King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Gymnastics gets interesting in a loud, hooting hurry. Plus: A white American sprint champion? Shh! And: More.
Aug. 24, 2004 | I love it, love it, love it! I love the crazy gymnastics judges! I love their little squinting faces and how they scurry around and have conferences and talk into telephones after they post their scores. They have to yell into those phones because 12,000 people are booing them. And they have to try to look like they don't hear the booing people.
They aren't any good at this last thing. I don't know who would be. On Monday night, the people booed for eight solid minutes. Eight minutes! You have to really go some to piss off a gymnastics crowd enough so that they boo for eight minutes. I've never heard a college football crowd boo for that long, never mind a polite gymnastics crowd.
And they only quit booing because the guy on behalf of whom they were angry asked them to please stop. And then a minute later, they were booing again.
I loved it!
You know who the crazy gymnastics judges were talking to on those phones, don't you? The French lady with the alligator purse! Remember? From Salt Lake City? Skategate? David and Jamie? Any of this ringing a bell for you? You really, really cared about it two years ago.
The men's gymnastics, which were winding down nicely Tuesday, almost gone, suddenly got way interesting in the high bar competition, and poor Paul Hamm, the American all-around gold medalist, was in the middle of it again. Hamm had spent the last few days dealing with the snot-storm that resulted from the crazy judging in the all-around, and just before he was ready to do his thing in the high bar, the snot started flying again.
Hamm won the all-around Wednesday after the judges made an error assessing the start value of South Korean Yang Tae-young's parallel bars routine. The Koreans protested unsuccessfully and there'd been a lot of talk that Hamm should give up his gold or at least share it with Yang. Hamm said he had no such plans, and rightly so. Scores are scores, the Koreans had their chance to protest within the rules at the time of the error, and them's the breaks. You don't go into gymnastics if you're interested in fairness and verifiable outcomes.
But the whole thing clearly bothered Hamm.
So on Monday the competitor before Hamm, Alexei Nemov of Russia, a four-time gold-medalist and general big daddy in the sport, turned in a spectacular routine that wowed the crowd, made up of amateur judges. He did six release moves, four of them right in a row. It was a thing to behold. But he took a step on his landing.