It’s My Imagination

Nastia Liukin Accepts Silver With Grace

Nastia Liukin performed beautifully in the individual event finals of the uneven bars at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. She had a few small errors, but stuck her landing in a very difficult routine. In fact, her routine had the highest difficulty rating of any routine being done at these Olympics. Her competition, the Chinese women, opted to increase their own routine difficulty ratings in order to be able to compete against her.In the end, another screwy judging scoring system left Nastia tied with her competitor He Kexin which should not have happened. These two gymnasts had identical difficulty ratings, both had small errors in their routines, but He Kexin had several more small errors and took a sideways step on her landing. Remember, Nastia stuck her landing. All things being equal, Nastia should have scored higher. But, this is international gymnastics and all things are apparently not equal. The two gymnasts wound up in a tie.

The International Olympic Committee determined that there would be no ties in gymnastics and the computer is programmed to automatically break the tie by dropping the 4th lowest score, leaving only 3 judges scores remaining to be calculated together. This left Nastia with the Silver medal. There should have never been a tie in the first place.

Nastia Liukin has handled the situation with maturity and grace. Although she was no doubt disappointed, she accepted her medal with a smile, posed for photographs after the awards ceremony and never said an unkind word about the situation. She is certainly a gold medal individual.