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 And Liukin could finally breathe again.
"These are not machines," national team coordinator Martha Karolyi explained after her team overcame two big mistakes on the balance beam that could have cost them the meet. "As much as we strive for perfection, it's still not possible because we're just human people."
That came shining through during a crazy, dramatic, emotional roller-coaster of an ending, filled with tears of joy, anguish and relief.
The Americans finished with 184.4 points, beating defending champion China by .95 for their second world title, and the first they've won on foreign soil. Romania took the bronze after getting shut out of team medals last year for the first time since 1981.
Sacramone's winning floor exercise was as clutch as any pass ever thrown by Peyton Manning or basket made by M.J.
Though in this case, the coup de grace was every bit as much a stage show as an athletic performance.
Sacramone powered through her flip combinations and landed without looking down, knowing she'd stayed inside the lines. And in the corners, there she was, seductively running her hand down her leg and flinging her arms open to the crowd as if to say "I'll be appearing here nightly at 9."
"I told them, 'Everyone makes mistakes, but we still have one more event and it's one of our best events, so we might as well go out there and have fun and show everybody what we've got,'" she said.
The American comeback became necessary when Liukin, a former world champion on beam, couldn't close out what had been shaping up as one of the best routines of her life on the sport's most difficult event.
Could it have been too good? "I guess I just got too excited too early," she said.
The landing of her last flip resulted in an awkward thud. Later, she said she thought her foot slid halfway off the beam. So instead of poising herself for a flip with 2 1/2 twists on the dismount, she settled for a back tuck
-- the kind of thing you'd see at the kid's meet down the street on Saturday mornings.
She scored a 15.175, losing about a point off her usual mark. She rattled the team, and national champion Shawn Johnson followed with an equally costly and unexpected mistake, a fall off the beam that knocked her score down about a point, as well.
That's two misses out of 12 in a meet where scores from every routine count. Last year, two mistakes cost the Americans the gold, leaving them befuddled as they walked out of the gym in Denmark, feeling they were better than the Chinese team that won.
Liukin didn't want to be part of that experience again. Making it more difficult was that she was not slated for the floor exercise, leaving her stuck in the corner and forced to watch
-- well, sort of watch -- as her teammates tried to bail her out.
"Honestly, it's so much harder watching and not being able to compete," she said. "I felt like I was nervous on beam, but when I was watching the girls on the floor, I was more nervous because it was ours to grab and there was nothing I could do about it."
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The Chinese went into the last event leading but made a mistake on floor that brought the Americans right back into contention.
Li Shanshan put way too much power into her last tumbling pass, two piked somersaults. She stumbled backward, toppled onto her backside and ricocheted wildly out of bounds.
"I certainly want to win the gold, and in Beijing also," Chinese coach Lu Shanzhen said of next year's Olympics. "But it's competition. There's only one gold, and you cannot always keep the gold."
About the same time Shanshan was falling, Russian vaulter Ekaterina Kramarenko flew down the runway and put her arms up to ready herself for a roundoff onto the springboard. But she suddenly cut her speed, stayed upright and touched the springboard then stopped.
She received a 0.0 for that unheard-of mistake. The sight of her weeping on the sidelines wasn't as jarring as that of her teammate, Elena Zamolodchikova, heaving with sobs as she stood on the runway to prepare for her now-meaningless vault.
Russia led the meet halfway through, but finished in last place.
The United States finished in first, and Johnson, the national champion, also deserves heaps of credit.
She had to recover from her error on beam to put together a floor routine that would give Sacramone a chance to win it. She came through.
Her floor routine was a perfectly steady, high-flying roam around the mat, her face always gleaming with a smile. She scored a 15.375, and when she strutted off, she stopped to hug Sacramone as if the Americans had already won.
"All the girls were like, 'You can do it, it's fine,'" Sacramone said. "I was like, 'C'mon guys. I'm fine.' I'm like 'OK, I've done this routine so many times.'"
She did it once more with feeling. This time, it resulted in a team gold medal
-- the first in a competition this big since 2003.
Since then, there have been two close-call losses, first to Romania in the Olympics, then to China last year. (The 2005 worlds was not a team competition.)
This victory establishes the United States as the team to beat next year in Beijing.
"We're going into the Olympic Games as world champions," Liukin said. "How much better can you feel?"
[Associated Press;
by Eddie Pells]
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
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