In summer of 2003, Svetlana Khorkina 🇷🇺 headed to America to defend her World title at the World Gymnastics Championships in Anaheim 🇺🇸.
Now 24, her results had begun to taper off a bit. After an incredible seven consecutive years, she had finally lost her World Title on bars the prior fall. With a talented field in Anaheim, it would not be easy to retain her crown.
The name of the game in this Code was ensuring a high start value by making sure the trickiest skills were credited. On bars, this meant pirouettes finishing close enough to handstand. On beam and floor, it was vital to get credit for leaps and jumps. The SV credited to a gymnast would most likely factor heavily into her success.
Svetlana would struggle with some of these very issues during the Qualification Round. Although she finished third AA, all of her four scores were fairly mediocre. To the point that for the first time in her career, at her eighth individual Worlds, she did not qualify for any individual Event Finals.
To make matters worse, Russia struggled during Team Finals and finished seventh out of eight teams. The last time Russia failed to medal as a team was in 1995.
So as she had so many times in her career, Khorkina put on her game face the day of the All Around Final. She was ready to give it her all.
And that's exactly what she did. She increased her score from prelims on every event, including a whopping 0.363 increase on floor--her last event.
She created a moment out there with her Notre Dame routine. The crowd was entranced. This was Svetlana's last ever Worlds performance, and she milked it for every last drop. Her AA performance was a clinic in resilience, determination, and never giving up.
Khorkina was able to stave off a surge from first-year senior Carly Patterson, who had to settle for silver. (Oh how the tides will turn when it comes to that rivalry.) She would become World AA Champion for the third and final time. And at the age of 24, she was the oldest woman to win Worlds in 37 years--since Czech Great Věra Čáslavská stood victorious in 1966.
26 авг 2024
