Simon Barnes

From Simon Barnes in Sydney

Another twist in the plot in the greatest soap opera at the Olympic Games: the latest double-twist in the fortunes of the gymnastic diva of disaster, Svetlana Khorkina. She has lived through a week in which one unimaginable sporting horror has followed another. And on, then, to the individual apparatus final, and her speciality, the uneven bars.

But at these Games her friend has become her implacable foe. Successive falls from the bars have cost her two gold medals and an ocean of tears. She fell in the team competition, performing her trademark blind transition from low bar to high but missing the bar. That slip cost Russia the team gold, and they had to settle for silver.

Khorkina takes gold
© AP

In the individual all-round competition, the blue riband, she followed an imperious floor exercise that put her into first place, by first falling onto her elegant nose in the vault, and then once again coming unstuck on the bars, this time with a totally different move, a release-and-catch.

It was a night of endless tragic expressions on her unnaturally expressive face. Picture her then, striding out to the bars for the third time like Mary Queen of Scots heading for execution. She had had a drastic haircut for a change of luck, an Eton crop that contains an element of difficulty with a sort of twisting dismount at the front.

It was a performance that excited more tension than aesthetic rapture as she wrapped her long-stemmed form around the bars and flew weightlessly between them. It was packed with difficulty and included two high-risk flight elements. And she brought them off flawlessly, dismounted with a languorous - only Khorkoina can make such a move look languorous - somersault with double twist. She spotted the landing stone dead and walked away with joy and relief in her eyes.

It was a humble and grateful diva that stepped off the mat, and the routine was good enough to put her in gold medal position. But the gods had yet to finish their sport with Sveta. Ling Jin of China was last to go, and she performed a lovely flowing routine that concluded with an immaculate double layout somersault dismount, body fully extended. Or almost immaculate: a tiny little bunny-hop on landing.

That hop - it might have covered as much as three inches - was probably the difference between partial and total redemption for Khorkina. Picture her, looking at the scoreboard like a soothsayer staring at the stars in search of an omen. Picture her closing her eyes in prayer. With her, every expression is a photo-opportunity, and in that fraught period of waiting she went through about a hundred of them. For long, teasing second the judges cogitated their stuff, before finally electing to show their hands.

And Khorkina had done it: slow dissolve into tearful delight. After the hugs and the kisses she went back alone to the uneven bars, seized the lower one, rested her face against her hands, and wept. And I bet half the Sunday Super Dome wept with her.

Oh, it was emotional stuff all right. Gymnastics is often said to be a sport for little pixilated automatons, but Khorkina can put into an evening of gymnastics enough emotion to keep Dostoyevsky busy for half a book.

It is strange how some athletes have this addition quality of watchability: something that makes them not a great athlete but also a star. They draw every eye to themselves in triumph and disaster or when they are just having an ordinary day at the office. Talent is something you take for granted at the high level of sport: watchability is something different. Pete Sampras is one of the greatest tennis players you will ever see, but it’s Andre Agassi you keep looking at.

Also, there is something compelling about failure: dramatic, humiliating, soul-wrenching failure. It is, if you like, the Reverse Redgrave principle: defeats as vivid as those Khorkina has brought us are something we cannot look away from.

And the Olympic Games bring a higher proportion of melodramatic failures than any other event in sport ever could. This is partly on the numbers principle: with 28 sports and 10,000-plus competitors, there is a fair old scope for disaster.

But it is also because, for all the true Olympic sports, this is the only thing that seriously matters: and it is this, the caring so much, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of disaster.

The Khorkina business has, in its daft way, been a wonderful saga to be involved with: this odd, slightly demented-looking woman fighting her quixotic battles with her mind, her fate and her own height. She was told once, because she is 5ft 5in, to give up and become a rhythmic gymnast - that is, the sport where you twirl a ribbon on a stick and prink about.

It is gymnastics with the heat taken off: you never fall, because you never seek to fly. And that is totally against Khorkina’s nature. After a year, she got fed up and turned back to the real thing: the one with danger - the one in which you can fly.

With her height problem, Khorkina is always flying pretty close to the sun, and her wings have been scorched in two nights of humiliation. Humiliation is a harder thing to rise above than mere misfortune. But on Sunday night, Khorkina flew. Lord, how she pouted on that podium.