U.S. gymnast Carly Patterson's all-around gold medal was groundbreaking for the young woman and heir-apparent to Mary Lou Retton, but it wasn't justification for a team silver medal. Patterson's individual gold medal has been shamelessly used to divert the attention away from Martha Karolyi's mistakes as the team coordinator.
Karolyi prepared the team for every obstacle: power outages, air conditioning failures, and the equipment issues that plagued Sydney. What she didn't prepare them for was her lack of judgment.
The scoring system in Athens was far more challenging than past Olympics. Each team comprised six gymnasts; only three competed on each event, with every score counted. There was no longer a margin for error. USA Gymnastics dealt with the changes accordingly. The country's best gymnasts unified once a month at Karolyi's ranch in Texas where she could oversee their progress and more importantly enable them to develop a healthy sense of competition with the other gymnasts.
Now fast-forward to Athens. Careless last minute decisions during the team finals undermined the vast progress the new system had accomplished since its implementation in 2000.
You never heard about these decisions. Gymnastics commentators were too busy being cheerleaders for the sport to give any objective insight as to why our team really crumbled under the pressure. They chalked it up as "too much hype," when it should have been classified as an administrative breakdown.
The team finals became an appalling chain of events with an utterly predictable ending. Perhaps trying to prove her intolerance for mistakes, Karolyi shockingly benched potential all-around contender Courtney McCool after a sub-par performance during the preliminary competition. Commentators never explained what type of pressure benching McCool put on the rest of the team during the team final. They never explained that we inexplicably put ourselves at an extreme handicap. They never explained that "the deepest talent pool in U.S. history" appeared so arrogant to think they could pull off a gold medal with five women instead of six.
It was a textbook Greek tragedy that became progressively worse. Carly Patterson had a poor performance on vault followed by an equally disappointing bar routine, eventually hitting her feet on the lower bar.
Courtney Kupets became "injured" forcing Mohini Bhardwaj to do beam without a warm up. This would be the equivalent of using Brett Favre as a punt returner instead of a quarterback.
Then Kupets decided she was healthy enough to compete on floor and was unable to complete an elementary dance element resulting in a score of 9.187.
Meanwhile McCool sat on the sidelines never able to remove her warm-up suit. She smiled. She clapped. She cheered. She hugged every teammate after each routine and convincingly hid the disenchantment she must have felt watching her team fall apart and her Olympic dream fade away.
McCool's mistakes during preliminaries were laughable compared to those of Patterson and Kupets in the finals, when the scores actually counted. This team didn't need the hype, these women were so good that they could self-destruct and still manage to win silver.
The Romanians and the Russians were not the biggest obstacles the United States needed to overcome that night, McCool's absence was the difference, but don't tell anyone.
Kim Taylor is a journalism senior. Reach her at kimberly.a.taylor@asu.edu.
