The Sydney 2000 Olympics are generally considered to be one of the best Summer Games of all time, yet they still had their fair share of issues, particularly in the gymnastics venue.
In the latest installment of our year-long look back at the Sydney 2000 Games, Alison explores the numerous debacles during the Olympics’ gymnastics competitions.
Well, gymnastics wasn’t all a mess. Trampoline made its debut as an Olympic sport, and in the men’s competition, Russian Alexei Nemov proved that he wasn’t lazy and distracted.
However, in the women’s competition, things did not go as well—so not well, in fact, that the sport changed forever after these Games.
Alison shares the story of the women’s team competition, which not only had controversial results, but also had issues with the podium results.
Then it got even stranger—and more dangerous—during the all-around competition, in which the vault was set too low, causing most gymnasts to fail miserably and even get injured (thankfully, no life-threatening injuries, although that was in the realm of possibility).
Once Australian Allana Slater noticed what was wrong, it was too late for many gymnasts, including favorite Svetlana Khorkina, to salvage their competition. But that’s only part of the controversies with this competition. Listen to the full episode to learn what else went down in women’s gymnastics at Sydney 2000.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive!
TRANSCRIPT
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382-Sydney 2000: The Debacles of Women’s Gymnastics
Jill Jaracz: Hello and welcome to another history episode of Keep the Flame Alive, the podcast for fans of the Olympics and Paralympics. If you love the games, we are the show for you. I am your host, Jill Jaracz, joined as always by my lovely co host, Alison Brown. Alison, hello, how are you?
Alison Brown: I am so excited for this month’s show.
Jill Jaracz: Oh man, this is our monthly history episode in which we look at back at one particular games all throughout 2025. That games will be Sydney 2000 as it’s the 25th anniversary of those games. when we divvied up everything, you took artistic gymnastics and we didn’t know that there would be, we knew that there were issues.
We did not know how many debacles there were, like, honestly, the number of novellas we would have had.
Alison Brown: Let me put it this way. I could not even include all the epilogues in this story. I’m going to try and throw some in as we’re going along, but it gets wild. Let me just put it that way. I do remember most of this.
So this is why I wanted to dig into it a little bit more. It’s wild and get ready and definitely put some padding down. People get hurt. So we’ll start off with the good parts.
Sydney 2000: Trampoline
Alison Brown: Trampoline made its debut in Sydney. Russia took gold in both the men’s and women’s events. G. Wallace of host Australia took silver in the men’s competition and a name that you may know, Karen Cockburn of Canada took the first of her three. medals.
Sydney 2000: Men’s Artistic Gymnastics
Alison Brown: the artistic competition on the men’s side, thankfully was much quieter than on the women’s side. basically all you need to know is Alexei Nemov as yes, I know when you’re a gymnastics fan, certain names just bring up pictures and this is one of them. He competed in Atlanta. He won six medals.
And then after Atlanta, people started calling him lazy and distracted. He got married. His wife was pregnant at the time. And everyone said, you know, has he lost his edge? Well, guess what? Nemov said, I have not lost my edge. Comes back, wins another six medals, including the men’s all around gold. He had won silver in Atlanta.
He won gold on high bar, bronze on parallel bars and pommel horse. And in the team competition, Russia took bronze. He had not met his newborn son who had been born about a month previous. That’s how dedicated he was. And he. returned to Russia and gave him what he called a golden rattle. That’s the last happy thing I’m probably going to be saying the rest of the show.
Jill Jaracz: You’re kidding. Oh no. No. Yeah.
Sydney 2000: Women’s Artistic Gymnastics
Alison Brown: Cause now let’s move to the women’s artistic competition. Things get a little wild. So, leading into this, it looked like the team event would be a battle between Romania and Russia, who had finished 1 2 at the previous two world championships. Romania had never defeated Russia in the team event. The Chinese and Americans were expected to be competing for a place on the podium. Two of the Magnificent Seven from Atlanta, 1976, uh, 1996, Dominique Dawes and Amy Chow had returned for Sydney, but the Americans had really struggled. after 96, the program had kind of hit that pinnacle and then was trying to re reform itself.
