The U.S. women’s gymnastics team’s performance gets a little blocky with Lego version

If you've been watching any amount of Olympics coverage, you've probably seen some of the video highlights of the American women's gold-medal performance in the team gymnastics final. It was a remarkable effort, as "Fab Five" gymnasts Gabby Douglas, Aly Raisman, Jordyn Wieber, McKayla Maroney and Kyla Ross combined for to win the second team gold medal in U.S. gymnastics history and the first since 1996, defeating Russia by a whopping 5.06 points. (Romania picked up bronze, while China took fourth and Canada finished fifth.) People who want to watch the actual competition video have to go to Olympics rightsholders in their country, such as CTV or NBC, though, as the videos keep getting yanked off sites like YouTube, which can make it a little difficult for other media outlets to cover the action. Fortunately, British newspaper The Guardianhas stepped in with the remedy they've been using for many Olympic highlights; embeddable videos recreated with Lego!

Of course, it probably would have been way too labour-intensive to recreate the entire final, but this is a pretty good way to look at some of the key highlights, including Maroney's legendary vault (which dropped judges' jaws). It gets the key storylines right, too; the Americans shone on the vault, but the Russians pulled back into the lead with strong performances on the uneven bars. The Russian stumbles and dominant U.S. performances in the balance beam and floor-exercise portions of the event aren't mentioned, but hey, something had to be left on the cutting-room floor (and they might have been difficult to recreate; it's quite stunning that The Guardian managed to get Lego figures to flip around the way they did for the events they did choose to show). Props to the digital team over there for taking the video limitations all non-rightsholders are working with and finding a fun way to recreate the highlights anyway. It's unlikely "creative Lego recreations" will become an Olympic sport any time soon, but if it does, these guys might have a lock on the gold medal.