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h on the attention. In Rio, Biles

  • April 2, 2019
    DURHAM, N.C. -- Virginia has much less in the playbook -- and is doing so much more.With a defensive game plan that first-year coach Bronco Mendenhall called the simplest plan we had yet, the Cavaliers intercepted five passes and forced six turnovers in a 34-20 victory over Duke on Saturday.The five interceptions tied the program record, last accomplished against Miami in 2010.The execution, it matches the current level of our players understanding of the playbook, Mendenhall said. Im still getting to learn them. Theyre still getting to know me.Kurt Benkert threw for 336 yards and three touchdowns, finishing 23 of 41 with touchdowns covering 28 yards to David Eldridge, 12 yards to Olamide Zaccheaus and 3 yards to Richard Burney.Albert Reid also had a short TD run to help the Cavaliers (2-3, 1-0 Atlantic Coast Conference) snap their 17-game road losing streak.The execution appears, I think, to all of us to be improving, and the culture as we all know, was the emphasis to begin, Mendenhall said. Its starting. ... But its fun to see the players happy. Its fun to see the players see that its coming.Joseph Ajeigbes 4-yard touchdown run with 11:34 left pulled Duke to 27-20, and the Blue Devils had the ball inside Virginia territory twice after that but were stopped on downs both times.Daniel Jones threw five interceptions for Duke (2-3, 0-2), and fumbled in his own end zone with 4:24 left after a hard hit from Jordan Mack. Eli Hamback recovered for the touchdown that put the Cavaliers back up by two touchdowns.THE TAKEAWAYVirginia: These Cavaliers looked nothing like the crew that was routed by Richmond in the opener, made Mendenhall a winner in his first ACC game and earned their first road win since a 2012 rout at North Carolina State.Richmond doesnt even feel like this year, Mendenhall said.This time, they did it with defense. After failing to force a turnover in its first two games, Virginia now has nine takeaways in the last three weeks. Juan Thornhill and Bryce Hall had two interceptions apiece.Duke: The Blue Devils pretty much squandered whatever goodwill they generated by beating Notre Dame last week, largely because they couldnt take care of the ball. Jones, who threw three interceptions in his first four games, surpassed that total by throwing four of them in 20 minutes of the first half.Coach David Cutcliffe bristled at a reporter who asked if hed considered replacing Jones with backup Parker Boehme, saying that if I would have considered it, I would have done it, OK?With this loss, its fair to wonder if Duke -- which still faces road games at No. 3 Louisville, No. 14 Miami and Pittsburgh -- will find the four more wins it needs to qualify for its fifth straight bowl game.PLAY OF THE DAYDuke trailed by a touchdown with 98 yards to go and less than 5 minutes to play. It set up a possible Joe Montana-type moment for Jones, who was looking to atone for the four interceptions hed thrown at that point. Scanning to his left for a receiver, he never saw Mack flying in from the right side. Mack leveled him and knocked the ball free, and Hamback pounced on it for the touchdown that sealed it, and Jones threw his fifth interception on the Duke possession that followed.STAT LINEBenkert has thrown for 757 yards and eight touchdowns in his last two games. The East Carolina transfer set the program record with 421 yards against Central Michigan , and was on pace to break that mark before the Cavaliers slowed things down in the fourth quarter. Hes a throw-first guy, Mendenhall said, and I think hes good at it.UP NEXTVirginia: Its all ACC opponents remaining for the Cavaliers, who have an idle weekend before playing host to Pittsburgh on Oct. 15.Duke: The Blue Devils step back out of league play to host Army, but then they have only six days to get ready for a Friday night visit to Louisville on Oct. 14.---Follow Joedy McCreary at http://twitter.com/joedyap. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/joedy-mccreary---AP college football site: http://collegefootball.ap.org Discount Shoes Online Free Shipping . The 20-year-old Pelicans big man glanced up and smiled widely at the well-wishers -- a fitting end to a day he wont soon forget. Davis responded to his selection earlier in the day as a Western Conference All-Star with 26 points and 10 rebounds, and the New Orleans Pelicans overcame a 10-point fourth-quarter deficit to defeat the Minnesota Timberwolves 98-91 on Friday night. Wholesale Shoes China . According to a report from the Winnipeg Free Press, the Bombers will name Acting GM Kyle Walters to the post full time. http://www.shoescheap.us/ . Jim Rutherford, President and General Manager of the Carolina Hurricanes, announced Wednesday that the team would assign Swedish forward Elias Lindholm to his nations team for the upcoming tournament. Cheap Shoes Wholesale Free Shipping . -- Stanfords Kevin Danser knelt on one knee and hardly moved on the sideline as Michigan State celebrated its Rose Bowl victory and his Cardinal teammates made their way to the locker room. Cheap Shoes From China . -- San Francisco 49ers linebacker Ahmad Brooks was fined $15,570 by the NFL on Wednesday for his hit on Saints quarterback Drew Brees last Sunday. Quiz question for all non-gymnastics nerds. In five seconds, name the winner of the mens all-round individual title in Rio. First, like a gymnasts shaky landing, there will be a mental fumble. If you watched the highlights you may vaguely remember - guy in red-and-white? Japanese, right? Name starts with a vowel. If you came up with Uchimura, thats eight on ten; Kohei Uchimura gets you full marks and proves you sat up and watched television at a