GYMNASTICS: In the gymnastics hall last night, the tinsel-and-powder sport showed signs that for all its youthful smiles, it is ageing badly.

In its glory days, the women's all-round final seemed like the very essence of the Olympics, with its improbable combination of cheap circus glitz and rare athletic achievement.

In front of a half-crowded house in Athens last night, a shadow version of the old East versus West story was played out in undeniably dramatic style. America won - on Carly Patterson's routine that literally came down to the last dance - but the night still belong to Svetlana Khorkina, the sport's last true star.

At the scandalous age of 25, the Russian has been hanging around the elite world of women's gymnastics for, it seems, as long as Dot Cotton has been preaching the truth on Albert Square. In what was surely her third and final Olympic games, Khorkina sought her first all-round gold medal. Her name lit first place on the leaderboard until the evening's denouement, Patterson's dance, a routine full of muscular confidence and the jazz of her native Louisiana, absolutely lacking in both charm and mistakes. Khorkina's name lit the leaderboard all evening until the judges scored the American's floor routine 9.711. She took gold from the Russian by just .176.

The drama made up for an attendance that would have been inconceivable back in the days when it appeared that countries went into national debt to produce medal-winning pixies. Last night's great battle - and ode to the sport really - perfectly captured why it has ceased to matter since then.

Khorkina was almost a decade older than her rival last night. Her height - 5'7" - is virtually unheard of in artistic gymnastics and her demeanour - glacial, frowning and melodramatic - in complete contrast to her shorter, sequined opponents who try to ingratiate themselves with their public with every movement and utterance.

Raised in Belgorod, a name that even sounds like a cold wind, Khorkina is old enough to remember the lean days of the old regime and when gymnastics was a ticket not necessarily to a better life but to something less grim.

And wasn't it so that in the days of Communism, we in the West watched the floor routines from the Eastern waifs as though all the gaiety and fun of those countries had been locked into the choreography and brilliance of those floor routines?

Wasn't it so that part of the appeal was imagining the put-upon citizens of the Eastern Bloc achieving through these Olympic gymnastic nights in cities they would never see, a kind of liberation?

When those days ended, so too did gymnastics' ability to make a statement, as it did through Nadia Comaneci all those years ago. Maybe the 1970s was so gaudy a decade that that inimitable night in sport was a perfect marriage of time, place and form.

But ever since then, gymnastics has been lapsing into its own time-locked sense of fashion. Swimming has replaced it on the Olympic calendar as the banner event of the opening week, where the nationalism is no longer reflective of the old cold war sensibilities.

Most of the old shamans that produced so many tumbling and dancing champions in the former communist state are now wizards for hire around the globe, like Yevgeny Marchenko, who masterminded Carly Patterson's routine last night.

From the first rotation, it was clear the night would belong to the American kid, whose red, shiny leotard reflected from the welts on her hands and the cuts on her wrists from a thousand burns on the mat. She is brave and impossibly young. An old press man whose belly suggested his tumbling days are long behind him came up from the corridors where the young gymnasts poured out their hearts last night and quoted the Patterson's coaches: "She's wonderful. She's worked her old life for this."

"Jeez," he spat. She's SIXTEEN!"

A kid true, but still maybe past her sell-by date come Beijing in four years time. Khorkina has lasted this long in a fast and fickle sport because of her incomparable hauteur and because she is the last in a long line of Eastern icons. She will surely bow out after this and if that is the case, then she probably left the scene as she would have wished.

Her grace note was her performance on the uneven bars, the one event that truly suits her height and feline nature. A 9.725 after she landed to the loudest cheer of the night pushed her into the lead but she sulked her way through the restrictive beam, pouting at the judges' recognition of her mistake before finally coming alive again for the floor routine, sparkling as her public clapped along.

Then came Patterson's thunderous finale, a demonstration of tidy power and athleticism and Khorkina, ever the ham, nodded in resignation as the American made a perfect descent after executing her final move on the mat. There were tears and waves as the gymnasts trooped away from the bright lights of the Olympics. Khorkina lapped up the attention in the epilogue, when the old reliables, the flags of China, America and what was once the Soviet Union climbed high into the evening.

Afterwards, she confirmed that that had been her last night at the proms. When asked what the difference between her and Patterson had been, she could not resist stoking up the old enmity that informed her childhood.

"Probably none. Except my opponent is American and I am a Russian." And then she made a raspberry into the microphone, which the American media spent hours trying to translate. It was her last laugh. Old Ronnie Reagan would be spinning.