Jefferis on a roll

Josh Jefferis is putting up a great case for Olympic selection. He came second at the Kyle Shewfelt invitational with 84.55 ahead of Thomas Pichler in 3rd. He also came 1st on Rings and P Bars. Apparently China was also supposed to attend, but missed the comp due to a flight delay.

View the results here

Lauren Mitchell Updates

There have been a couple of (slightly conflicting) news articles on Lauren Mitchell today:

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/sport/a/-/other/13248377/mitchell-reduces-olympic-workload/

Former world gymnastics champion Lauren Mitchell will not be contesting the all-around competition at the London Olympics.

The WAIS scholarship holder has been nursing a shoulder injury and has decided to abandon her campaign to compete on all four apparatus focussing instead on the floor, beam and vault where she can make her greatest contribution to the overall team score where Australian finished sixth in Beijing four years ago.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/london-olympics/lauren-mitchell-not-yet-focusing-on-london/story-fn9dheyx-1226308501174

AUSTRALIA'S leading gymnast Lauren Mitchell refuses to focus on London, knowing that the burden of a nation rests on her shoulders.

Although, people are increasingly turning to blogs for their news as blogs seem to produce higher quality coverage for sports like gymnastics, it is still good to get some coverage in the old media.

Rizzo Retires

The Sydney Morning Herald had an article on Sunday announcing that Phillipe Rizzo has decided to retire from gymnastics. Unfortunately the article is not on their online version, however, it did say that he cited a lack of motivation as a primary reason for his retirement. Since, the AIS residential program was closed and the AIS was changed to a camps-based program he hasn't had a good environment to train in which contributed to his loss of motivation.

Conagratulation to Rizzo on an incredible career, but it is sad that it ended how it did, and hopefully Gymnastics Australia will realise how bad their decision to cut the AIS program has turned out to be.

Interview with Australian Team

Channel Nine did a short interview with some of the Australian team, which was shown on Wide World of Sports yesterday. You can view it here:

http://wwos.ninemsn.com.au/london-olympics/video?videoid=5e077e35-06f5-423f-a7da-331f33528fa6

However, I suspect you will probably need to be in Australia to be able to watch it.

2012 American Cup

There has been some suggestions that Universal Sports would cover the 2012 American Cup, although there doesn't appear to be anything on their website. However, the USA Gymnastics website does have a link which looks promising:

http://usagym.org/pages/events/ac/live.html