MyKayla Skinner (USA) has had an astounding comeback, and she's been super successful. On floor exercise, it's been awesome to see how much tenacity she's had, gaining back huge elite-level skills after being quite successful in NCAA with Utah. It's also been cool to see her document this journey on YouTube: check her channel out! If there's something all of us can agree upon, it's that her music during the 2019 season was very memorable :).

Notes:
- Moors (I) form: I can imagine a 0.1 or a 0.3 deduction for body shape on the Moors; I took 0.1 because it's much easier to see faults on video and it wasn't egregiously poor. It's a super difficult skill to get right!
- Both leaps in her leap series were marked with a precision deduction.
- Double L Turn (D) was downgraded to a Full L Turn (B): this was super strict, but she "fell out" of the turn before she was near getting her second rotation in. I didn't call this at first, but this reflects the score she was awarded at the competition.
- Artistry deductions: artistry is notoriously difficult to get right, and I thought that MyKayla was very expressive and passionate throughout the routine.
- The first deduction was for fluidity: the routine seemed to have pauses or still points between difficult elements; some transitions weren't super smooth.
- The second deduction was a bit stricter, but I didn't really see a character, role, or emotion that connected with the music. The music was upbeat, and she was too, but I didn't see a great link between the two.

It's always much easier to see deductions on video compared to live, which explains why scores can differ a bit. I try to be lenient on certain form deductions that the live judges may have missed to get a more accurate score, so if you see a little issue in slow-motion that I didn't account for, that could be it. Feel free to comment about that though!

Remember that the point of these videos isn't to be overly critical or to malign the gymnasts, but simply to explain how the sport is scored. MyKayla is performing super difficult skills here, and we need to keep that in mind!

Actual score: 13.850 = 5.8 + 8.050 (avg. of two judges)

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Video belongs to USA Gymnastics and NBC. This video falls under fair use as its purpose and nature is educational: teaching people how gymnastics is scored.

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