All-Around – Steliana Nistor (ROM)
Steliana placed behind teammate Sandra Izbasa in the all-around final. Unfortunately, Steliana walked out empty-handed from the competition after placing fourth with her team, and significantly struggling in the bars and beam final for 7th place finishes.
Related Article: The Falls at the 2006 World Championships
Vault – Lais Souza (BRA)
She finished fourth because, unlike the top three, she didn’t have a 6 something vault. Still, this was Lais’ best competition: 4th on vault and 8th on Floor. Lais had an unsual first pass an Arabian into front tuck, she went out of bounds in the Floor final but it was impressive to watch. Lais was also third reserve to the beam final and qualified 5th to the all-around final from which she withdrew, likely to focus on the event finals.
Related Articles: Remembering Lais Souza Accident Four Years Later
Uneven Bars – Mayu Kuroda (JPN)
Nothing really wrong here, just her D-score, a 6.4, was significantly lower than the 6.9 Tweddle and Liukin, the gold and silver medallists had or the 6.7 Vanessa Ferrari, the bronze medallist, presented.
Balance Beam – Anna Pavlova & Zhang Nan
Zhang Nan saw a medal escape her when her acrobatic series went wrong. She was supposed to do a front aerial into two back handsprings but only did the first one and just walked back on what was supposed to be the second one. Wise decision since she probably would have fallen had she gone for that second backhandspring. However, this lowered her difficulty and she also had two big wobbles.
Anna Pavlova had no apparent broken connections, but did have two big wobbles, on her side aerial and L-turn. They both scored a 15.275. Yes, scores in the 15s were common in 2006, the debut year of the open ended code.
Floor – Daiane Dos Santos & Elizabeth Tweddle
Both had a 15.425 which was 0.025 short of Vanessa Ferrari’s bronze medalling score of 15.450. Even though they had the same score the difficulty was significantly different, Daiane had a 6.4 while Beth had a 6.0. At the time ties were not broken and they are both listed in fourth, if this was today. Beth would be the official fourth (higher execution score) and Daiane would be 5th.
Source of the picture: Lais Souza’s Instagram
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