Once every four years, the sport of gymnastics sees a huge increase of interest. After all, each and every night of Olympic gymnastics is broadcast in prime time. Many of the world’s most popular sports, like basketball, soccer and baseball, don’t even come close to that kind of Olympic coverage. Those sports are usually relegated to late night/early morning broadcasts, usually on alternative networks.

After the Olympics, gymnastics amazingly disappears from the radar screen, save for annual tape-delayed broadcasts of the U.S. Nationals and World Championships. Need further proof?

Yahoo has some great interviews with members of the team.  It’s a shame we can’t post them here, but that is no reason not to share them through links.

Raj Bhavsar :  Raj, your journey to become an Olympian is not only quite the story; it also has encompassed your growth to become the best person you can be.  We love your laugh when asked if you’d be going out for the team in 2012.  We assume you were ruefully figuring you’d be typecast into the alternate slot again!  Still, while you ponder your future choices, we suggest that you not omit broadcasting.  You have the best voice on the team and you always look good on camera.

Jonathan Horton :  Jonathan, your determination, joy, and leadership for this team is palpable.  Keep up the good work.  We too see gold in London.

Sasha Artemev :  You needed this Olympic medal experience to infuse you with the true confidence that you really have what it takes.  All in all, this was a great first Olympics for you.  We see this as just the beginning of what you can do.  And to David Durante:  You may not have been on the team at all, but no one was with them more in spirit, and in Sasha’s interview he gives away repeatedly that he couldn’t have done it without your training and keeping both of you in professional focus.

Feel free to add links to other great men’s gymnastics post-Olympic interview videos if you find them.

By Guest Blogger: Logan Christopher of www.lostartofhandbalancing.com

Did you catch the Men’s Gymnastic Rings final the other night? For anyone who has never mounted a pair of rings its hard to comprehend the difficulty of even basic moves.

But when you have, no matter your skill level or lack there of, you’ll have a greater understanding of what these Olympic athletes are going through.

It’s not just one move they do, but to string several

From The Washington Post

Friday, August 22, 2008; 1:00 PM

Washington, D.C.: If you wanted to get more American kids to do gymnastics, and to compete in these events, how would you go about encouraging them to do so? And if we did encourage more competition, should we recruit more Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans and other ethnic group members to enter the competitions?

Justin Spring: Gymnastics is such a tough sport it’s hard to get anyone to stay in it if they don’t want to. If we could make it more popular in the media I think more kids would join. It is such a great sport though because of what qualities it teaches the athletes. I think anyone from any race or ethnic background should be encouraged to try gymnastics. It’s a fantastic sport to help develop coordination and athleticism.

[excerpted from the Washington Post at the above link ]

The traditional American spirit of "get there or die trying" was alive and well in the Olympic high bar silver medal winner.  Jonathan Horton performed a routine he had never done before, a tremendous risk for the venue, the pinnacle of achievement in the sport.  His attitude was as American as poker, as American as a classic movie.  He wanted that medal so badly he probably had its metallic taste on his tongue, and he had to have been prepared to risk losing miserably.

Luckily, Jonathan did not have to eat mat in the finals.  Even in his pre-finals workouts, he stunned his competition into silence in the practice gym as he filled his routine with wild difficulty.  The man who went on to beat Horton for the gold, Zou Kai, even called Horton’s routine "stunning."

The smile on Horton’s face when he finished was more priceless than the medal itself.

Obviously, the biggest stories of the Beijing Games were China’s absolute domination and Yang Wei’s demolition job on the the entire field. China picked up a whopping seven gold medals, leaving all the other teams in the chalk dust.

Team USA, despite all the drama preceding the games, showed respectability and sheer grit, clawing their way to a bronze medal in the Team Finals. Jonathan Horton proved he is a major