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

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma gives horror a surreal twist

Photo courtesy of MUBI

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The horror genre really ramped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, bringing with it a new subgenre - the slasher - that gave audiences new visuals of gore, but also a reliance on sexism and homophobia that would come to define the era. The new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wrestles with that legacy in ways that are funny, thought-provoking, and downright strange.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the moldy IP that is the Camp Miasma franchise, one that was fresh in the 1970s but which numerous shlocky sequels have rendered irrelevant. In an attempt to get to know the property better, Kris has scored a meeting with the reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original film who has shunned the public eye for decades.

Turns out that Billy lives deep in the woods at Camp Rivoli, which served as the location for the first film. As Kris tries to get to know Billy and convince her to be a part of the new film, she starts to fall under Billy’s spell and the lore of the franchise as a whole. That includes believing that the movie’s villain, Little Death - a transgender person who has an air conditioning vent as a head/mask - may not just be a character created for the movies.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), the film at first feels like it’s going to go the straight-up comedy route, with comic explosions of blood, a strange fascination with candy brands, and a production design that does nothing to hide that the two main actors are on a movie set with painted backdrops. This is backed up by Kris’ phone conversations with her girlfriend, Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown) and her agent (Sarah Sherman), as well as numerous other details.

But the film starts to go down the surreal route the longer Kris stays at the camp with Billy, especially when they sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma. An extended sequence shows a good amount of that film-within-the-film, demonstrating why Kris and Billy have a love/hate relationship with the property. For Kris, though, the lines between the film and the real world start to blur, and Schoenbrun uses a variety of out-there elements to drive the point home.

The final act of the film can barely be described as Kris goes deeper down the rabbit hole, with Schoenbrun using her film to comment on the horror genre as a whole, its treatment of women and LGBT people, the movie industry, and more. All the while the “camp” of Camp Miasma maintains a presence, with candy wrappers showing up everywhere and the tongue-in-cheek references to Little Death (the French term La petite mort, which means “the little death,” is a euphemism for orgasm).

Einbinder, an Emmy winner for Hacks, is the perfect person to inhabit her role. Her established real-life and fictional personas color everything she does in the film, with her enthusiasm and curiosity shining through. Anderson leans heavily into another reference - Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard - to create a character that is as mysterious as she is alluring. Supporting actors like Brown, Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, and Eva Victor keep the movie at the right pitch all the way through.

While other films have made fun of horror movie tropes before, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finds a wholly unique way of doing so. It’s a funny and daring trip into the psyches of two women who may be victims of their own obsessions, and of the movies that made them that way.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select theaters

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