It looked like a repeat of Worlds Team Finals last year. The favourites USA giving away the Championships after two unexpected errors by Liukin and Johnson on beam.
Then Russian Ekaterina Kramarenko balked on vault scoring ZERO in a 3-up, 3-count Finals.
And Li Shanshan from China over-rotated on Floor.
Here’s what happened:
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’s winning floor exercise was as clutch as any pass ever thrown by Peyton Manning or basket made by M.J.
Though in this case, the coup de grace was every bit as much a stage show as an athletic performance.
Sacramone powered through her flip combinations and landed without looking down, knowing she’d stayed inside the lines.
… 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.
… 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 — the kind of thing you’d see at the kid’s meet down the street on Saturday mornings.
She scored a 15.175, losing about a point off her usual mark. She rattled the team, and 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.
That’s two misses out of 12 in a meet where scores from every routine count. Last year, two mistakes cost the Americans the gold, leaving them befuddled as they walked out of the gym in Denmark, feeling they were better than the Chinese team that won.
… The Chinese went into the last event leading but made a mistake on floor that brought the Americans right back into contention.
Li Shanshan put way too much power into her last tumbling pass, two piked somersaults. She stumbled backward, toppled onto her backside and ricocheted wildly out of bounds.
… About the same time Shanshan was falling, Russian vaulter Ekaterina Kramarenko flew down the runway and put her arms up to ready herself for a roundoff onto the springboard. But she suddenly cut her speed, stayed upright and touched the springboard then stopped.
She received a 0.0 for that unheard-of mistake. The sight of her weeping on the sidelines wasn’t as jarring as that of her teammate, Elena Zamolodchikova, heaving with sobs as she stood on the runway to prepare for her now-meaningless vault.
Russia led the meet halfway through, but finished in last place.
The United States finished in first, and Johnson, the national champion, also deserves heaps of credit.
Shawn JohnsonShe had to recover from her error on beam to put together a floor routine that would give Sacramone a chance to win it. She came through.
Her floor routine was a perfectly steady, high-flying roam around the mat, her face always gleaming with a smile. She scored a 15.375, and when she strutted off, she stopped to hug Sacramone as if the Americans had already won.
“All the girls were like, ‘You can do it, it’s fine,'” Sacramone said. “I was like, ‘C’mon guys. I’m fine.’ I’m like ‘OK, I’ve done this routine so many times.'”
She did it once more with feeling. This time, it resulted in a team gold medal — the first in a competition this big since 2003.
The Associated Press: U.S. Golden Again at Gymnastics Worlds
Gymnastics Coaching.com 