Yang Wei earns men's all-around gold medal as Chinese shine

BEIJING — With each day bringing another gold medal, gymnastics is fast becoming China's domain at the Beijing Olympics. And no one is a bigger star than Yang Wei.

Yang Wei clapped as he walked past the vault judges, pumped his fists at the crowd and flashed a thumbs-up for the cameras. He even exchanged high-fives with the competition.

Denied in Sydney and disappointed in Athens, Yang is finally an Olympic champion after winning the men's all-around Thursday. It wasn't close, either. The 28-year-old with thinning hair finished with 94.575 points, nearly three points ahead of Japan's Kohei Uchimura. Benoit Caranobe of France won the bronze.

After eight years of waiting, he's certainly earned it.

"Today was perfect," he said. "I felt tired before the competition, but after it I feel relaxed."

He didn't even bother waiting for his marks on high bar, his final event, before taking a curtain call, leaping onto the podium and thrusting his fists in the air while the crowd went crazy. His coach gave him a Chinese flag, and he held it out with pride. Judges took what seemed like forever to post his marks, but that only gave Yang more time to soak it all in.

"I thought a month ago if I would get this medal, I would be every emotional," Yang said. "But I'm really not because we won the team gold medal."

As the adoring crowd chanted "Yang Wei! Yang Wei" he pounded his chest with his fist. When his final mark finally did go up, the crowd went wild and Yang wanted more, cupping his hands to his ears and asking for them to pump up the volume. They did, of course, cheering lustily for the two-time world champion, who just might join Yao Ming and Liu Xiang as China's biggest names in these games.

The only difference? Yang already has won two gold medals. The other two are still waiting.

There could be more to come for Yang, who qualified for the pommel horse and still rings event finals.

"Yang was very uneasy going into his third Olympics," said Chen Yibing, Yang's teammate on the China squad that won the team gold two days ago. "But he handled it like a champion and I respect him very much."

The Americans couldn't add to their bronze medal from the team competition. Jonathan Horton finished ninth and Sasha Artemev was 12th.

Yang appeared moved during the medals ceremony, looking down often at the piece of gold he cradled in his hands, but he hammed it up afterward. With the medal now in his hands, he held it up to one group of Chinese fans and pretended he was going to throw it at them.

He didn't, of course, laughing and walking over to show it off to another cheering crowd.

Yang was dismissively referred to as "the silver collector" after he finished second to Alexei Nemov at the Sydney Olympics and second to American Paul Hamm at the 2003 world championships. The gold was his for the taking in Athens when Hamm fell midway through the meet, but Yang couldn't close the deal. He fell on high bar, and dropped all the way to seventh.

No one has been better the last two years. Not even close. In fact, he was so far in front at last year's world championships that he almost tumbled off the podium on high bar, and still won by more than a point.

There was no such drama Thursday.

Yang performs such difficult maneuvers on every event that this isn't a fair fight. On pommel horse, he works his way around in a perfectly controlled rhythm, no movements wasted, no exertion showing on his face. On still rings, he moved from strength pose to another as if to say, "Oh, you like that? Well how about this one?"

On parallel bars, he flipped from one handstand right into another and came to a dead stop, his body as straight as an arrow.

He wasn't perfect. He slipped on a landing on floor, both feet sliding out of bounds. And he took small steps on his landings on both vault and still rings.

But he had built such a commanding lead after five events that he could have fallen off the high bar, his weakest event, and still come away with the gold. He didn't fall, but the routine was somewhat anti-climatic. He wobbled after getting off-balance on a pirouette, and banged into the bar as he came down to catch it after a release move.

It hardly mattered, though. He is the best gymnast of the day, and he has the gold medal to prove it.

There is one person who might have given Yang a fight, but Hamm was watching back home in Columbus, Ohio.

After taking 21/2 years following a gold-medal win in Athens, Hamm looked better than ever earlier this year. He doesn't pack the difficulty in his routines that Yang does, but Yang can't couch Hamm's precision and polish. It was going to be a spectacular matchup -- until Hamm broke his hand May 22 at the national championships.

He sped through his recovery to get to Beijing, but announced July 28 that the hand and a strained shoulder would keep him from competing.

That removed Yang's only real obstacle to gold.

There were other contenders, but they never really made it a fight. Hiroyuki Tomita, the only other man to win the world title since Athens, peeled off still rings on his dismount and finished fourth. Fabian Hambuechen, the silver medalist at world's last year, fell from high bar, his signature event, and wound up seventh.

Yang Tae-young, who caused such a stir at the Athens Games when he won a bronze medal that he thought should have been gold, dropped to eighth after a dismal pommel horse routine.

This gymnastics meet has become a big Chinese swinging, dancing, somersaulting, fist-pumping, high-fiving, in-your-face celebration.

It has also been redemptive for the men.

First the Chinese team won gold in an authoritative, doubt-erasing rout after crumbling under pressure in Athens, Greece, and finishing fifth.

