Word: goldings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wonders of Olympic basketball. Except these guys aren't playing hoops. They're going for gold in team handball, a popular game throughout Europe and, to a lesser extent, American gym classes. But handball is the only sport in which the Americans don't have a single Olympian. (Rhythmic gymnastics - you know, the one with the ribbons and balls - also has no Yank participant. But since it's an event within gymnastics, it doesn't count as its own Olympic sport...
...team finals at the Olympic Games. But that's where Alicia Sacramone, a Brown University undergrad, found herself after her second tumbling pass on the floor exercise. It was Sacramone's second fall of the meet, and it may ultimately have cost the U.S. women the team gold on Wednesday in front of a capacity 19,000 crowd, which mainly rooted against the Americans, at the National Indoor Stadium. Sacramone and her teammates - Shawn Johnson, Nastia Liukin, Chellsie Memmel, Samantha Peszek and Bridget Sloan - ended up with a perfectly respectable silver, 2.375 points behind home-town favorite China...
...trials in July and lost their chance to become a part of this squad at all. Making the team is more a matter of playing last-gymnast-standing than being the most talented acrobat around. "That was our fear when we originally saw it," says Bart Conner, an Olympic gold medalist from the 1984 Los Angeles Games, on the new code of points, "that it was going to lead to a lot of injuries." Chinese men's coach Huang Yubin lamented after Tuesday's men's team win that putting together a strong squad was difficult, because the gymnasts would...
...been healthy, Memmel's presence may have kept the U.S. in the gold-medal hunt against the Chinese, as replacement Sacramone, not known as a beam specialist, fell off just as she mounted it, launching the U.S.'s troubles. "Possibly, yes," said Martha Karolyi, the national team coordinator on whether an injury-free Memmel might have been the third scorer on the beam, with Johnson and Liukin. "Everybody knows how rock-solid Chellsie is. And definitely on floor also, she had a chance to perform, because we all remember what kind of routine she did at [the] trials...
...navigating the technical challenges presented by the code of points remains the best way to the top of the medal stand. And while it may be too late for most of America's female gymnasts to savor gold, Johnson and Liukin remain at the top of the lineup for the women's individual all-around event on Friday, and will be hoping to stand side-by-side on the podium, celebrating first and second place...