Stuttgart, Germany – Nastia Liukin couldn’t watch. She knew she might be the one who had let another world title slip away.
Alicia Sacramone couldn’t wait. She wanted to get out on the floor, show ’em what she had, and see if it was good enough to save the day.
Sacramone did it, coming through with a floor routine full of attitude and glitz, one good enough to rally the Americans to a world championship Wednesday and prove that winning gold medals in gymnastics is more about determination than perfection.
And Liukin could finally breathe again.
“These are not machines,” national team coordinator Martha Karolyi said after her team overcame two big mistakes on the balance beam that could have cost it the meet. “As much as we strive for perfection, it’s still not possible because we’re just human people.”
That came shining through during a crazy, dramatic, emotional roller-coaster of an ending, filled with tears of joy, anguish and relief.
The Americans finished with 184.4 points, beating defending champion China by .95 for their second world title, and the first they’ve won on foreign soil. Romania took the bronze after getting shut out of team medals last year for the first time since 1981.
Sacramone powered through her flip combinations and landed without looking down on her winning floor exercise, knowing she’d stayed inside the lines.
“I told them, ‘Everyone makes mistakes, but we still have one more event and it’s one of our best events, so we might as well go out there and have fun and show everybody what we’ve got,”‘ she said.
The American comeback became necessary when Liukin, a former world champion on beam, couldn’t close out what had been shaping up as one of the best routines of her life on the sport’s most difficult event.
Could it have been too good? “I guess I just got too excited too early,” she said.
The landing of her last flip resulted in an awkward thud. Later, she said she thought her foot slid halfway off the beam. So instead of poising herself for a flip with 2 1/2 twists on the dismount, she settled for a back tuck. She scored a 15.175, losing about a point off her usual mark.
National champion Shawn Johnson followed with an equally costly and unexpected mistake, a fall off the beam that knocked her score down about a point, as well.
