Looking Back At The 2006 World Championships in Aarhus

The competition was held in Aarhus, Denmark.

After an extremely successful World Championships in 2005 where the United States won 9 out of 10 possible medals, they were expected to dominate entirely a year later. However, injuries hampered their top two stars, Anastasia Liukin the National All-Around Champion was dealing with an ankle injury that limited her only to bars, her best event, however, she would not be able to contend for an individual all-around medal and also her beam was needed to secure team gold.

Chellsie Memmel, the reigning World All-Around Champion had a fall on bars during the team competition, which added to the absence of Liukin on beam was not helping the team to gold. But that was not all Chellsie tore her labrum during the fall, and even though she managed to finish the competition she had to withdraw from the all-around final to which she had qualified first.

China, on the other hand, had an excellent competition lead by 2004 Olympians Zhang Nan and Cheng Fei they won their first, and to date, only World Title. In the fight for bronze, Russia scored nearly two points (177.325) ahead of Romania (175.450) to comfortably win bronze. It was a new era in gymnastics, the code had changed it was all about the difficulty and Romania had trouble adjusting; in fact, Romania had qualified only 5^th to the team final.

For the all-around the United States lacked its two top stars the ones that had put the country in the gold and silver position a year earlier so it was all in the hands of Jana Bieger. She was the one who had to win an all-around medal for the United States and she did her job (silver medal). But again it was a new era in gymnastics and someone else had a lot more difficulty, enough to even make up for a fall, Vanessa Ferrari.

In the old code of points, it was inconceivable that a gymnast could win a medal with a fall, the 0.5 deduction made it impossible but overnight the system changed and even though the deduction for a fall was raised to 0.8 enough difficulty could make up for it. But the world was not ready for that so when Vanessa Ferrari fell on her back handspring into a full twist on beam and then went on to win gold in the all-around she was heavily criticized. For many it took years to accept and understand that her win was fair, she was playing by the rules; it was the new rules the ones the world didn’t like.

In the event finals, Cheng Fei won two more golds: Vault and Floor. On bars, Liukin was disappointed when 21-year old Elizabeth Tweddle placed ahead of her by a 0.150 difference. The medal was Great Britain’s first ever World Title. In the beam final, Irina Krasnianska became the last ever Ukrainian World Medalist with her gold and Elyse Hopfner-Hibbs made history by winning Canada’s first ever World Medal with her bronze.

The 2006 World Championships were Vanessa Ferrari’s most successful competition because aside from her All-Around Title she qualified to three finals capturing bronze on bars and floor but missing a medal on beam after falling again, although this time in the last skill (switch ring leap) before her dismount. It was also perhaps Cheng Fei’s best competition since she won only gold medals team, vault and floor.

As for Anastasia Liukin, she would recover from injury to shine in Beijing 2008. Sadly, for Chellsie Memmel it would be the beginning of what seemed an endless road of shoulder injuries, she would make it to Beijing but after sustaining an ankle injury she was limited to only bars. Vanessa Ferrari would also struggle with injury in Beijing having a sad Olympics after placing 11^th all-around. It would take Vanessa four Olympics to win a medal (bronze on Floor in Tokyo 2020/21).

As for Oksana Chusovitina, who in 2006 won a bronze medal on vault aged 31, she is pretty much around competing at the age of 40-something.

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