Unlike our resident former gymnast, I was rooting for Shawn Johnson over Nastia Liukin in the women’s all-around, and for the exact opposite reason that Jennifer Sey gave for backing the eventual gold medalist, “a desire to see grace count for something in this sport again.”

Sey has a love-hate relationship with her former sport. For me it’s loathe-loathe, and a vote for Johnson, who wound up winning silver, was a vote for athleticism over all that allegedly balletic but mostly cheesy and cutesy so-called artistry that makes women’s gymnastics — officially “artistic gymnastics” — so loathsome.

Not that Liukin is loathsome. She’s an underdog who came through in clutch situations like a true champion. Don’t get me wrong, here. Yay for Liukin.

But Johnson, with her muscular legs and powerful leaps, looks like an athlete. The first time I saw her bounce — boing! — back into the air upon landing at the end of her first tumbling run on a floor exercise, I got a similar “I’ve seen lots of people do that but the way that person just did it, wow!” feeling I got the first time I saw Bo Jackson run with a football.

Gymnastics aficionado that I am, the first time I saw it was this week.

Still, I decided then and there to root for this corn-fed Iowa kid. If she was going to win, it was going to be because of those assured, powerful, athletic moves, not because of her beautiful lines or the way she interpreted the music or flowed through her routines or whatever.

For all I know, all of that is why she didn’t win. NBC experts Elfi Schlegel and Tim Daggett whined about what they said were the low scores Johnson was getting and the overly generous ones the Chinese gymnasts were posting. I’ll take their word for it, and I’ll also take the word of the judges that Liukin was just a little better than Johnson.

I don’t know, really, and neither do Schlegel and Daggett. Neither do the judges, evidently. They sure spend a lot of time scurrying around and looking at replays and consulting each other on cellphones.

During the Athens Olympics former U.S. heroine Kerri Strug wrote a column for Yahoo Sports in which she all but said that judging in gymnastics is something very like random, and that anyone who gets into gymnastics at a high level not only knows that drill, but by the time she’s reached the Olympics, she’s spent years benefiting from its inequities.

The scoring system has been “reformed” since Strug wrote that. And everyone who believes it’s square and transparent now please signify by flying around the room.

OK, Li Ning, come down from there. Very funny.

But despite the old-school Soviet-graceful Liukin beating the Iowa teenage jock I’ve been idolizing for days now, the gymnastics were a little more watchable than they’d been for me in recent Olympics. There wasn’t nearly as much of that whiff of pedophilia that had become so prominent lately.

A lot of that had to do with Bela Karolyi being banished from the floor to NBC’s studios, a good move for him. Instead of pawing little girls every time they came off the floor, he played the eccentric uncle alongside Bob Costas, excitedly rooting for the American girls and offering analysis in a colorfully incomprehensible accent.

But the other male coaches seemed to be a lot less handsy too. Johnson’s coach, Liang Chow, seemed like a downright normal fellow, treating his charge with adult-like respect. How strange.

Meanwhile the girls as a group, Liukin included, looked healthier and more athletic than in recent Olympics, with the possible exception of the allegedly underage Chinese girls the vicious American coach Martha Karolyi referred to as “little babies.” They mostly looked like they could use a sandwich, a hug and a vacation.

I can’t say I know that Chinese gymnastics failures are sent to work camps, and I can’t say I know what expression a person wears when she knows she’s about to be sent to a work camp, but right before the medal ceremony, bronze medal winner Yang Yilin was wearing an expression that made me wonder if Chinese gymnastics failures are sent to work camps.

Good times, but at long last the track and field competition has started. Friday morning American sprinter Walter Dix lined up for his first heat in the 100 meters wearing what appeared to be evening gloves.

Uh-oh.

The South Korean city of Pyeongchang was awarded the 2018 Winter Olympics on Wednesday after failing in two previous attempts.

Pyeongchang defeated rivals Munich and Annecy, France, in the first round of a secret ballot of the International Olympic Committee.

Needing 48 votes for victory, Pyeongchang received 63 of the 95 votes cast. Munich received 25 and Annecy seven.

The Koreans had lost narrowly in previous bids for the 2010 and 2014 Olympics.

Pyeongchang will be the first city in Asia outside Japan to host the Winter Games. Japan held the games in Sapporo in 1972 and Nagano in 1998.

Olympic gold-medalist Lindsey Vonn has recreated that scene from “Basic Instinct” on the cover of ESPN magazine. And by “that scene” I do mean the one in which Sharon Stone infamously flashed her naughty bits to the world. It’s the magazine’s movie issue — why ESPN has a movie issue, I do not know — and it boasts a bunch of athletes reproducing classic film scenes. The headline accompanying the saucy cover photo is, wait for it, “Back to Basics.” Funny, I thought the magazine’s Body Issue — which came out just a few months ago and features exquisitely athletic naked bodies — was a return to “basics.” But it doesn’t get any more basic, or base, than paying homage to the most famous crotch shot in cinematic history.

London Olympic organizers say a record 5,000 doping tests will be carried out at the 2012 Games.

The local organizing committee has signed a memorandum of understanding with Britain’s anti-doping body and will implement the testing program under the authority of the International Olympic Committee.

London 2012 director of sport Debbie Jevans says the size of the testing program will give a “strong message that drug cheats are not welcome at the London Games.”

UK Anti-Doping will train anti-doping officials and assist them during the event to carry out a 10 percent increase on the 4,500 tests conducted at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

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Canada’s women’s hockey team has scored quite the controversy by daring to celebrate their win against the U.S. on Thursday by sipping beer, guzzling champagne and smoking cigars on the ice. After the fans filtered out of the stadium, the ladies returned to the rink still in uniform with gold medals draped around their necks. They laid on the ice, poured champagne in each other’s mouths and soaked up the Olympic glory. Their revelry hardly would have garnered any attention, except for one minor detail: there was an Associated Press photographer on hand to capture it all on film.