very weird hour of the night in India.The womens all-around individual winner? Simone Biles, and thats not even a question.In Olympic gymnastics, the men must always play second fiddle to the flexible flying nymphs. For a week every four years, the wider sporting world watches in open-mouthed astonishment as women play tricks with our eyes. They race along, backflip, somersault and jump on and off a beam the width of a picture postcard. And then, in a series of contortions, swing between the uneven bars, separated by anything between 5 and 6 feet - a gap far wider than the gymnasts height.Its not that the male gymnasts are not watchable; they are, with their combination of speed, power, strength. Its just that the women disguise theirs behind slighter frames and pixie faces, performing their routines as if boneless, as if cast in a magical spell of more memory, less muscle. The truth is nothing of the sort.Women gymnasts compete over four apparatus, the men six, with two in common - the vault and the fundamental starting point of all gymnastics, floor exercises. The women dont get to do the roman rings or the parallel bar because male upper body strength is far greater than that of women. The men dont bother with the uneven bars because it is considered far too simple for their musculature but its not clear why they wont try the beam.This fundamental gender divergence in strength and power means that, even in their shared apparatus, the points value of routines vary. It is why the front handspring double somersault, aka the Produnova vault, offers a greater points value in womens gymnastics (7) than its closest counterpart, the Roche (points value 5.6), does in the mens competition.The floor exercises, however, which every gymnast starts out on, offer a completely different take on la difference. For the men, the International Federation of Gymnastics (FIG) rule book describes the floor exercise in 42 words, talking about acrobatic and gymnastic elements like strength and balance, flexibility and choreographic combinations all forming a harmonious rhythmic exercise to be carried out over the entire floor area. All without any music.To describe the womens floor exercise, the rule book requires 500 words (plus 160 words for the rules about the CD requirements) among them artistry and musicality. It also states that the gymnast is to be awarded points for, among other things, expressiveness. What is judged is the gymnasts ability to play a role or a character throughout the performance. In addition to the technical execution, artistic harmony and feminine grace must also be considered. It is not only what the gymnast performs, but also how she performs her routine.So on the floor in Rio, not only did Biles launch into her high-speed, gravity-busting tumbling passes and her signature move, now called the Biles - the double layout with half-twist - she also was required to indulge in mandatory coquetteishness.dddddddddddd. It looks a bit silly today because womens gymnastics has changed considerably since its first showing at the Olympics in 1952. The Nellie Kim-Comaneci era sylphs have now turned into pocket rockets, and, when abiding by the rules, have turned their music from Strauss to the Sex & the City theme.Slate columnist Rebecca Schuman described it best; the womens floor exercises she said, were becoming, more like the?mens version, with its umpteen tumbling runs and awkward poses between them... the music seems to be less and less connected to the gymnasts movements, while simultaneously pandering more and more to the crowd.Indias Dipa Karmakar is not a fan of the pirouettes and hip-twitching either and says, Its not that I dont like it [floor exercise] but Im not very good at dancing on the floor. When I dont do it properly I kind of feel bad and cry that its not turning out like it should.Borrowing from elements of balletic dance may have made sense in the early days of womens gymnastics. In the new millennium however, the dance moves are often left looking so 20th century. But, many WAG (womens artistic gymnastics) fans would argue, why fix something that works and that the audience loves?It is mens gymnastics that looks for traction and eyeballs. Yes, we do remember the great male gymnasts - Dityatin , Nemov, Scherbo, Li Ning - and chant names like Tsukahara when describing gym elements; but at an Olympic Games its the ladies who will always lunch on the attention. In Rio, Biles made the headlines, and rightly so, but Uchimura became only the second male gymnast in Olympic history to win all-round titles back to back. He is also a six-time all-round world champion. Oh, the injustice.For women athletes in almost every other sport, such disproportionate spotlight - in reverse - is a given. In order to grab their audience, women participants in more than one sport are told they must glamour up their sport for television. Wear skirts/ bikinis/ make-up or not wear quite so much clothing. Do something, anything to get TV numbers.Since we know the womens rules will never change, maybe mens gymnastics could be advised to try something as radical along the same lines - how about some music on the floor, guys? Give your explosive but fairly regulated floor exercises a touch of individual pizzazz? So that, to borrow from the WAG rule book, the gymnast can transform the floor exercise from a well-structured composition into an artistic performance.Maybe that way we could instantly remember the gymnast who won the individual all-round Olympic gold by introducing a bit of Travoltas Bus Stop in his floor routine? In order to get their genuinely admirable skills a little bit extra attention, surely male gymnasts wouldnt mind adding a bit of posterior-wiggling into their sport, now would they? ' ' '