Female gymnasts have to dance. What if the sport actually valued it?

Women's artistic gymnastics may be one of the few Olympic events to feature music and choreography, but it doesn't mean the sport takes them truly seriously. In 2016, in the middle of the Rio Games, the specialist publication Dance Magazine declared that today's floor routines "insult dance."

Gymnastics, this line of thinking goes, has distanced itself from its artistic roots by emphasizing acrobatic difficulty, with choreography now just generic filler between the real fireworks.

As a dance critic and gymnastics aficionado, I hoped to feel differently last week as I headed to Bercy Arena, the Olympic stage for the sport in Paris. After all, gymnastics officials have made attempts since 2016 to reprioritize artistry in the sport's official rule book, with "poor expressive engagement" and "insufficient complexity or creativity of movements" among the deductions judges...