U.S. sets focus to all-around

BEIJING – Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin have moved on to the next big thing already.

They are the co-favorites for the Olympic gymnastics all-around gold medal, a competition that happens Friday at National Indoor Stadium.

Johnson and Liukin politely insisted that winning a team silver medal on Wednesday was fine, even if the U.S. had come into competition as favorites after defeating China at the 2007 world championships.

But glamour girls are made, after all, from the individual events.

Olga Korbut, Nadia Comaneci, Mary Lou Retton, Shannon Miller, Svetlana Khorkina, they’re remembered for signature individual moments and medals. So that’s the aim of Johnson, 16, and Liukin, 18.

The Americans qualified first and second for the all-around. They have been diplomatically friendly all season while they’ve been teammates. That’s over now and if the team result wasn’t what they’d hoped for (China won), the competition is far from over.

But as the Chinese team celebrated its first Olympic team gold medal and was enveloped in an arena-embrace, another American, Alicia Sacramone, couldn’t wipe away her tears and paint on a smile as quickly Johnson and Liukin.

Sacramone, 20, who fell twice and stepped out of bounds once on her final two routines in the team competition, has one more event left, the vault final Sunday.

A medal would be fine and Sacramone will smile again, but while Johnson and Liukin were able to immediately put away the team performance, Sacramone couldn’t.

Her teary eyes are being offered as photographic evidence on message boards and Internet sites that Sacramone was the one to blame for U.S. winning silver instead of gold.

Swimming

After winning five gold medals and setting five world records over the course of four days, Michael Phelps got a bit of a respite today at the Beijing Games. He merely had the semifinals of the 200-meter individual medley in the morning, followed by the preliminaries of the 100 butterfly in the evening.

By Phelps’ standards, a rather light day.

Just look what he did Wednesday: In the span of an hour, he set a world record in the 200 butterfly and then came back to lead the first 800 freestyle relay to crack the 7-minute barrier.

These are the finals Phelps has left:

• Friday, 200 individual medley: Teammate Ryan Lochte makes this a potential stumbling block.

• Saturday, 100 butterfly: American Ian Crocker holds the world record, but he set that mark three long years ago.

•Sunday, 400 medley relay: The U.S. has never lost this event at the Olympics, the only blip coming in 1980 when the Americans boycotted.