A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

SHE SAID SHE WANTED A GOLD MEDAL AS MUCH AS SHE WANTED TO MOTHER HER OWN CHILD: I'm not a fan of Olympic gymnastics the way I am of the winter counterpart, figure skating. I think it's because figure skating's manuevers are all done at a higher rate of speed, making the whole thing more fluid and watchable, and because the competitors tend to stick around a lot longer. Forget about Michelle Kwan's ridiculously long career -- do you realize that Elvis Stojko competed in four straight Olympics?

Finally, there's nothing organic about gymnastics -- while we all, some day, might need to get somewhere quickly, or swim there, or throw an object accurately for a distance, or lift a large weight, you and I are never going to walk up to a set of uneven bars on the street and say, hey!, let me swing myself around them for a while. Or, wow, that's a really narrow beam there -- not only am I going to walk across it, I'm going to do flips along the way!

Still, three elements made tonight's women's finals compelling viewing:

1. KHORKINA! Diva to the last drop, with legs as long as her rivals are tall, she makes this all worth watching.

2. I like all the nonsense choreography and vogue-ing during the floor exercises, especially those silly poses they make at the end of their routines. And the spirit fingers.

3. Most of all tonight, and maybe I'm a sadist, but the imbalance beam ruled. Rarely do so many talented athletes find so many interesting ways to screw up landings that they've practiced thousands of times. I'm not talking about failed-to-stick-the-landing errors; there were full flops on the floor tonight like Lasorda at the All-Star Game.

This thread is open for all Olympic discussion.