Going for gold

Olympic gymnastic hopefuls' path to Paris 2024 flips through Frisco for Winter Cup

Texas Gymnast Zoe Miller at the 2021 Winter Cup.

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One of the most important gymnastics meets in the country is coming to Frisco this weekend — a competition of elite athletes hungry to compete in the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. The USA Gymnastics 2022 Winter Cup will run February 25-27 at Ford Center at The Star in Frisco and will feature both men’s and women’s events for juniors and seniors.

The Winter Cup — as viewers of the hit Peacock docu-series Golden know — is considered the first elite gymnastics competition of the year and one in which athletes can separate themselves from the pack. According to a release, the U.S. men will name a new Senior National Team following the competition, and Winter Cup performances will help determine international selection for several upcoming events.

Winter Cup is also a qualifying event for the 2022 U.S. Gymnastics Championships, which serve as the annual national championships for artistic gymnastics in the United States (they were held in Fort Worth last year and will be contested in Tampa, Florida this year).

Simone Biles — last year's record-setting U.S. national champion, Olympian, and now newly engaged woman — will not be competing in Winter Cup. Neither will her Olympic medal-winning teammates Jordan Chiles, Suni Lee, Jade Carey, and Grace McCallum (all of whom are successfully competing on the NCAA collegiate level now).

But some of the top names expected to compete in Frisco include Senior National Team members Skye Blakely (Frisco, Texas/WOGA Gymnastics), Konnor McClain (Cross Lanes, W.Va./WOGA Gymnastics), Ciena Alipio (San Jose, Calif./Midwest Gymnastics Center), Addison Fatta (Wrightsville, Pa./Prestige Gymnastics), eMjae Frazier (Erial, N.J./Parkettes National Gymnastics Center), and Zoe Miller (Spring, Texas/World Champions Centre).

For the men, the headliner is Yul Moldauer, part of Team USA's Tokyo Olympics squad. He'll be joined by fellow World team members Alex Diab (Glen Ellyn, Ill./United States Olympic and Paralympic Training Center, 2021), Colin Van Wicklen (Spring, Texas/University of Oklahoma, 2018), Vitaliy Guimaraes (Arvada, Colo./University of Oklahoma), Ian Gunther (Houston, Texas/Stanford University), Paul Juda (Deerfield, Ill./University of Michigan), Riley Loos (El Dorado Hills, Calif./Stanford University) and more Olympic 2024 hopefuls.

An updated list of competitors is here.

The Winter Cup will be accompanied by the annual Elite Team Cup and Nastia Liukin Cup, which feature top emerging talent in the country.

Senior men will kick off the competition at 6:30 pm Friday with the men’s senior all-around title at stake. Apparatus champions (based on two-day scores) will be crowned at 5:30 pm Sunday.

"The top Elite Team Cup performers from Saturday’s competition will join their senior counterparts for the men’s Day 2 session on Sunday, as junior individual event titles will also be up for grabs," the release says. "The top-five senior all-around finishers on Day 1 of competition will earn automatic selection to the U.S. Men’s National Team. The full team will be announced in the days following Winter Cup."

The women’s senior competition, which will determine all-around and event champions, will kick off at 12 pm Saturday, February 26. Juniors will compete Sunday at 12 pm with all-around and apparatus titles on the line.

"The top-three all-around finishers in each division will automatically qualify to represent the U.S. at the 2022 DTB Pokol Mixed Cup and Team Challenge March 18-20 in Stuttgart, Germany," the release says. "Winter Cup performances will also help determine the remaining team members for the event."

According to Inside Gymnastics, Tokyo Olympians and gymnastics fan-favorites Sam Mikulak and MyKayla Skinner will serve as in-venue hosts for the events.

"As co-hosts, Mikulak and Skinner will help amplify the spectator experience by engaging with fans during warmups and competition breaks throughout the three-day event," the site says.

For those who want to attend in person, tickets ($19-$85) are available through SeatGeek.

