Wednesday, September 21, 2000
Gymnastics News Online

Falling star

It was a bad day for divas. Marie-Jose Perec, the tempestuous French runner, has done a runner, while Svetlana Khorkina, the even more tempestuous Russian gymnast, wishes she had done one as well. For by staying, she completed a week of total personal disaster.

She came into the gymnastics competition as the star of highest magnitude, and left it in tears: Queen of the Great Olympic Twitch. She has had not one of those days, but two of them, in which everything she touched turned into ordure.

In the team competition, it was her fall from the uneven bars - her best exercise - that cost Russia the team gold medal. But gymnastics is a multi-medal sport, and she had an immediate chance for personal redemption. On to the women’s individual all-around championship, the blue riband event in which the best go against the best on all four pieces of apparatus. And I was there, for I couldn’t bear to miss a minute of Khorkina. I wanted a story about the Russian phoenix rising from the ashes of despair, etc etc.

But instead, she went from despair to even deeper despair. For some extraordinary reason, the multi-channel screens in the press box - you can zap from apparatus to apparatus - seemed always to be full of Khorkina's face.

They could not leave it alone. It’s just possible, of course, that the cameramen were totally bewitched by the haunting beauty of her face, and the extradinary depth of the tragic emotions it reflected. She looked like the last few pages of Anna Karenina: Anna in the train staring sightlessly out at the endlessness of Russia before she jumps beneath the wheels. I hope Khorkina keeps clear of Olympic Park station.

A rather classy journalist sitting beside me sighed and said: “I wish I was a better writer. I’d write 900 words just about her face.” “I’ve got to have to have a bash at doing just that,” I said, “because I have spent the the last three hours looking at nothing else.”

The competition brought a clean sweep of medals for Romania, who won the gold medal with Andree Raducan, a classic pixie at 4ft 10in, who passed the Great Olympic If Only Test by keeping her feet when all around were losing theirs.

It was that kind of evening. In quick succession, with gold medal within grasp, we saw further twitching from Yelena Zamolodtchikova, who fell on her bum after a punch somersault, and Viktoriya Karpenko who tripped like a drunk falling upstairs. But disgracefully, we also had a Great Olympic Cock-up. The International Gymnastics Federation set the vaulting horse 5cm too low, and that is a large distance in an Olympic sport that depends on fine margins.

It was particularly bad news for Khorkina, who, standing at 5ft 5in, is forced to work on finer margins than most. And it probably destroyed her competition, and from the look of those Karenina close-ups, it has come close to destroying herself.

She had begun the evening with her floor exercise and it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh, as Little Alex says in A Clockwork Orange. I have seldom, perhaps never, seen a human move with such grace and perfection, her height making every movement a long moment of languid delight. Most competitors move between tumbles as if killing time at a bus-stop, but not Khorkina. Khorkina dances. Naturally, inevitably, she took the lead and the redemption story was writing itself in my mind.

How strange it was: every eye in the hall caught up not with the struggle for medals, but with the Tolstoyan tragic figure with the world’s most haunting body language. It went wrong early, in the vault, and it probably did so because of the unbelievably incompetent error over the vaulting horse. It was like being at a Wimbledon final and discovering after two frenzied sets that the net was the wrong height.

Khorkina made her first vault and ended up on her knees. She got to her feet, and the inevitable close-up showed her face crumple like a paper bag for, say, half a second. And then she regained control and performed her second vault very nicely, knowing that all chance of a medal had gone already.

On, then, to the uneven bars, her best event. How terrible it must be, to want something as much as Khorkina wanted gold. To want it so much that the wanting gets in the way of getting. Alas, the Great Olympic Twitch struck again: she fell at a different point in the routine, an incredibly difficult release-and-catch on the higher bar. No question: she fell as a direct result of her disaster on the vault.

Cue the eternal 900-word-worthy close-up. She didn’t do a runner, for there is steel behind the lip-gloss and the mile-high cheekbones. She finished on the beam - the hardest event of all for her, with her centre of gravity so much higher than the others - and gave us something good enough to have crowned a gold medal performance.

She has a further chance for redemption in the single apparatus finals, but this was the one she really wanted. It was perhaps the most beautiful failure in the history of the Olympic Games but I somehow don’t think she'll find that consoling.

Simon Barnes
The Times