A slip ... a stumble ... a rebound ... a gold medal

ATHENS, Greece - You watched as Paul Hamm soared and spun through the air and, in a blink, headed for a landing Wednesday at Olympic Indoor Hall. Something wasn't right. Even as he catapulted from the vault, a rookie observer could sense trouble. He hit the soft runway and stumbled to his right, lost his balance, and slipped from the landing mat to an area that any golfer would regard as out-of-bounds. Oh, no.

There goes Hamm's Olympics gold medal. A guy trains all his life for one moment and in one crazy instant it smashes to pieces like that family heirloom you just dropped on the slate floor.

Here's what went through one observer's mind as Hamm, the top gymnast for the U.S. men's team, the reigning world champion, the gold-medal favorite in the all-around competition, was hit with a clumsy 9.162 score after he blew what is regarded as the easiest of the six individual gymnastics events (floor exercises, pommel horse, rings, vault, parallel bars, horizontal bar):

I thought about that old "Wide World of Sports" cut, the "agony of defeat" snippet where a ski-jumper doesn't quite get his landing gear down and plows snow for what seems like a quarter-mile as he goes into the most awful, contorted skid.

Wednesday's mishap wasn't as gory but it was certainly more costly. Hamm was in first place halfway through the six events. He had the tough floor exercises out of the way (score: 9.725). He made it off the pommel horse, another sweat-soaked challenge for men gymnasts (9.700). He got through the rings (9.587).

He was cruising. Vault, parallel bars, horizontal bars (his specialty) to go. If Hamm couldn't yet feel the gold medallion swinging, everyone else savvy to this competition and to its three remaining events figured Hamm as a lock.

Then came a silly accident. It was vintage 1984 Olympics, when Zola Budd accidentally tripped Mary Decker Slaney on her way to what would have probably been a shiny medal in a distance race.

Hamm's teammate, Guard Young, talked in the arena's tunnel afterward about a moment that made Wednesday's noisy crowd gasp.

"When it happened, I thought the meet was over," Young said of Hamm's spill, which looked like a car going off the road.

Hamm's standings position dropped like the Dow Jones Average on news that OPEC just jacked oil prices. He went from first to 12th - too far to make up ground against great gymnasts when only two events remained.

The expression on Hamm's face was the look of a man who had just lost his job and his wife to another man - on the same day. Desolate. Disbelieving.

Hamm promptly decided any medal was better than none, even if there would, forever, be this haunting feeling that he had blown gold.

He jumped on the parallel bars like a cowboy climbs onto a rodeo bull. Score: 9.837 - a blow-away number from judges who only gave three 9.8s the entire evening.

Now he had a chance. Probably not for gold, but along with the floor exercise, the horizontal bar is Hamm's baby, which at least could tease him into thinking a bronze, maybe silver, was in range.

There was another reason he could dream: He and his coach, Ron Gallimore, the U.S. men's team coordinator, had scripted a high-bar routine for just such a situation.

"He could relax because he knew he could nail it," Gallimore said later. "That routine was built to win a championship."

Hamm flew around the bar in one crowd-pleasing revolution after another, releasing cleanly, then launching himself high into the night as part of a clinching grand finale: twists and flips that ended in a dazzling finish, both feet planting gracefully. The scores: another 9.837.

He won the gold by 12 one-hundredths of a point.

Was it fixed? The Romanians seemed to think so.

"The only thing I can say is that the USA got something more than it deserved," said Ioan Suciu, who finished fourth.

Conspiracy notions weren't flying Wednesday. The high-bar judges - from Australia, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Algeria, China and Germany - were consistent on Hamm's scores as they had been in giving the Romanians and others their due.

The Olympics has had its political moments, but not Wednesday night.

Watch replays of Hamm's wipeout on the vault, and the sickeningly low score that followed, and you realize he didn't get any breaks in winning his gold medal Wednesday.

At least none that a U.S. athlete didn't make for himself as he shoved aside a bad moment and instead grabbed onto a nice chunk of Olympic lore.