Though I've enjoyed watching gymnastics on television since 1972, I’d never seen the sport in real life until this past Saturday, when I traveled out to Nassau Coliseum with reader Andrea B. to see the 2005 American Cup. The first thing that struck me was how tiny everything is in person, the mat for the floor exercise is about the size of a queen-sized mattress, the high bar the size of a portable clothes rack, and most of our fellow audience members the size of 10-year old girls (which they were). The reason of course, which was helpfully pointed out to me by my companion, is that the athletes are so miniscule that they could easily fit into your pocket. This observation was proven later that evening at a party I attended when I reached into my jacket to find some mints and instead pulled out Juan Liu of the Chinese team (who is now in training for my new Lil’ Rodeo venture in the corral out back of the Squirrel’s Nest, barrel racing around cans of pork’n’beans on one of my miniature goats).

Since the latest Olympic quadrennial just ended last summer and most of the competitors from Athens are now through with international competition, the meet gave us a chance to travel into the future and say “how do you do” to the heroes of 2008 in Beijing. There were some familiar faces off the floor, though – when we went to get beverages before the competition got underway we ran into Carly Patterson and Blaine Wilson signing autographs in the hallway near the restrooms (I really wanted to throw my Mt. Dew into Blaine’s face and yell “That’s for Raj Bhavsar, motherfucker!” but was restrained by Andrea). And when we got settled into our seats and surveyed the scene we realized that we were sitting right behind the NBC broadcast team of Tim Daggett, Elfi Schlegel, and the most awesomely infuriating imbecile in the history of sports journalism, AL TRAUTWIG. Unfortunately, the one small disappointment of the day was that my camera’s batteries started running out immediately, necessitating that I only turn it on right before I wanted to take a picture, and of course by the time it got aimed and focused the shot I’d wanted was already gone. Thus I missed the opportunity to capture Al yelling at some event representative directly in front of us and spent a lot of the early part of the meet waiting for him to turn Daggett-ward down at the broadcast table, which he eventually did:

The whole behind-the-scenes look at how they broadcast one of these events provided an interesting adjunct to the athletic action. They film the whole thing but don’t go on the air until it’s already been going on for an hour and a half, and one of the cameramen on the floor had his monitor turned toward us so we could see how they were switching back and forth between things that were actually happening live and past occurrences. Also, after a gymnast has completed their routine there is a hunched over cameraman shooting from approximately 6 inches in front of their face as they walk off and wait for their score, which must be a little unnerving given the fact that they are ¼ the size of the cameras and would get squashed like a bug if he happened to trip over a cable or something. And floor reporter Andrea Joyce kept latching onto somebody to interview but rarely seemed to be able to get a cameraman or director to give a shit and put her on the air – at one point both she and Blaine Wilson were jumping up and down waving their arms trying to get someone’s attention. There was a weird and somewhat distracting mix of classic rock and dance hits (i.e., The Cult followed by Destiny's Child) constantly playing in the background, even though the women’s floor routines are the only event set to music and that was the last event; making slightly more sense, the DJ also played the beginning of Seven Nation Army whenever a group of gymnasts marched over to a new event. Not being so gymnastics-mad as to actually read anything about the sport except maybe when an Olympics is coming up, neither of us had any idea who to watch as far as a potential America’s Next Sweetheart, but I’ve since found out that we saw the international competitive debut of the media’s pick: Nastia Liukin.

She was immediately noticeable, though, due to the contrast of her lithe leanness to the more traditional corn-fed bulk of the other American girls (of course, this stocky quality is just relative, none of them are anywhere near a normal weight). Our speculation about this was that she must have immigrated here from Russia, which proves to be the case. Here’s a snippet of commentary from the broadcast that just came up on a search for her: “>> Al: She reminds me of Svetlana Khorkina with those long, long legs and that line. >> Elfi: Could you take some still photos from this balance beam routine. >> Tim: That's exactly right. And you wouldn't get a bad shot. >> Elfi: Never.” Besides the fact that it oddly makes Trautwig seem like the sane commentator of the bunch, this also reminds me of the sad fact that Sveta has retired… I guess I haven’t heard Nastia speak yet, but somehow I doubt she’s really going to be able to fill those shoes no matter how long her legs are. Anyhow, this unexpected break from work I’ve been enjoying today appears to have ended, so if anyone’s interested in who actually won or anything you can just read this (with two events going at the same time and everything else to watch in the arena I wasn’t following the relative scores very closely while it was happening, everything out there was just so unbelievable and awe-inspiring that who got the medals seemed a little beside the point, and once we saw the first medal awarded and realized that they were going to play the winning country’s national anthem for each of the ten events we took off, so I wouldn’t really be much help there anyway).