France's gymnastic captain explains the difficulty of the balance beam final to come
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00:00The balance beam is one of the few all-female disciplines.
00:05It first appeared at the 1928 Olympic Games,
00:08the year in which women were finally allowed to compete.
00:11The beam is barely wider than your foot.
00:14Just 10 centimetres, it's an unforgiving piece of apparatus.
00:19This is known as an aerial cartwheel.
00:23The aerial cartwheel is just like a normal cartwheel but with no hands.
00:29You use the impulse from your legs and your arms to help turn,
00:32pivot your hips and land on the other side of the beam.
00:35I have to think about getting the power from my legs,
00:38straightening my arms and a clean landing with my shoulders up.
00:42Gymnasts only have one and a half minutes to show off
00:45eight different skills of varying difficulty.
00:48The beam is five metres long,
00:50which means being smaller in size is an advantage.
00:53Marine Boyer, for example, is 21 centimetres taller than Simone Biles.
00:58Even for some of the most basic skills, like the split jump,
01:02every detail counts.
01:05It's not easy when it comes to the splits
01:07to know whether your legs are well placed, whether they're straight enough.
01:10It's that kind of detail that really matters,
01:12but that you can easily forget about in competitions.
01:18Marine Boyer was less than a tenth of a point away
01:21from qualifying for the Beam Olympic final,
01:23but she won a bronze medal on beam at the European Championships
01:26earlier this year.