And on the first night in qualification in Sydney, only national champion, Elise Ray had qualified for an event final. Wow. three gymnasts, three, uh, American gymnasts had qualified for the all around, but not the event finals. So that was a little. A little strange going into it and feels very shocking
Jill Jaracz: after 1996 because I do remember like 2000 felt like a big disappointment.
Yes.
Alison Brown: Yes. It gets worse. Caroli is still in the picture at this point. And He was not happy. So we got lots of shots of him being not happy. Thankfully, thankfully, NBC learned its lesson a little bit because I did watch the NBC coverage and we don’t get to see too many shots of Bella Caroli, which was a relief.
Jill Jaracz: who were the, NBC commentators for this?
Alison Brown: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s Al Trotwig and, Tim Daggett and Elfie Schlegel.
Jill Jaracz: Oh, Elfie came back because I know John Tesh was just a lightning rod of really bad lines in 1996. Al Trotwig actually recently passed away. Yes.
Alison Brown: And you do hear the improvement, but Elfie Schlegel is still Elfie Schlegel.
So it’s moderated. So, after the qualifying night, Russia leads by a full point over, Romania, uh, led by Svetlana Horkyta. And if you’re an Olympics fan and a gymnastics fan, you remember this girl. She’s terrifying. She was 5’5 so she’s very tall, big presence on the floor. Her attitude and her diva ness was even bigger.
Every time she looks at the camera, I’m scared, even though it’s 25 years later. I mean, this was, this was one tough cookie. And surprisingly, the Americans were in sixth behind Ukraine and Spain. That is not something you see. And certainly Not something you would have seen then. It’s not like those teams were big then and have fallen off.
Like, Spain, what is happening? I mean, Ukraine at the time still had a lot of that Soviet shit. backlog, so to speak. You know, they still had a lot of, of gymnasts who had been trained under the Soviet system, certainly the coaches. So that wasn’t as big a surprise. They were very successful on the men’s side at this Olympics, but still for the Americans to be sitting in sixth, it was like, Oh, is it 1976 or 1996?
What is going on here? So the finals of the team event are really weird. They did a staggered start. So they started with Spain and Ukraine, then Romania and the U. S. start, and then finally Russia and China. So at first, you have only two teams competing at a time, and then four, and then six. Wow.
Jill Jaracz: If you’re confused, it was very
Alison Brown: confusing to
Jill Jaracz: watch as well.
Did they then all do the same rotation of apparatuses, or did they then start? Like, one starts on vault, and then they introduce the beam, and then they introduce the others. I
Alison Brown: could not tell from looking at the television coverage because it jumps around so much. Oh, great. Who was where. And, again, because I was looking at the final score sheet, I couldn’t tell. I do think they did the same rotation, so everybody can end on floor because floor is big and sexy. Everybody loves the floor. Spain and Ukraine go first and, and on paper, they have the lowest starting scores. And they both made little steps, little mistakes. So it wasn’t a big surprise that by the time they finished, they were looking pretty low.
The U. S. starts big on vault, solid on bars, but both Amy Cho and Elyse Wray had some trouble on the beam. But again, no disasters. They finished on floor exercise with solid routines and pulled ahead of Spain and Ukraine, but they were behind Romania. As expected, Russia begins to struggle very quickly. On the bars, Horkina falls off.
She’s the world champion on bars. That does not happen. That does not happen.
Jill Jaracz: Because also, I mean, like you see some falls off of bars today, but that’s in part because of the tricks that they’re doing are so complicated. But back then everybody was pretty solid.
Alison Brown: I mean, you would see falls on the release moves as always, but it was not the way it is today where people, where the girls are doing three, four releases, they’re doing two, you know, and then a couple of high low transitions, it gets worse.
Zamoldykova fell off the beam on a basic handspring, Ekaterina Lobasnyuk fell off on a jump, like not these long passes, these really simple moves. And it came down to the final scores and the final rotations. So the High starting scores for Russia kept them ahead of China. China was just solid, solid, solid throughout.
And China was ahead of the U S by two tenths of a point.
Romania was so good in the team competition and they finished ahead of Russia. This was the first gold for the Romanian women in a full participation Olympics. They had won the gold in the team event in LA 1988, but the Soviet Union and some other powerful Eastern Bloc teams had boycotted. But that’s not the end of the story.
