. We will be flying there so expect some travel pics :)
－我女兒叫阿莉莎 (ALYSSA). 他是新西蘭(紐西蘭)，台灣的混血兒．
－她一個禮拜花了大概３０ 小時練體操
－她是９歲， 可是他比賽時跟 １０－１３歲女孩子比
－上次比賽有新西蘭， 澳洲的高手來比．高低槓她得銅牌， 平衡木她的金牌
－以後他的夢想是要參加奧運之類的比賽