Beginner levels are levels 1-3 and they are the levels with the highest participant count. At this years H.C. Andersen Cup their are 43 participants for level 1 girls.
Their will be 4 groups for level 1 girls, which means that the 43 girls will be divided into each group. Each group is usually judged by a unique set of judges. This means that judges in group 1 don’t judge other groups. The main reason for having groups is usually because their will be two tracks that the participants can use and the competition is finished a lot quicker. Well all this is fine,… except their are no FINALS for beginner levels! Which means that a certain group can have a different base judging value then the other groups. The reason FINALS are a part of a competition is to resolve this problem! so why do we not have finals?… well you have to ask the committee for tumbling about that.
It gets even more strange.. all the over levels have finals even if they are judged by the same judges and only have like 10 tumblers in a level! This makes no sense!?!?!? except for a waste of time!
Tumbling could be one of the best gymnast sports in Denmark, but with the tumbling committee, kraftcenter, DGF and the national team only focused on the end result it never will be! It is NOT the end result that is impressive, it is the path to the end result…. a concept they will never understand.
Peter
29/1-2012 Follow Up
I’m home from the H.C. Andersen Cup competition. Any I have to say that they did not divide the groups into different judge grouping… (me very happy)… was a little worried about that. They decided to mix level entries instead were each judging group judged only a specified level. This is better than what I wrote above… but it does create a mix of gymnastic levels when they compete which is not very friendly for the audience. This problem is of course a hard one to solve, but with the limited amount of judges available the solution they used was probably the best one.
The competition was good,… OGF (Odense Gymnastikforening) that held the competition did a good job and Thomas Juul Hansen (OGF’s formand) handled everything very professionally. There were some problem with the participant lists but as I understand it this was a problem that came from DGF and not OGF. At one point the results were shown with a projector on a big screen and this resulted in some confusion , because the results were from Holstebro Cup and not the current H.C. Andersen Cup 
) … they decided to turn off the projector. Turning it off is a good solution if the results are not from H.C. Andersen Cup, but it would have been nice if the audience could have seen the results from the current event.
A little negative episode for the beginner levels was that, gymnasts from OGF were cutting in line and taking multiple turns in front of all the younger gymnasts. I told the gymnasts that were doing this, to stop it immediately and they just ignored my request, so I asked them in a raised voice who their coach was and was told that it was Daniel. Daniel said he has not seen anything and just ignored the situation completely and turned the event around and started telling me not to raise my voice at his gymnasts that were cutting the line (which is also called cheating). This was so unprofessional of Daniel, but I actually did expect him to react that way. The lack of discipline with his team is not new to me. Thomas Juul Hansen came over and asked what the problem was and I told him that their gymnasts were cutting the line… again Thomas handled this very professional and asked which gymnasts and talked to them and problem was resolved.
All in all a very good day,
Peter
You can see a show given by the Tumbling National Team at http://powertumbling.net/2012/02/od-dagen-2012-video/
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