EDITORIAL - MARCH 1976
The Romanian qualification matches are now history and both our men's and women's teams performed extremely well and should be advanced into the 1976 Olympic Games scheduled for Montreal in July. The men's team did a very outstanding job and defeated the Romanians in their official match held at the University of California at Berkeley. The women lost to the team from Romania but scored well and looked impressive at the same time. We received a number of compliments on the appearance and technical work of both teams that will hopefully pay off for us in the Olympic Games later this year. One must speak candidly about the Olympic Qualification System currently being used ... or perhaps a better term is mis-used. The qualification scores from almost all parts of the gymnastic world are so high as to be unbelieveable. It might well be that before the teams march on the floor in Montreal that every team from seventh place through twelth will have qualified with a higher score than the six top teams already qualified. Perhaps we should have an international lottery to place bets on which team scores closest in Montreal, to it's qualification score. Might prove to be very interesting. The American Cup will be held March 27-28th in New York's Madison Square Garden. Both days are afternoon competitions and both days are for men and women, and the names are indeed impressive. Tsukahara and Yoshida from Japan. Comanechi and Grecu from Romania, Magyar and Nagy from Hungary and Carr and Conner from the USA, along with Canada, Great Britain and Mexico and more to confirm soon including the USSR. This is a super event in our bicentennial year and we hope this initial event will be received well by the public and television and will become the annual event it should be. The Championship of the USA for our women gymnasts will be held in New Haven in mid-April and after that it's on to the Olympic trials for the top 20 in that meet. The men will have a semi-final trials at Berkeley and then move on to Penn State for the finals in June. We should be fielding the two strongest teams the USA has ever entered in Olympic competition. Lets all hope that Montreal sees-them receive fair scores- and finish in-the position they deserve based on gymnastics performances alone.
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