All this data is fairly consistent from one year to the other.  As a comparison, there were 85 athletes competing at the last World Championships, coming from 31 countries.  The average difficulty was 15.20 pts, and a score of 68.40 pts was necessary to enter the final.  With 33% less individual entries and only 60% of the countries from the World Championships, you end up more or less with the same average difficulty and the same score necessary to make the final.  This shows the quality of the World Cup series and the value of a gold medal at each of these World Cups.

If you look at all the individual finalists of this series, the performances by Japan, Germany and China have to be saluted as these countries were able to qualify four different athletes each at least once into the final of one of the World Cups of the 2005-2006 series.  These countries are followed by Russia and the Ukraine with three different athletes.  The main country missing from this list is France (unfortunately, no individual finalist throughout this whole 2005-2006 World Cup series!).

Finally, here is a quick study that could feed a future debate…When the FIG announced that the list of the finalists for the World Cup Final would be based on the world rankings, I immediately expressed my disagreement.  If you want a competition to be based on the world rankings, it should be called “World Masters,” not “World Cup Final.”  In my opinion, the World Cup Final is the event concluding two years of successive World Cups.  Accordingly, I put together rankings solely using the FIG points granted at the 8 World Cups of the 2005-2006 World Cup series.  I then compared these rankings to the actual world rankings.

The results are very conclusive: The #2 (Adam Goetz, GER), #5 (Flavio Cannone, ITA) and #8 (Jason Burnett, CAN) of these World Cup series rankings are at the 9^th, 10^th and 18^th spots of the world rankings.  The 3^rd (Yuri Nikitin, UKR), 5^th (David Martin, FRA) and 8^th (Tetsuya Sotomura, JPN) of the world rankings are respectively #13, not ranked, and #11 in the World Cup series rankings.  Arguably, Yuri Nikitin is finally coming back to the front stage with his recent silver medal at the Salzgitter World Cup.  Arguably, David Martin finished 3^rd at the last European Championships, and Tetsuya Sotomura seems to be recovering from his lost skills problem that hampered his difficulty throughout 2006.  What is sure is that thanks to the world rankings, the FIG will line up in Birmingham the top 6 of the 2005 World Championships, two Olympic medalists (including the defending Olympic Champion) plus two other finalists from the Athens Olympics.  What is a little of a pity is that those who competed in the 2005-2006 World Cup series, and who, in my opinion, would really deserve to compete at the World Cup Final, will nevertheless have to stay home.

Women’s Individual Trampoline

Years are passing by but are still similar for Irina Karavaeva (RUS)!  She finished, once again, as the leader of this World Cup series, also with 4 victories in a row.  It should be noted that Irina, Karen Cockburn (CAN) and Natalia Chernova (RUS) are the athletes who competed in the greatest number of finals: 6 each.

Let’s look at the statistics…