My favorite events during the summer Olympics are always swimming and gymnastics. While most announcers kept commenting that Shawn Johnson was the U.S.'s best bet for individual all-around champion, and was every ones favorite girl to win, I always thought Nastia Liukin was the better gymnast of the two young women. She seemed the person to win the gold medal, and I was spot on. While Johnson is good at what she does, better than most, Liukin has the grace and beauty of a ballerina on floor and balance beam. She does her routines effortlessly, or at least makes it look that way. She does not look mechanical like most gymnasts who just do the routine like a robot; she takes it a step further.
Flawless in execution and stick landings, out of all four rotations, each one was better than the next. Nastia kept in her own zone, focusing not on the other gymnast's performances, or her teammate Johnson, but on each rotation. The competition started off with the vault. The vault was perfect with a stick landing and she got a low score, which was very unfair. Then she moved to the uneven bars where her starting value was higher than any other gymnast in the competition. She was almost perfect except for a slight step in the landing, which the judges of course counted, to the fullest extent, and gave her a low score again.
Then Liukin had the balance beam where she looked like a swan. Perfect in performance to her signature mark on the beam where she actually looks like a swan standing on one foot, she stuck her landing. It was there that they had another disagreement with her scoring. It took forever, and finally she got a good score, which she most undoubtedly deserved, and that score moved her into first place. All that was left for Liukin was the floor exercise. After stepping out of bounds during the practice, she regained her focus and gave a flawless performance. Not stepping out of bounds, hitting every mark during the dance with such grace and beauty, she finally got another good score that kept her in first place, solidifying her position, giving her the gold medal.
The only gymnast left was her teammate Johnson, who had a good performance on floor after faltering on the balance beam, but was nowhere close to perfection. Shawn Johnson's performance did move her up from the bronze medal to getting the silver medal, giving China the bronze.
The judges favored the Chinese for some reason. Just because the Olympics are being held in China, does not mean that every Chinese athlete should win. Other countries deserve the chance, and the judges, especially in women's gymnastics, were bias, and that is being nice. While the judges never counted off points for a Chinese gymnast that fell, took a step during the landing, and wobbled on the balance beam, they did for the Americans. And if that was not enough, they even added on points, and gave the Chinese gymnasts incredibly high scores for performances that did not deserve such a high score. I do not understand how the Olympic committee could allow such a thing to take place, especially during a live broadcast?
Nastia Liukin performed like a champion, and now she is one. Her father, who is also her coach, and a former gymnast who competed for the Soviet Union in the Seoul Olympics almost twenty years ago, could not have been more proud of his daughter. And through all the controversy during the Olympics over the low scores that the American's kept getting for their flawless performances, and the Chinese gymnastics scoring exceedingly high scores for bad performances, and the controversy over the Chinese gymnastics being under age, looking less like sixteen year old girls, and more like pubescent children, a true winner emerged. Whether Liukin decides to compete in the next summer Olympics in 2012 in London, or go out on top as the 2008 gold medal winner for the all-around champion, she became only the third American to win that prestigious title, and will be forever remembered as one of the greatest gymnasts in U.S. history.
Davin Colten's debut novel, Lie With The Devil, a suspenseful romance set in 1940's Europe during WWII, was recently published. Pursued by a spy and hunted by Germans, romance and peril flourish between an unlikely pair of allies in this incredible drama. A love affair transformed by war, Lie With The Devil is available from Amazon.com, Borders.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon CA, DE, FR, JP, and several other online bookstores throughout the US, UK, Europe, Australia, Japan, all over the globe. A spy thriller series will soon follow.
Buy Davin's exciting new novel here Lie With The Devil
Check out Davin's new website www.DavinColten.com
|