OLYMPICS: The Games: Up in the Air

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Whether or not it is the daily regimen of five hours' classroom study and three to four hours' gymnastics training that has made her so, Comaneci is an extraordinarily somber child. Although she struts about and fidgets on the sidelines during competitions as if she were trying to release an inexhaustible flow of energy, she is almost eerily still outside the arena. While waiting to take her daily medical checkup one morning, she watched Olympic swimming heats on TV, her dark, unblinking eyes fixed on the action, her pale face expressionless, her hands folded decorously in her lap and her body perfectly still. The same, somewhat unsettling demeanor marked her press conferences. At times she would walk about clutching tight to a large doll. Asked how she felt about becoming the focus of world adulation, she deadpanned: "It's nothing special. I feel just the same as before." Did she ever think she might not win a gold medal? "No, I knew that I would win." Deadpan too was the way the press in Rumania handled her conquests; the achievements of the team as a whole were extolled, instead of Comaneci's.

At the end of each flawless performance, Comaneci would flash an automatic smile across her face as if it were an electronic scoreboard and prance briefly around the platform. But the show of enthusiasm almost seemed rehearsed, and she would subside immediately into the deep reaches of her concentration and composure. The smile and quick little dance steps about the floor were the only concession she made to the audience's clear desire that she refashion herself in the image of that ponytailed starlet of the 1972 Olympics, Russia's Olga Korbut. She is not an Olga.

Neither, any more, is Korbut. Now 21, Olga provided the Montreal Games with a haunting figure that may be remembered as vividly as the little girl who won two individual gold medals and one silver at the '72 Olympics in Munich. Her hair unkempt, the red bows on her two pony tails askew, her face at moments haggard beyond middle age, she displayed an overwhelming desire for victory while faced with certain defeat. She ignored Comaneci, refused to watch her rival perform. At one point Korbut burst into tears, at another ostentatiously iced an ailing ankle ("Every athlete always has something that hurts. If you don't, that's when you should start to worry"). When the stadium rocked with applause after Comaneci received her fourth 10 during the all-around individual competition, Olga slowly but pointedly walked halfway around the Forum to the water fountain. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes bungling (one night she even fell off the balance beam), Korbut still held the crowd. And when her last exercise of the Olympics ended (a sparkling 9.90 on the beam that earned her a silver to add to her team gold), the farewell applause dinned for minutes. "I gave all I had," she said later.

Gone, too, for good was the Soviets' mistress of gymnastic elegance, Turishcheva, impeccable as ever and rewarded for it with four medals: one team gold, two silver, one bronze.