Tuesday, September 19, 2000
Gymnastics News Online

Make-up masks mental anguish

She is the most graceful athlete I have ever seen, with the possible exception of Dubai Millennium. She is the diva of the gymnasium, and has always believed that you tumble for show and you pout for dough. But because of a small matter of fractions of millimetres and seconds, she is quite inconsolable.

She is Svetlana Khorkina, and she loves the limelight. Some of these Olympic performers who come out of the shadows every four years do so with an air of embarrassment, blushing and shuffling on to their appointed stages, but not Russia's Khorkina. She struts as if all these Olympic Games were designed entirely to please her. The Games is an occasion that has been created so that she can rise to it.

It is hard to be a diva when you appear before your public only every four years, but at least for an Olympic gymnast you know that the audience can be measured in billions. "I want to be recognised," she once said, "from half a mile away." We all looked, we all recognised, for she is indeed unmistakable.

But Khorkina, more than anything else, is a sportswoman. Defeat and disaster affect her every bit as much as they do Vinnie Jones. And there she was on her best apparatus, the uneven bars. The women’s team event was expected to be a straight slugging match between Russia and Romania, and Khorkina was expected to lead Russia to the gold medal.

A microsecond, a millimetre were enough. And it came right at the peak. After two very fine vaults, she moved on to her favourite piece of apparatus, the uneven bars. And on into one of her favourite moves, a transition from low bar to high, in which she makes the catch totally blind - terrifying, audacious and glorious to watch.

She was never cut out to be a gymnast, but that is precisely the reason she is so wonderfully watchable. It was the thought of seeing her perform again that quickened my step towards the plane to Sydney.

She is head and shoulders above any other gymnast at the Olympic Games, and I mean that quite literally. She stands an incredible 5ft 5in, as ludicrous a height for a gymnast as it would be for basketball player. She signifies the end of the line for the eternal pixies of this sport.

The point about being very small, if you are a gymnast, is that every move is easier. The point about being very tall is that every movement must be performed languidly: the pixies perform on fast-forward, while Khorkina, even at normal speed, is already in slomo.

A somersault for her, can only be a long drawn-out affair. It is twice as hard for her to get any movement right, but when she does so, it looks twice as lovely.

She is not only tall, she is also ancient - an old lady of 21. The age bias in gymnastics is changing in favour of older girls, but Khorkina is still an exception. Indeed, she once posed topless for Russian Playboy to show the world, as she said, that real women take part in women’s gymnastics. No one who has seen these pictures would deny that she made her point more than adequately.

Once before a competition she said: "I realise I am not just Svetlana, but in a sense the personification of gymnastics." But gymnastics, like all sports, is about risk, and therefore about failure. That blind grab at the high bar. She missed it. Fell to the floor.

She got up with that heart-breaking courage of gymnasts and ice-skaters everywhere, and carried on. She did the blind move to perfection. It was wonderful, but it was not a joy. The bubbles had gone out of it.

She followed this with a wobbly performance on the beam and a face of thunder. Yet, when her team-mate, Ekaterina Lobazniouk, fell from the beam and burst into tears, it was big sister Svetlana who stepped between her and the intruding cameras.

What a night: Khorkina ran the gamut of emotions like a Dostoyevsky heroine, at one stage sobbing openly, at another furious with anger, moving through phases of resigned acceptance to a final moment of defiance on the floor exercise.

She has upgraded the routine to include an opening double-pike - wonderful to see with her extended frame - and inevitably, she brought to the Spanish routine her own sense of style and occasion. It was brave and it was marvellous, but it was not enough.

The gold went to the Romanians, and their pixie tendency, while the Chinese were ecstatic with their bronze. Russia lay between them for silver; everybody in the hall knew that if Khorkina had taken that catch, she and Russia would have won the gold.

It is a heavy load to carry - an immense personal disappointment, and more, a crushing sense of personal responsibility. She has talked about giving up gymnastics before; it is sad to think that this may be the last we will see of her.

Sport is a cruel business, and that, as we all know, is the point. Women’s gymnastics is a sport, even if its participants wear lip-gloss and sparkly bits on their faces. You can tell it is a sport by the cruelty; you can tell it is a sport because you can look at Khorkina and see the despair behind the mascara.

Simon Barnes
The Times