Finally, Paul Hamm relaxed.
He basked Thursday in the glory of the Olympic all-around championship he won late Wednesday, the first such victory by an American man.
With the gold medal hanging around his neck after his comeback win in one of the closest finishes in gymnastics history, Hamm said: “I did not sleep with it. But it was right beside me when I went to bed.”
Hamm watched a replay of his horizontal bar routine, which clinched the championship over Koreans Kim Dae-eun and Yang Tae Young. He won by .012 of a point over Kim.
“When I saw it, it was really how I pictured it,” Hamm said.
He has not viewed the fall on his vault landing, which almost cost him the gold.
“And I don’t know if I want to,” he said.
He will not rest for long, with individual event finals looming next week.
Hamm, who led the U.S. to a silver-medal finish earlier in the week in the team competition, could win four more medals by Monday. He is a finalist in the horizontal bar, floor exercise, pommel horse and parallel bars. Realistically, his best chances of medaling will be on the horizontal bar and floor exercise, he said.
Hamm dismissed accusations by two Romanian gymnasts who implied judges scored him too high on parallel bars and horizontal bar. He earned a 9.837 on both.
“I don’t think the judges were overscoring me,” he said. “They had no reason to want to overscore me. They were just two of the best performances of my life.
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“It’s upsetting for other gymnasts to see me win with a mistake. It makes them feel like you didn’t perform in the way that other Olympic champions had.”
All the expected medal contenders made glaring errors in the final, however, allowing Hamm to recover from his mistake.
After Hamm’s mistake on vault, “everyone was nervous,” said Hamm’s coach, Miles Avery. “I think people got to thinking, `I don’t want to be the next one.’ Everyone knew they were closer to winning that gold, and that affects people very differently.”
Hamm recovered brilliantly. In doing so, he put his sport in the spotlight in the U.S. for the first time in 20 years.
“I’m hoping men’s gymnastics will become more popular,” he said.
Hamm has been known well in a small athletic community that follows gymnastics, but his popularity is about to boom.
“I feel I’ve been a role model in the gymnastics world for a long time,” he said. “I’ve had so many young kids come up to me and tell me how cool they think I am and how much they look up to me.”
He grinned and added: “I’ve always thought I was cool.”