Word: gymnast
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...Olympic flame. The two obvious candidates were hoops star Yao Ming and hurdling legend Liu. When Yao loped in front of the massive Chinese Olympic team with the Chinese flag held aloft, the audience naturally thought Liu would carry the final torch. But that honor went instead to retired gymnast and sports-clothing tycoon Li Ning. Liu didn't even march with the Chinese Olympic delegation. Where...
...Indeed, for all of Johnson's remarkable consistency and skill, gymnastics experts - and perhaps judges too - tend to favor the more artistic athletes among their ranks than the athletic ones. The legendary Comaneci, watching from the stands at the National Indoor Stadium, said "In order to get very high start values, they don't do any artistic moves, especially on the floor exercise. It's almost like you should do only six tumbling passes and finish." Liukin, however, is a gymnast with a balletic aesthetic, and one who can bring back the 'artistic' to artistic gymnastics, its official Olympic name...
...good place to be when you're a gymnast competing in the 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...
...surprisingly disappointing as the U.S.'s performance was, it might be a testament to the difficulties - and hazards - of competing under a new scoring system and code of points that rewards gymnasts for packing their programs with difficult skills. The U.S. team alone lost two members to injury on the men's side, and two gymnasts of the women's team are competing injured - and that's not even counting the ones who hurt themselves either before or just after the Olympic trials in July and lost their chance to become a part of this squad at all. Making...
...once perfect 10.0 no longer exists; instead, the scores are now a combination of two numbers - the first for how difficult a gymnast's skills are, and a second for how well those skills are executed. The total can now range from 10.0 all the way to 17-something. "You have to do a bigger variety of difficult skills now," says Conner, who was in the stadium with his wife, the 1976 Olympic champion Nadia Comaneci, to catch the competition. "In our era, you could do one or two difficult moves, then fill out the rest of your routine with...