Live coverage will be broadcast on the NBC family of networks, as follows:

The Nastia Liukin Cup, 1:30-4 pm Friday on Peacock
Men’s Day 1 competition, 6:30-9 pm Friday on Peacock, re-airing 3-5 pm Saturday on CNBC
Women’s senior competition, 12-2 pm Saturday on NBC
The Elite Team Cup, 6:30-9 pm ET Saturday livestreamed on FlipNow Powered by USA Gymnastics
Both Winter Cup sessions on Sunday livestreamed on FlipNow Powered by USA Gymnastics

Podium training for each Winter Cup division, as well as the Nastia Liukin Cup and Elite Team Cup, will be livestreamed free on USA Gymnastics’ YouTube channel.

“After the success of last year’s Winter Cup — the first to feature both men’s and women’s competitions — we can’t wait to bring this event to Texas,” said Stefanie Korepin, USA Gymnastics’ Chief Programs Officer, in a statement. “This is an exciting time to be a gymnastics fan with so much up-and-coming talent. Fans will have the opportunity to cheer on some of their favorite athletes while getting to know a whole new generation of gymnasts who have their eyes set on Paris in 2024 and beyond.”

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Movie Review

Much-anticipated film sequel Gladiator II tells a very familiar story

Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Paul Mescal in Gladiator II.

There are some films for which making a sequel is natural, and others where a follow-up is wholly unnecessary. Gladiator, which made both tons of money and was named Best Picture at the Oscars, told an impactful stand-alone story that ended with the protagonist dead and no real loose ends. And yet because there’s always more money to be made, here we are 24 years later with Gladiator II.

The lead character this time around is Lucius (Paul Mescal), a general in a North African army who becomes a prisoner of war when the Roman army led by Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) bests him and his troops in battle. Taken back to Rome, he is put in the pool of captured men forced to fight at the Colosseum for the amusement of twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracella (Fred Hechinger).

Lucius is controlled by Macrinus (Denzel Washington), an ambitious schemer who bets liberally on his prized fighter and always has an eye to move up in the world. Meanwhile, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), the sister of Emperor Commodus from the first film, is now married to Marcus Acacius and has a unique connection with Lucius that is fairly obvious from the get-go.

Directed once again by Ridley Scott and written by David Scarpa, the film commits a number of sins throughout its 150-minute running time, the most blatant of which is that, aside from a few embellishments, it essentially tells the same story as the first film. Lucius, like Maximus, is a deposed military leader who’s out for revenge on the person who killed his family. Instead of one obnoxious emperor, there are now two. And the only way for Lucius to earn his freedom is to fight his way out.

Stories told in the same world can echo each other and, if done well, overcome those similarities. But Gladiator II is shockingly boring for a purported sword-and-sandals epic. Scott and his team try to introduce new elements to the fights, like a gladiator riding a rhinoceros or a ship battle inside the Colosseum (with sharks!), but most of the sequences are inert with no propulsion to them.

The action fails because none of the relationships in the film amount to much. There are stand-out characters like Macrinus and the twin emperors, but instead of creating antipathy or strong feelings of triumph or defeat, the story just kind of happens without any sense of excitement or importance. Much of that issue lies at the feet of Lucius, who simply doesn’t inspire in the same way that Russell Crowe’s Maximus did.

Mescal is a fine actor who’s done good work in more intimate roles, but he’s not up to the task of being an action star, at least not in this film. Any bombast he shows with the character feels forced, and the story doesn’t give him enough opportunities to counteract that lack. Washington, however, fills up the screen with his charisma, and it’s during his scenes that the film comes closest to being rousing. Quinn and Hechinger are a lot of fun as the twin emperors, but in the end they feel like retreads of Joaquin Phoenix from the original.

Any sequel should have a purpose that sets it apart from what came before, but Scott, Scarpa, and the rest of their team fail in that respect in Gladiator II. It’s a mostly lifeless film that delivers scenes that would be exciting if they had any kind of good story to back them up.

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Gladiator II opens in theaters on November 22.

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Movie Review

Much-anticipated film sequel Gladiator II tells a very familiar story