no one's pure evil! i mean, yeah, some people have a hard outer shell, but inside, everybody has a creamy center.

A gymnastics cold war is coming.  Do you hear it?

"Ugh, but Bross isn't ARTISTIC!"

"Have you SEEN Nabieva's vault?  BARF CITY!"

"Dude, once Komova and Grishina become legal, ho boy, you don't even know.  You don't even KNOW!"

"Whatever, you dumb Commies.  Have fun crying while your team blows the gold medal, AGAIN." 

"Whatever DUDE.  The Americans have blown the last two Olympics golds, IDIOT."

 All countries have their strengths and weaknesses, their stars and their headcases.  Some are what we like to call "code-whores" and win all of the time, and then there are those who are beautiful and unique, but never win, because beautiful and unique doesn't really mean shit anymore in gymnastics.  With all of these CRAZY differences, will there ever be one universal issue that spans all countries equally?  That all fans can bash each other over in fairness?

Yes, my friends.  And that issue is

BUTT SHELVES. 

Obviously, the Americans are HUGE offenders of the butt shelf.  

 But how do the other countries stack up?

The Russians have come into some shelving of their own.  Semy, our own saucy little bitch of a minx, has quite the butt shelf.  

They seem to have a quite literal interpretation of the word "shelf."  I could literally stack a bunch of books on Semy's ass.

The other girls seem to have gotten the memo.  Here we see different levels of assstickouttitude.

The Americans and the Russians are frequent offenders of the butt shelf rule, it's true.  However....

The Romanians wrote the BOOK on butt shelves.

These are your more traditional examples of the butt shelf.  The Romanians, however, have an even more aggressive model-

The bend over.

I just, I don't even know what to say about that.  I suppose we've seen stranger poses on beam.  Or Bross' floor.  To each their own.

As always, there seems to be a little Romanian influence on our wee Chinese ones.

So there you have it.  International butt shelves, the universal issue.