Then Thursday Yang Wei, a slight 28-year-old with thinning hair and an impish grin, won his first Olympic all-around gold medal. He finished his night high bar where, four years ago, Yang fell of and plummeted from first to seventh, from almost-champion to earning a reputation as a cheery choker.

This time, he did his high-bar routine last. It was nervous and slow, and there was a big step on the landing but that didn't matter this time. Yang didn't fall.

The crowd chanted "Yang Wei, Yang Wei, Yang Wei," and Yang began a victory lap while waiting for his high bar mark of 14.775 to post. He shook his fists and flexed his muscles.

His gold-medal total was 94.575. Winning silver was 19-year-old Kohei Uchimura of Japan, whom American team alternate David Durante had touted as a dark-horse contender. The bronze went to little-known French veteran Benoit Caranobe, who was 33rd at last year's worlds and 17th at the 2004 Olympics.

A pair of 22-year-old Americans, Jonathan Horton and Alexander Artemev, were eighth and 12th.

There were few more dramatic moments at the Athens Olympics than watching Yang fall off the high bar on his final routine of the men's all-around final. The mistake opened the way for the United States' Paul Hamm to complete his own recovery from a bad vault landing and sent the Games into a controversy when South Korea's Yang Tae Young protested he had been underscored and should have won the gold medal.

China's Yang has won the past two world championships, and again other athletes had spoken of him as unbeatable coming into the Olympics.

If he made no major mistakes.

Before he had to withdraw because of a broken hand, Hamm said his own strategy was to perfect routines of less difficulty than Wang's, hope to do them flawlessly and hope that Yang made mistakes.

If anyone else had that strategy, it didn't work, and that was a stark contrast to Athens.

U.S. women look ahead

BEIJING -- Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin have moved on to the next big thing already.

They are the smiling co-favorites for the Olympic gymnastics all-around gold medal, a competition that happens Friday at National Indoor Stadium.

Johnson and Liukin politely insisted that winning a team silver medal on Wednesday was fine. The two Americans

But glamour girls are made, after all, from the individual events. Olga Korbut, Nadia Comaneci, Mary Lou Retton, Shannon Miller, Svetlana Khorkina are remembered for signature individual moments and medals. And so that's what Johnson, 16, and Liukin, 18, are aiming for.

The two Americans qualified first and second for the all-around. They have been diplomatically friendly all season while they've been teammates. That's over now and if the team result wasn't what they'd hoped for (China won), the competition is far from over.

Liang Chow, Johnson's personal coach and the U.S. team head coach, said Johnson and Liukin have had a "rocking" meet so far and pointed out that Johnson tied China's Cheng Fei for best vault score Wednesday, that Johnson had the best balance beam score and that Liukin won the uneven bars.

But even as the Chinese team celebrated its first-ever Olympic women's team gold medal and was enveloped in an arena-embrace, a verbal hug from almost all the 15,000 fans on hand, another American, Alicia Sacramone, couldn't wipe away her tears and paint on a smile as quickly Johnson and Liukin.

Sacramone, 20, who fell twice and stepped out of bounds once on her final two routines in the team competition, has one more event left, the vault final Sunday.

A medal would be fine and Sacramone will smile again, but while Johnson and Liukin were able to immediately put away the team performance, Sacramone couldn't.

Her teary eyes are being offered as photographic evidence on message boards and Internet sites that Sacramone was the one to blame for U.S. winning silver instead of gold.

She fell on her mount of the balance beam, the first major mistake for the Americans. Four more falls followed -- two by Sacramone and one each from Johnson and Liukin.

Sacramone, who postponed her sophomore year at Brown University to concentrate on gymnastics this Olympic season, was flustered after being held up twice before the balance beam when there was a scoreboard glitch.

"The judges decided to hold me and I guess I just let my nerves get the best of me," Sacramone said. When the judges gave her the OK, Sacramone leaped onto the beam and fell off.

From there things tumbled downward for the Americans.

But, as Johnson said, there is never time to look back.

"I have to put my mind in a little box and ignore the bad things going on around me," she said. "I've got to concentrate on myself too."

Chow and Liukin's coach and father, Valeri Liukin, both refused to get involved in the simmering controversy about the stated ages of three of China's six team members -- He Kexin, Yang Yilin and Jiang Yuyuan.

There are have been several published reports that none of them meets the international federation age rule of turning 16 during the Olympic year.

"I don't think about that," Chow said.

Said Valeri Liukin, "Oh, I don't know about that."

Johnson and Nastia Liukin will face Yang and Jiang in the all-around finals. He, an uneven bars expert, will go up against Liukin on that apparatus in the event finals. And the 16-year-old who was listed as being 13 as recently as last November on a regional registration list, said, "You will see my difficult moves in the final," suggesting more twists and turns on her already difficult routine.

And certainly more to come in this meet as well.

Los Angeles Times