You think we have a podium? Romania, Russia, China. No, we don’t. In 1997, the International Federation for Gymnastics, the FIG had raised the minimum age of athletes from 15 to 16, and the Chinese team had been plagued for years with accusations of fielding gymnasts well below the minimum age. This would come to a head after Beijing 2008, when it was discovered that three of the Chinese, uh, Chinese women were below the mini MA age.
And as part of that investigation, investigators uncovered evidence that Dong Feng Zhao was only 14 at the time of the Sydney Olympics. Because of that, the Chinese were stripped of their bronze medals and the American women moved up to third. They finally received those medals in 2010. It was the only medal for gymnastics for the Americans, either men or women in Sydney.
That’s how much of a fall off it had been after Atlanta.
Jill Jaracz: Wow.
Sydney 2000: The Women’s All-Around and Vault Controversy
Alison Brown: You think we’re done? We’re just getting started. So now we get to the all around competition for the women, and this is where things. Really go off the rails. The favorite was Russian Svetlana Horkina. She had come into the team competition with a gold or nothing attitude.
So she was crushed by that silver the night before. And as I mentioned before, don’t mess with Svetlana. Watch some of this footage. You will be terrified of her. I promise you. And she wanted nothing but gold in the all around. Now standing in her way is of course, all these Romanians, Elise Ray is the American national champion.
We’ve got a lot of powerhouse women coming into this competition. She starts off Svetlana with a gorgeous routine on floor exercise, but her next rotation on the vault is an absolute disaster. She launched herself into the air, barely competed, completed the twist of her vault, and she lands on her knees.
This is not the kind of thing you saw at the time. Now you see women doing much harder vaults, landing on your knees. You didn’t see in the Olympics. No. She immediately bursts into tears because she knows her dream of the gold is over. Because as the announcers actually said accurately at the time, you needed four clean programs.
You couldn’t have a fall. with the way the scoring system worked and likely recover to win a medal. It’s different now because this is, we’re still in the 10 scoring system. So if you’ve fallen, you’re not going to be on the podium. Except the vault seemed to be killing the dreams of a lot of gymnasts that night.
Elise Ray fell on her back. Britain’s Annika Reid fell so hard that she had to pull out of the competition. Vault after vault, gymnasts crashed, fell on their heads, ran into the horse. As the third rotation warmed up on the vault, and we’ve had all these crashes, and the announcers are confused, the crowd is confused, nobody understands what’s going on.
And here comes 16 year old Alana Slater from Australia, who’s warming up and says to her coach. The horse looks wrong. She does a warm up. She signals her, her coach and says, the horse is too low. Coach looks at it and says, I think you’re right. And they signal the officials.
Turns out the horse had been set at 120 centimeters instead of 125 centimeters. That’s almost two inches, but it’s also the equivalent of one notch on the legs of the horse. Now. You have to go back and watch the videos because the horse itself looks very different now. Now you have that single tube in the middle and that arch table.
In the old days it had two legs and a center piece that was across the middle and you’d set each leg. And it would sort of click into place. They clicked it into the wrong place. You don’t think five centimeters a lot, but the world, it’s, you ain’t kidding. The vaults are timed so precisely that that two inches was literally the difference between completing a world class vault and landing on your head.
18 gymnasts had already competed on the vault at the wrong height. No one had done very well. Officials gave gymnasts the option to redo the vaults. That was their solution. Problem was because gymnasts like Svetlana Horkina had already had these disasters on the fault, it effect, it affected their entire rest of their competition.
Horkina Again, fell off the bars after she had fallen on the vault. She had given up. Other gymnasts had chosen not to do certain difficult moves because they already felt they were out of the competition. So just redoing the vault would not have made a big move in their scores. So even if you got a new vault score, you can’t redo the entire competition.
My gosh, how horrible is that? it was tough and it was tough to watch. I remember watching this at the time going. Yeah, giving them another vault is great, unless you restart the competition entirely. It’s never going to be totally fair.
Jill Jaracz: Right. And you can’t necessarily move it to another day because everything is so tightly scheduled.
And even if you restarted the competition, A, people have gotten injured off of this vault. And. B, their bodies are tired from competing already. So there’s no great fair way to fix this. Would not want to be an official in the room there.
