Mr Firefox's Chinese Gym Blog

To compensate, here are some of the fun facts about her:

She’s the resident “tastemaker”. She’s responsible for Liu Tingting’s new hairstyle. Ting2 was reluctant at first, but Yile cut her own hair to show her “big sis Ting” how it would look and convinced her to do it. 

She teaches the younger girls how to paint in her spare time and they have art sessions together. 

She drew the piggy on Sun Wei’s arm band and the Vegeta on Xiao Ruoteng’s arm band. Zou Jingyuan has one with peppa pig on it.

She recommends books and tv shows to her teammates. She got Tang Xijing hooked on Mo Dao Zu Shi (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) and the tv show based on it. (Tang is now a Xiao Zhan stan, let’s hope she wont be another DYL)

Post BB EF interviews of Li Shijia and Liu Tingting by Chinese media.  Translations under the cut!

Jessica from Gymcastic said that the rule is that gymnasts must be injured to be replaced in finals and that China are known for “faking injuries and Galieva’ing their athletes” because LTT competed in UB finals after she was replaced by TXJ in AA finals. 

This is inaccurate in so many ways. The rules and technical regulations specifically say about the All Around and Event Finals that a federation can replace a gymnast with another from the same country as long as the gymnast qualified above the first reserve for any reason as long as it’s at before the 24 hour period. An injury or illness with medical certification is only required for AA or EFs if the replacement is done within the 24 hour period. Rules about the gymnast not being able to compete in later phases only applies to qualifications/team finals with choosing the alternate/or the alternate replacing someone on the team for example (this makes sense because then it would be like a team having an extra member/more members than they’re allowed to competing).

Also China doesn’t really have a history of faking injuries or substituting their athletes in finals, so I don’t understand this “that’s so China” or “Galieva’ing their athletes” narrative?

The most high profile/well known case is Gustu/Galieva (Unified Team) in 1992 and the craziest case is probably Omelianchik & Shushunova (Soviet qualfiers #4 & 5) replacing Mostepanova & Baraksanova (Soviet qualifiers #2 & 3) and then going on to tie for AA gold. These were all under the guise of injury/illness because the rule did exist then.

But I don’t think there were any rules about it afterwards and China was not the one who took advantage of this rule the most… 

There was the Marinescu/Amanar substitutions at both the 1996 Olympics and 1997 World Championships where Belu flat out said it was because he thought Marinescu was lazy & didn’t word hard enough + Marinescu still competed in the 1996 BB final and 1997 UB final. At the 2016 Rio Games, Brazil substituted Saraiva for Barbosa in the AA, so that Flavia could focus on the beam final.

The only previous case I can think of for China is when Fan Ye was the top AA qualifier for China at 2003 Worlds, but was replaced by Kang Xin. Fan Ye still competed in balance beam finals and of course won gold there.