No individual vault final medal for Alicia Sacramone, as she finishes 4th to Chinese gymnast Cheng Fei who lands on her knees instead of her feet; Romanian Sandra Izbasa wins the floor final gold, Shawn Johnson wins silver and Nastia Liukin wins bronze; Sasha Artemev finishes 7th on pommels because of a mess-up - not the same he could deliver for the team qualifiers and final as the US men won bronze:
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"Everything hit me at once," Sacramone said, fighting back tears. "I definitely had to pull myself together. The last couple of days have not been easy. It's time I get a vacation. It was a very stressful, good learning experience. I'm excited to go home."
Not every story ends with eight gold medals at the Olympics. On Sunday the
U.S. gymnasts learned how the other 99.999% deal with defeat, or at least the absence of total victory. Sacramone suffered her disappointment, heaped on frustration.
Alexander Artemev lost his focus on the pommel horse soon after completing the hardest part of his routine, falling off for a seventh place finish.
Then at the close of the long night,
Shawn Johnson and
Nastia Liukin were dropped from first and second place, down to second and third on the floor exercise. The final gymnast,
Sandra Izbasa of
Romania, passed them both by sticking all her passes and landings.
"Everything hit me at once," Sacramone said, fighting back tears. "I definitely had to pull myself together. The last couple of days have not been easy. It's time I get a vacation. It was a very stressful, good learning experience. I'm excited to go home."
Not every story ends with eight gold medals at the Olympics. On Sunday the
U.S. gymnasts learned how the other 99.999% deal with defeat, or at least the absence of total victory. Sacramone suffered her disappointment, heaped on frustration.
Alexander Artemev lost his focus on the pommel horse soon after completing the hardest part of his routine, falling off for a seventh place finish.
Then at the close of the long night,
Shawn Johnson and
Nastia Liukin were dropped from first and second place, down to second and third on the floor exercise. The final gymnast,
Sandra Izbasa of
Romania, passed them both by sticking all her passes and landings.
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Don't count out the Romanians.
What Alicia Sacramone's coach says:
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"I know how she's a fighter,"
Mihai Brestyan said Sunday. "I don't know what happened this time. She took too much on herself. She forgot her own personal duties as a gymnast."
Sacramone said she couldn't help but worry about Peszek. "I was the team captain," she said. "It's my responsibility to the team."
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Too much "team", the "team", "team" "team" "team", etc.....
Sacramone's vault:
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In any case, she wasn't bad Sunday on the vault. But Sacramone had the misfortune of going first, when judges want to leave plenty of room at the top. And her start value, or degree of difficulty, was a low 5.8 on the second of two vaults. This just isn't her best event, and Sacramone can't perform the trickiest of tricks.
She was beaten by gold medalist
Hong Un Jong of Korea, by
Oksana Chusovitina of
Germany and by
Cheng Fei of China. Cheng landed terribly on her second vault and immediately began to start bawling. But her start value was 6.5, so she ended up beating Sacramone for the final medal, by .025 points.
This was no consolation to Cheng, 20, who was terribly miserable about her own failure under intense pressure to win a gold. She was still crying in the mixed zone, and told Chinese reporters they would not have her to kick around four years from now.
"It's just the way competitions are," she said. "I can't keep it up until
London. Women's gymnastics is changing too much."
Both Sacramone and Brestyan thought that Cheng should have scored lower, and lost the bronze.
"Considering she landed on her knees, I thought the deduction would be higher," Sacramone said.
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Cheng Fei has had enough too.
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