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

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is better than the first but not by much

Blumhouse

Five Nights at Freddy's 2

Blumhouse Productions first made their name with the Paranormal Activity series, establishing themselves as a leader in the horror genre thanks to their relatively cheap yet effective movies. In recent years, they’ve added on “soft” horror films likeM3GAN and Five Nights at Freddy’s to draw in a younger audience, with both films becoming so successful that each was quickly given a sequel.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 finds Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) still recovering from the events of the first film, with Abby particularly missing her “friends.” Those friends just so happen to be the souls of murdered children who inhabit animatronic characters at the long-defunct Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, children who were abducted and killed by William Afton (Matthew Lillard).

A new threat emerges at another Freddy Fazbear’s location in the form of Charlotte, another murdered child who inhabits a creepy large marionette. Mike, distracted by a possible romance with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), fails to keep track of Abby, who makes her way to the old pizzeria and inadvertently unleashes Charlotte and her minions on the surrounding town.

Directed by Emma Tammi and written by Scott Cawthon (who also created the video game on which the series is based), the film tries to mix together goofy elements with intense scenes. One particular sequence, in which the security guard for Freddy Fazbear’s lets a group of ghost hunters onto the property, toes the line between soft and hard horror. That and a few others show the potential that the filmmakers had if they had stuck to their guns.

Unfortunately, more often than not they either soft-pedal things that would normally be horrific, or can’t figure out how to properly stage scenes. The sight of animatronic robots wreaking havoc is one that is simultaneously frightening and laughable, and the filmmakers never seem to find the right balance in tone. Every step in the direction of making a truly scary horror film is undercut by another in which the robots fail to live up to their promise.

It doesn’t help that Cawthon gives the cast some extremely wooden dialogue, lines that none of the actors can elevate. What may work in a video game format comes off as stilted when said by actors in a live-action film. The story also loses momentum quickly after the first half hour or so, with Cawthon seemingly content to just have characters move from place to place with no sense of connection between any of the scenes.

Hutcherson (The Hunger Games series), after being the true lead of the first film, is given very little to do in this film, and his effort is equal to his character’s arc. The same goes for Lail, whose character seems to be shoehorned into the story. Rubio is called upon to carry the load for a lot of the movie, and the teenager is not quite up to the task. A brief appearance by Skeet Ulrich seems to be a blatant appeal to Scream fans, but he and Lillard only underscore how limited this film is compared to that franchise.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is better than the first film, but not by much. The filmmakers do a decent job of making the new marionette character into a great villain, but they fail to capitalize on its inherent creepiness. Instead, they fall back on less effective elements, ensuring that the film will be forgettable for anyone other than hardcore Freddy fans.

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Five Nights at Freddy's 2 opens in theaters on December 5.

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