A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

I'M FOR TRUTH, JUSTICE, AND THE AMERICAN WAY, LOIS: Taylor has the skinny for you on the men's team gymnastic -- excuse me, excuse me, artistic gymnastic -- finals:

I spent the earlier part of Monday evening sitting on the National Mall watching Superman because the American men's gymnastics team wasn't even going to medal, so NBC was only going to show highlights Tuesday in primetime, and I was going to watch Christoper Reeve pretend to fly on a 15 foot screen. Then I got home, my roommate was yelling at the TV and Team USA was winning. What the hell was going on? Was this related in anyway to Superman making the earth rotate backward?

Of course, the gold medalists in the end were the home team. The Chinese win is not even a story - they did it by substantial amount and didn't even falter in the superficial ways they had earlier during the qualifying round. Even when the Chinese team ended on high bar, historically their weakest apparatus, the Chinese played it extremely safe. Way to win so soundly that you bore everybody, China.

Earlier, when the US started to lead, NBC interrupted its all-important swimming coverage to go live to the gymnastics [excuse me, the artistic gymnastics -- Ed.] competition. Raj and Jonathan Horton stuck their vaults and Justin Spring pushed another couple of fractions of point out of his high bar routine. They led through three rotations, and even though it was still mathematically improbable (for all its excitement, gymnastics is often a game of numbers - much like electoral math [or Dr. Brain's Robot -- Ed.]) the commentators started talking as if Superman himself had walked into the building. As if on cue, that's when the team faltered. The floor routines were messy, especially when Joey Hagerty stepped out of bounds.

The US ended on its weakest event as well, the pommel horse, and it hurt the team badly. Kevin Tan ended up at 12.775 points, the lowest score of the entire night. Raj wasn't much better and fell in the middle of his dismount. In the team finals, you send up three people and all three scores count, so the only guy left was Alex "if not for both Hamms" Artemev. This what happens when you leave your entire ability to medal or not to the second alternate.

But Artemev took a deep breath, and well, he proved them all wrong (including me - "Don't choke, Sasha!" I yelled at the screen), posting the fourth best score on the pommel horse of the night. The Germans just didn't have the routines to make up the difference.

And then David "maybe I'm not meant to be Olympian" Durante was in the stands, wiping away manly tears with his freakishly huge arm muscles. Aw, dude, that's got to be bittersweet. I'm torn between either being excited that the US defied expectations and being disappointed that the team messed up enough to squander real potential for silver, especially when the Japanese gave them enough room to do so. Currently breaking my heart the most are Raj's underwhelming performances on rings and pommel horse.