Alison Brown: So then, of course, afterwards, there’s a huge investigation. How did this happen?
And at the time, the investigation really didn’t find an answer as to how this could have happened. But an article from Gymnastics History published in 2022 revealed their investigation and they found an error in the 2000 edition of the Apparatus Norms. The Apparatus Norms is the Bible issued by the FIG every season for how these pieces of equipment are supposed to be set up. The guidelines in that book said 120 centimeters for senior women instead of 125 centimeters. There had been a change made in that quad as to how high the horse was supposed to be set for senior women. And that change of height is why we saw a very rapid increase in the difficulty for women’s vaults.
They tried to call back these books, they tried to issue corrections, but there were still some wrong books floating around. And one had been at the Sydney Olympics.
There was a change in the equipment. There have been additional fail safes. We’ve never seen anything like this before or after.
Jill Jaracz: Right. Because this is what led to the introduction of the vault that we know today. Because didn’t that one get, it took like till 2004.
Alison Brown: It did. Because it changes the whole way you vault because it’s an angled table instead of a straight table.
and it, again, it changed vaulting. For all of gymnastics. So this five centimeters changed the entire sport. Wow. So after all that, Romania swept the podium for the first time in Olympic history, because at the time, a country could have three athletes in the all around now. And because of this, this Romanian sweep the U.
- lobbied heavily to change it to two, which turned around and bit them in the butt this year and put Jordan Chiles in the butt because she finished fourth. But because two other Americans were ahead of her, she did not get to compete in the all around. Wow. and all three of the Romanians had competed on the vault after the effort, the error was discovered.
16 year old Andrea Radican won gold, Simona Aminar won silver, and Maria Olaru took bronze. Guess what I’m about to say? But wait, there’s more? But wait, there’s more! While in Sydney, Andrea had been battling a cold, which, you know, if you’ve ever lived in group Environments like college dorms, a cold will run around like rapid fire.
And her coach had given her two Neurofen tablets to clear her head. Unbeknownst to Andrea, the medicine contained the bad substance called pseudofedrin. Now that’s old school pseudofed. We’ve all taken it. It’s legal. It’s over the counter, but it is a stimulant. So, it is considered, to this day, a bad substance.
So, in her post competition dread test, Radican tested positive and she was stripped of her medal. The Romanian Olympic Committee appealed the decision to the Court of Arbitration of Sport despite the efforts of ROC President Jan Tiriac. Do you remember him? He used to coach Boris Becker. He was a tennis pro.
Oh my gosh! And he looks like Vlad the Impaler. Not even he could convince the IOC otherwise. And a lot of the IOC members wanted to give Radican a pass. Oh yeah, I can imagine. Clearly, she didn’t do this on purpose. Clearly, this was a mistake by her coaches. But Cass said, you got to follow the rules and Radocan’s, loss of her medal stood.
Jill Jaracz: Which is so sad, but you do wonder, okay, if she has a stimulant in her blood, did it affect her performance that day? She says no.
Alison Brown: And in fact, the medicine made her dizzy. Interesting. Which I can believe, because if you’re not used to taking that and your body is so precise. Pseudofedrine can make your heart race.
People have had that reaction, you know, if you ever take Pseudofed, and if you have high blood pressure, you can’t take Pseudofed, or Pseudofedrine, so, and I hate to say it, But there is more. I told you, it is wild how much happens here. As I said, when you live in communal living, germs spread. Guess who else had a cold?
Silver medalist, Simona Aminar. She took the medicine too, but because she weighed 15 pounds more, her body absorbed it. It didn’t show up in the test. So she comes out to the press conference, admits. I also took this medicine, but because the drug test didn’t show it, it didn’t matter. Whoa. Ammonar was upgraded to gold, Aloru was upgraded to silver, and China’s Juan Leo was awarded bronze.
Wow. That is just incredible. I do have a little epilogue that I do want to mention. Radican later became the head of Romanian gymnastics. Right. And unfortunately, she was the head during the most disastrous time in a Romanian gymnastics when they did not make the Olympics as a team. So it didn’t get better for her.
And Simona Aminar is, named, the Aminar is still one of the most, competed vaults that you will hear. So you will hear her name continuously. you heard it in Paris and you’ll hear it again in L. A. Are you tired? Do you need a sudafedrin?
