USA Up On UR Podium, Takin' UR Medals

I am so delighted by Nastia taking gold and the Americans going 1-2! And you know what was just as good? The medal winners all went 4 for 4 in their routines, the competition wasn't a huge splatfest and was a true competition instead of a process of eliminations like we've seen so many times in the lead up to this very day.

I have never seen Nastia perform so well. Her vault was as perfect as a 1.5Y could be. I do think it was scored a little low. I think it was because 1.) it was a 1.5Y and 2.) Yang Yilin had gone before her with a DTY and they didn't want to score a 1.5Y equal to or higher than a DTY. A friend pointed out to me that had this been 1996, Nastia's vault would have been a 9.8, easy. Probably, but that's another decade, another CoP, and an entirely different scoring system. But her vault was damn good.

Her UB wasn't as good as it was on previous nights, namely the landing, but was I nervous throughout that entire routine. I figured that the skills that she had issues with would be fine, but she would fall on her Gienger or something like that. Thankfully, she didn't.

Nastia's FX was her best ever. Crazy cowboy on her double front as usual, but she'll be no Ivana Hong on that skill, so she's got it as best as she can get it. She nearly gave away an OOB tenth, but saved herself (seriously, what has been with the Americans and the OOB line?).

Papa Liukin nearly had me going. I have never seen him so emotional. It must be crazy to see your little girl achieve something her dream and be right there next to her when she does. Their father-daughter moment was so adorable. All their tense moments, arguments in Russian, all that, for this.

Shawn, I want to give her a hug. I've never been her biggest fan and made no secret of it, but one tends to show their true colors when missing out on something huge as an Olympic gold (like that Swedish wrestler's temper tantrum) and she has been so gracious and sweet in the face of her own disappointment. I can't blame her. She's spent the past year hearing everybody say that she's got the gold, it's hers 100%, yes siree Bob, she's got the gold (especially after it came out that she had an Amanar). People in her town building creepy statues of her out of butter and bronze. Walking into local and national chain grocery stores and seeing herself as a life-size cardboard cutout and seeing herself on local and national products like Coca-Cola and Hyvee-brand ice cream sandwiches. She's 16. She probably bought into her own hype a little bit and probably did not expect to not only lose the gold, but by such a large margin (.6).

My hypothesis is that because Shawn was being so well gifted at domestic meets and hit a purple patch when she became senior (most of her direct competition was either out with injury or just coming back from injury) that they were well content to keep things as they were and and kind of lapse on the things that needed working on, namely her leaps and jumps, instead choosing to upgrade and hope that high A-scores would offset her flaws. Many armchair judges said that she would get slammed on those very things come Beijing. She did and it cost her dearly. I didn't think that the margin would be so wide between her and Nastia, but there you go. Plus, Shawn got very lucky in regards to her vault because given how long the judges pondered over that and even had Nellie Kim over there, I seriously thought they were going to downgrade that vault.

Either way, Shawn has a lot to be proud of. She's well-accomplished for a gymnast who only became an elite in 2005. Qualified elite in 2005, triple World Champion in 2007, double silver Olympic medalist (so far) in 2008. I'm not sneezing at that.