What is it with the Olympics and women's gymnastics? As has always been the way, the competitors enchanted the crowds and cameras on Tuesday night in Sydney, these strange, precocious wraiths with powdered faces and old, old eyes.

It was a traditional battle of nationalities, a showdown between the countries famed for the brutal art, each with six tiny, ephemeral little creatures expressing the national mood through their floor routines and flips and twists on the apparatus.

The Chinese, chirpy and eager. The Romanians, small and doe eyed. The United States, buoyant and sassy after Atlanta 1996. The Russian Federation, proud and imperious.

Gymnastics has softened its image in recent years but there is still something slightly creepy about the needless sequins, the hair glitter and the eye shadow, the paternal coaching figures and the astonishingly slight frames.

The Romanians took gold this time and afterwards they sat obediently on soft chairs on either side of their legendary coach, Octavian Belu. These girls are 16, so their birth certificates read, but here they looked lost, like little kids doing their best to behave at the table in front of visitors.

"Maybe this time God was on our side," smiled Belu, an apparently avuncular figure.

"Victory is great, a happy moment in life - and because 1,000 years from now, I won't be here to see the millennium games - maybe I will come down from the air to see what happens. It was a great moment for Romania but now it is history as well and we must start from zero, back in practice for the next competitions."

Tomorrow is the women's all round individual final, the event that the world really warms to. Because after all the miraculous somersaults and dizzying spirals, after the terrifying speed and drop-dead precision off the bars, after the ridiculously high level of the balance, after everything, what people really crave from this is charm and personality.

People want soap. That is why the floor is the undisputed centre of this massive stage of powder and soft cushions and severe apparatus. On the floor, through the little quirks in the dances, the crowd see humanity, they see something beyond technical, out-of-this-world accomplishment. They see something they can relate to.

So when Simona Amanar, who quits gymnastics with this gold medal, launched into a cheeky floor routine to pan-pipe music, the crowd in the Superdome handclapped along and whooped. It was like The Last Night at the Proms. Pity Simone could not translate her floor-show spontaneity into words.

"This is the last team of my career so it is satisfying to be part of a golden team. It was my duty to help the team win this medal."

The fear is that that word, duty, was terribly apt. Of all the athletes in Sydney right now, these gymnasts must be the hardest to fathom. Their sport is still slightly tainted with the old perception that when they are not out on show for this hour of hard glamour, they are toiling in some bleak old sweatshop, running, twisting, defying the million aches and strains shooting through their tiny frames. Off the floor, away from their art, the girls seem muted. Joy, expression, is a rare commodity.

Except for one girl. Svetlana Khorkina is the self-styled princess of her sport, a natural star, one who might yet leave a lasting print on these games. Not for a long time has gymnastics unearthed a personality so vivid. Television loves her. No matter what rotation she is on, the cameras stick with her. She knows the attention, has come to expect it. Standing at 5 ft 5 in, she towers above the other gymnasts and at 21 is one of the oldest girls left in her sport.

She looks a lot like Charlotte Rampling. Drama follows her. When she had a romance with a fellow gymnast, it had to be Ivan Ivankov, the best in the world. When she decided on a photo shoot, she went with Russian Playboy. When she went to France for the European Championships earlier this year, she had to take three golds.

So here in Sydney she owns the floor. When she slips from the uneven bars, a gasp rips around the stadium. They call her the queen of the bars. Khorkina redeems herself in the very last routines of the night, the floor of course, all the other athletes watching, all cameras on her. It is a compelling performance and even the judges are bowed. But the Russians still fall slightly short and are relegated to silver.

Khorkina faces the world media with her arms around her coach, the browbeaten Leonid Arkaev.

"That is how you saw it," she shoots when someone suggest she looked shocked at her fall. "I was not shocked. Everything was all right, I just keep going."

Because that's the motto in this hard, hard shiny world that keeps its own secrets.