Jill Jaracz: I don’t know. I’m afraid to take one now. I might get banned from doing this podcast.
Alison Brown: You know, I do highly recommend watching some of the footage of the All Around. The NBC coverage is still up on YouTube. I watch the whole thing. God bless Tim Daggett and Alfie Schlegel. They tried to be professional, but their minds were just blown when that vault error, nobody knew what to do. The gymnast didn’t know what to do.
The coaches, the officials, the announcers, it is like nothing you have ever seen in the Olympics before. So if you didn’t see it at the time, if you weren’t around, you have to watch it because I think it is probably, it’s certainly in the top five. of the greatest Olympic controversies in, all of Olympic history.
Jill Jaracz: I cannot imagine being in that room and then dealing with the aftermath of All of that. Is there, is there more? That is it. Oh, okay. Take a deep breath. No, that’s enough. And you know, they’re very lucky that nobody got seriously injured off of that because all the stuff they’re doing is so dangerous.
Even at that time it’s always dangerous when you’re doing flips and twists in the air. So for nobody to Have a life changing or life ending injury off of that is pretty incredible not in a good way But
Alison Brown: it’s incredible and I do want to mention Alana Slater again who the Australian gymnast who really is the hero of this story.
This is a 16 year old kid Australia does not, at the time, and even now, have much of an international standing in women’s gymnastics. And she just said, this doesn’t look right. And trusted herself and her coaches trusted her to, can you imagine being the 16 year old kid in the greatest gymnastic stage and going to the officials and being like, um, Hey, something’s wrong here.
But good for her for speaking out. And what I want to do in the, uh, the newsletter this week is what happened to her. And what happened to Australian gymnastics. So I didn’t get to do it before the show, but I’ll do it in the newsletter where is a lot of Slater hero today.
Jill Jaracz: And you can get our newsletter by signing up at flamealivepod. com. and sign up, there’s a little sign up thing at the bottom of the page. We’re on Substack, our newsletter is on Substack, so you can get it there. It is absolutely free, so signing up is a lot of, signing up is a lot of fun. It is! You get to type in your email, you get to tell me your name, you get our little welcome email that I wrote for you.
Producer Ben just gave me some jazz hands. He said, he happens to be in the room today. Um, no, but, uh. It is a free. I know that substacks are sometimes paid subscriptions. Ours is a completely free one. So you can find us on substack. You can find us at flamealivepod. com and be sure to sign up that comes out once a week and then daily during the games.
Sources
Jill Jaracz: Give some love to some sources because I know you had to do a lot of research for this.
Alison Brown: Well, first of all, I watch so many YouTube videos. The amount of hair glitter at the Sydney 2000 Olympics is worth the watch. But in addition, ESPN, BBC, FIG, Elle Magazine, Gymnastics History, USA Gymnastics, Blind Landing Podcast.
If you really want to get into it, please tune into that. The Guardian on olympics. com.
Jill Jaracz: All right, excellent. Well, it has been another rousing look back at the Sydney 2000 Games. What, just, there’s no amount of sighs that I have for, for that. Not in a good way. I mean, we remember Sydney as such a fantastic Olympics, but this was really a black spot on those games.
Hey, Alexei Nemov. Oh, well, there you go. There you go. Not lazy. Alexei Nemov. All right. That will do it for this episode. Let us know your favorite moments from Sydney 2000.
Get in Touch and Coming Soon
Alison Brown: And we do love hearing from you. You can chat with us and other listeners on our Facebook group, Keep the Flame Alive Podcast. Email us at Flame Live pod@gmail.com.
Our voicemail and text line is always open at 2 0 8 3 5 2 6 3 4 8. That’s 2 0 8. Flame it. And as Jill mentioned, you can find our newsletter on Substack and sign up for that@flamealivepod.com. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.
Jill Jaracz: Next week, book club Claire will return for our first next week book club.
Claire will return for our first book club selection of 2025, which is beyond expectations by Shukla Stani, Sydney Collier. she’s a para equestrian. it’s the memoir of her life through the Rio 2016 Paralympics and all of the amazing, all of the things that she has, she overcame to get to those games, which is pretty incredible.
It is always great to chat with Claire, so you will not want to miss this episode. Thank you so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive.