Incidentally, I haven't seen the pregame jet fighter flyover mentioned on this list. Sure, that's standard fare for public events and especially big-ticket sports, and since they did it at the Columbine memorial, it's obviously done without any attention to the context whatsoever ... but in light of recent events, it sure seemed a tad incendiary. I thought Bubba took better care of his people.
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But all that aside, the big story of the final shot, and the game, is that Scurry cheated. Or, since this is a team sport, we cheated. The Chinese have been playing the tapes over and over on TV claiming that Scurry moved off her line, and in today's LA Times there is a still photograph that makes it incontestable: it shows her over a yard off her line -- i.e., 3
or four feet *toward the ball* -- when the Chinese shooter was still a yard from the ball. It was a blatant violation of the rules. Furthermore, Scurry admits it. She said "Everybody does it. It's only a
violation when you get caught." And she said she jumped as far forward as she could on the early ones to see how much the ref would give her. Perhaps she suspected that in this context the ref would give her a lot?
The bottom line, however, was that it wasn't the bending of a rule, it was the breaking of a rule. It was probably more a subtle interaction of cynicism and intimitation than an actual plot, but in the end the game was fixed in our favor.