Grace for the Captain

Note: Some of this is sheer speculation but it sounds better this way!

Choker? You could argue that. She's an elite athlete. She's been in these situations before. She knows from pressure. I'm not of that school but many athletes (including, probably, the lady herself) and armchair quarterbacks are. I'm just too touchy-feely for that.

Goat? No dice. She wasn't the only reason Team USA finished second. She was a major factor but the Chinese were also.

Robot. Robot? Yes, I've actually seen this term in print, used to describe a world champion gymnast with a heart the size of her home state, Massachusetts.

The boors - actually the astonishingly perfect morons - who say Alicia Sacramone showed no emotion when her dreams of Olympic gold were quashed as she fell from the balance beam last night are blind and obviously have no clue how to read other human beings. I hope they aren't married or dating anyone. They will have many years of pain caused by their obliviousness. Sacramone was on the verge of tears immediately after her beam routine but she refused to cry for the phalanx of cameras that were stuck in her face. Why? I can't read her mind but here's my take:

Because she was the adult.

She was the leader.

She was the captain.

Any reasonable person could see Alicia was utterly shattered and her eyes were filled with shock, grief, and an absolute all-consuming rage at herself. She even fell on her hands and knees at one point and fought to compose herself. But she refused to give the prying eyes of the world the satisfaction of watching her cry. And she would not break down in front of her teammates because she was trying to keep the agony from spreading and to reinforce her example to them. An example she set when they had made many mistakes during Sunday's qualifying, when she encouraged and coached her younger teammates to bounce back, to focus, to overcome. She wasn't going to be a hypocrite.

Did she bounce back? No. Did she maintain her focus? No. Did she overcome? As far as last night goes, one could argue she didn't. But, my goodness, she struggled mightily to do so.

Personally, I think many of us would have curled up in the corner and gone quietly insane if we'd spent twelve years to reach that one night and had it all collapse in a fraction of a second.

Thanks to the newly intrusive microphones in the team's huddles, I have marveled at Alicia all week for showing superior leadership and level-headedness. Through the setbacks of Sunday's qualifying round she was unfailing in her ability to rally her teammates and keep them on task and in a positive frame of mind. Sadly, she actually seems much more mature, emotionally, than their coach, Marta Karolyi. Alicia may have realized that, too. And that may have been her undoing. Last night I felt like she had probably taken too much responsibility on herself. She may have seen their success or failure resting solely on her shoulders. For a 20-year-old with billions watching, that's an incredible amount of pressure.

When she finally cracked under that pressure, she could not encourage the one teammate who needed it the most.

She dispensed so much grace that she had none left for herself.

Stone-faced and feeling absolutely outside of her body, her brown eyes filled with both fire and ice as they stared out at nothing, she let her teammates' encouraging words bounce off her ears and fall to the ground like rice off a groom's back. She would hear none of it. It was a distraction.

But one girl got through to her. It was only for an instant but it was real and it was a harbinger of hope.

Shawn Johnson. A Miss Perfect who realizes that she is far from it. She stood toe-to-toe with her captain. She looked Alicia in the eye and said something. I don't know what. But it made a fleeting smile pass across Alicia's face. Just one moment of grace in a night that will haunt her dreams for months, maybe years.

It didn't take the pain away. It didn't rally Alicia to a triumphant recovery in the floor exercise. But it was a start in her recovery from that one mistake. She will recover. She will graduate soon from an Ivy League school. She will be a great leader in whatever field she enters, rest assured.

And this was a start.