Word: khorkina
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...with me, ladies and gentlemen, Svetlana Khorkina. Thank God for Russian divas! America could never produce a Dostoyevskian heroine like Khorkina - with her razor sharp hair line, her aquiline features, her glares, her screams, her wails, her brilliant hits and her spectacular crashes. At the team competition, she moped and giggled, smiled and cried, and chewed the scenery so viciously that she almost single-handedly destroyed her team and then brought them roaring back. And if all the drama wasn't enough, the image of her angrily tearing off her silver medal at the end of the night was enough...
...Nemov's gold set Russians' expectations high for Svetlana Khorkina on the next night when the women were to compete for the all-around title. If they couldn't have the team golds, at least they had a crack at putting two Russians in the two top individual slots. But no. Svetlana shot over the vault and landed with a thump, shattering her mental preparation just before she went to the bars where, yet again, she wound up on the floor. She walked out of the gym and it seemed for moment that finding herself in 18th place...
...best of health, but it might be assumed that when the Russians found themselves in fourth place and nearly two full points behind the Chinese after the fourth rotation, it would make anyone sick. The women got silver, a performance only slightly less humbling. When team leader Khorkina fell off the uneven bars for the first time in her disastrous week, the team dropped to second behind Romania. The Romanians have been winning World Championships of late, but they had never won a team gold in an unboycotted Olympics...
...sights on the individual all-around finals. Alexei Nemov, 24, the anchor of the Russian team, was the most decorated gymnast in Atlanta when he took home six medals. But he did not get the title of best male gymnast that year - it went China's Li Xiaoshuang. Like Khorkina, the glamorous Nemov was here for his final Olympics, but he almost didn't make it. He had dropped out of training for two years after Atlanta, gained weight, lost it again, went into training, fell back out. Only in the past year did he settle down and train seriously...
...unprecedented error threw the competition into turmoil. The Romanians were on their way to sweeping first second and third place. But now the girls who had taken the vault on the faulty apparatus were being given a scond chance. Five of them took it (not including Khorkina), though their scores did not change the position of the top three gymnasts. Nearly every one of the gymnasts over 153 cm had fallen or done badly. The Romanian gold medalist Andreea Raducan had sailed through the event, but she is only 148 cm. The impact of the miscalculation could not be overstated...