THE SEOUL GAMES : Italians Give Clear Idea of How Far U.S. Men’s Gymnasts Have Slipped

The U.S. men, disadvantaged as they were, struggled through the first gymnastics session, thought they did pretty well, all things considered, and then looked up and saw they were trailing the Italians. Folks, it doesn’t get any worse than this.

The legacy of the 1984 gold-medal team is about to disappear in a wisp of smoke. The Italians! The U.S. gymnasts had little hope going into Sunday’s compulsory exercises but now, as they await the rest of the team scores from Sunday’s later sessions, they have even less going into Tuesday’s optionals, the remaining half of the team score.

“The Italians must have done pretty well,” said two-time Olympian Scott Johnson, the United States’ last link to ’84 greatness. “They must have done a great job.” He sounded hopeful.

Possibly they had done a great job, but certainly not as great as the Soviets, the Chinese and the Germans (East and West) were about to do in later sessions, where the scoring traditionally is higher. The United States had hoped to fit into the top six teams after the compulsory scoring and thus qualify for the so-called glamour session Tuesday, where the top teams are lumped together. It is considered impossible to medal from an earlier session.

The United States would have been battling those four teams plus Bulgaria, Japan, Hungary and Romania for the spot. Tough enough to beat any or all of those. And now the Italians! It is a doomed team.

If the only gymnastics you see are Olympic gymnastics, you may well wonder how a team can drop from medal contention into a possible 10th-place finish. These things have to happen:

--All but two of the gymnasts must retire, and one of those (Tim Daggett) must shatter his leg and fail in a courageous but doomed comeback.

--The best remaining gymnast in the country (Dan Hayden) must drop from first place in the Olympic trials right off the team because he injures himself in the second-to-last event and then, because of a rules misunderstanding, unnecessarily continues to compete and falls off the next apparatus twice.

--The team that finally does come together has just two gymnasts who competed in the World Championships (where it finished ninth, ahead of the Italians). One of the members, Lance Ringnald, is a recent high school graduate.

--Finally, the United States, in picks drawn from a hat last month, gets a disastrous draw. The team must not only compete in the first session, where scoring is tighter than it will be later in the day, but (because the session has fewer teams than the others) the United States is first up on three different events. This is a double whammy. Despite these conditions, the U.S. team actually did OK Sunday.

“We didn’t have to count one missed routine,” Johnson said. This is rare indeed. The team score of 285.90 does not reflect any botched routines. Not that there weren’t any. “There were three,” Johnson admitted, “all mine.” But in each case, his was the throwaway score and did not affect the team points.

Still, there were no great routines, nothing that would get anybody thinking miracle.

The team’s most exciting gymnast, Charles Lakes, was just enough off in each of his dismounts, particularly on vault and high bar. And there was a sloppy finish on floor exercise where he rocked back on his heels and stepped back, dropping a good routine to a 9.70 score. And not one U.S. gymnast stuck a landing off vault, a failure of pr1701013875suffer.

Though Johnson’s scores did not hurt the team, more was expected from him than throwaway scores. But he failed to achieve a handstand on the bar (8.75), slipped dismounting the pommel horse (8.85) and got lost in the air dismounting the rings (9.30).

“What I did,” he explained, “was pull out all the plugs, let it all go. On pommel horse, I tried to max the dismount. On rings I tried to do the highest rings in the world. But both were so high I over-rotated. When you max things out, sometimes you get failure.”

In other words, if the U.S. team does falter, it will not entirely be for lack of trying.

That the team would falter is not unexpected. Hartung was watching the U.S. workout last week and was sort of shaking his head at the team’s chances. It’s true, he said, that the U.S. enjoyed the Eastern Bloc boycott in 1984; the U.S. may never be capable of beating the Soviets. Yet that 1984 U.S. team had been together four years by the time of the Los Angeles Games, whereas this one was still shaping up in August.

“And then we peaked at the right time,” Hartung said of the ’84 team, “got a great draw and all these things went right for us.”

Just going into the Olympics, already all those things had gone wrong for them. An interrupted national program, injuries and luck of the draw. Then Sunday, to top it off, something went right for the Italians.

“I thought we fought against that (the draw) very well,” Johnson said. “But they must have done real well.”

Just an hour later the Soviets and Chinese took the floor to begin their face-off. We can say this much: At least somebody was better than the Italians on Sunday.