Inches short of perfection

By PETER CALDER

The past isn't what it used to be. Ask the gymnasts.

The young women who took to the floor of the Sydney SuperDome for the all-around final on Thursday night sparkled like princesses. Glitter in their hair, sequins and curlicues on their gloriously patterned leotards, they were figures of fragile, fairytale beauty.

But the fairytale doesn't have the same perfect ending any more. The gymnasts go through their routines and quartets of unsmiling judges mark them down.

Down from 10 that is. Remember Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian waif who stole the hearts of the world at the 1976 games in Montreal? She did what no one in the modern era had managed before her: she executed a routine, on the uneven bars, which even those nitpicking judges called flawless. She got 10.

At the finals on Thursday, the performances fell well short of perfection. The two-point landing of utter poise just never seemed to happen.

Watching the women's all-around is like trying to watch a split-screen movie being projected on to all four walls, so I'm happy to accept I may have missed something, but I soon lost count of the landings that were tentative, uneven, ill-balanced, even graceless - and no amount of that arm-spreading, chest-thrusting, wide-grinning pose of triumph was going to fool the judges.

Of course there was a reason for all this. When English entrant Annika Reeder fell heavily and injured herself on landing (she took no further part), they ought to have guessed.

When the favourite, the lissom and scowling Russian Svetlana Khorkina, landed on her knees with a yelp of pain and walked away in tears of frustration, her early lead in shreds, the penny may have dropped.

Incredibly, mindbendingly - heads are still shaking among the specialist press corps here - the vaulting horse was set at the wrong height.

And it wasn't just a whisker out, but 5cm - which the last time I looked was just under two inches in the old measure. Two inches isn't much when you drive it, but to a gymnast somersaulting at steeple-height and hoping to execute a routine designed and refined with algebraic precision it must seem like the length of a football field.

Dwight Normile, of the magazine International Gymnast, says we're entitled to wonder whether the glitch cost Khorkina the gold medal. On her next apparatus, the uneven bars, she missed a grip and fell to the mat in a cloud of chalk. Her shoulders drooped; she was gone.

"You have to believe that if she'd landed on her feet in the vault, she'd have gone to the bars feeling more motivated," says Normile, who cannot remember seeing such a mistake since school meets.

Yet even assuming the organisers can set the gear up correctly, perfection is a thing of the past. As Normile explains, "10 is supposed to be perfection and a lot of times when you saw a 10 you saw imperfection."

In any event, if one person can get a 10, so can another. Who would win? Avoiding tied tallies was, in part, why gymnastics started scoring to three decimal places. In Comaneci's day, what came before 10 was 9.9.

It's an issue which has exercised the sport's governing body for years not least because Comaneci taught us all to expect a 10 and to feel disappointed, as I did on Thursday, when it didn't happen. A proposal to eliminate the perfect score was scuttled on the grounds that it would alienate the public, so it remains theoretically possible, but judges are all but instructed that it cannot be achieved and should not be awarded.

But if we're not seeing perfection, we're seeing better gymnastics than we used to, says Normile because routines have a higher level of difficulty and equipment is better.

"If somebody had done Comaneci's vault last night it would have scored maybe an 8.8," he says, but for her time Comaneci was ahead of everybody.

But she wasn't perfect. Whatever the judges said. That we'll have to wait for.