The Russian gymnastics squad, after choking on both the men's and the women's team events, managed to salvage some dignity Wednesday when the star of the men's team, Alexei Nemov (incessantly referred to as "Sexy Alexei"), won gold in the all-around. Russian gymnasts have a tendency to be promoted as sex symbols. They don't aim for the automatonlike efficiency of the gold-medal-winning Chinese men, the church-mouse austerity of the Romanian women and certainly not the wholesome cheerleader style of the Americans. No, they want us to believe that they're little artists, and the cameras give their ridiculously chiseled physiques a grandeur that allows viewers to forget that most of the Russian men are probably 5-foot-5, tops.

Nemov, who narrowly lost the all-around in both the Atlanta Games and in the 1999 World Championships, has worked his image nearly as well as his divalike contemporary on the women's side, Svetlana Khorkina (more about her Thursday). His flirty antics have launched a thousand fan sites that detail his every move ("Alexei chalking up his hands") and emotion ("Alexei looking upset"). And he has done his part ("Alexei taking his shirt off!") to keep the tongues wagging ("Alexei with no shirt!") over and over ("No shirt again"). Now already a huge star in Russia, he will have an even bigger international fan base, which will finally enable him, on the lucrative exhibition tours sure to follow, to share with an even wider audience his art ("Alexei with no shirt doing a handstand").

Thompson wins seventh gold, Aussie star falls
Jenny Thompson anchored the 4-by-200-meter relay race, winning a record seventh career gold medal (all in relays), while in possibly the biggest surprise in the swimming events so far, Misty Hyman, a 21-year-old American, won the 200-meter butterfly, stunning Australian world-record holder and defending Olympic champion Susie O'Neill. In May, O'Neill broke the oldest record in swimming when she lowered American Mary Meagher's 19-year-old world record in the event. Wednesday, she took home silver.

Meanwhile, Dutchman Pieter van den Hoogenband won gold in the 100-meter freestyle in 48.30 seconds, beating the two-time defending champion, Russian Alexander Popov. Van den Hoogenband had shocked another world-record-holding Aussie sensation, Ian Thorpe, in the 200-meter freestyle last weekend. American Gary Hall Jr., of Phoenix, took bronze in 48.73, beating Australian Michael Klim -- who had taunted him by playing air guitar during the Australians' victory in the 4-by-100-meter relay -- by .01 seconds.

Why wait for NBC to exploit you?
Hall had stirred up his Aussie opponents when he foolishly wrote in a Sports Illustrated online diary that the U.S. relay team would "smash the Australians like guitars." Now, since Hall's too busy winning medals, his girlfriend, Elizabeth Peterson, is writing on his behalf. She should stop. Hall, she writes, was at peace after the Americans' loss to the Australians. That's because, she says, he has had a rough time of it. After Hall was suspended from swimming after testing positive for marijuana use, and then later was diagnosed with diabetes, Hall "was terribly depressed," she writes. Then she recounts a trip the two took to Costa Rica, when "he told me that he didn't plan to return, that he was going make this a beautiful two-month trip, a goodbye trip, that he planned to take his life." She writes: "For the first three weeks, we went to the beach each day and he would go out to swim and would swim and swim and swim out so far that I would lose sight of him. I curled with our little dog, Tiki, on the beach and cried. I didn't know if Gary was going to swim back."

Bulgarian weightlifter stripped of his medal
A Bulgarian weightlifter was stripped of his silver medal, while a hammer thrower from Belarus was booted in the first positive doping cases of the Games. The International Olympic Committee said Wednesday that it had taken away the silver in the 123-pound weightlifting class from Ivan Ivanov, who tested positive for furosemide, a diuretic. Ivanov was a 1992 gold medalist and a four-time world champion. Vadim Devyatovsky, the hammer thrower, tested positive for the banned steroid nandrolone. They are the first athletes banned because of tests conducted during the Games. Several others were banned after pre-Games testing.

Yawn
The U.S. women's basketball "Dream Team" came back to defeat Russia 88-77.

Track just a day away
If you find yourself growing tired of the swimming events, track and field begins Friday. For a quick primer on who's hot and who's not, Sports Illustrated's Tim Layden gives the word on headliners like Marion Jones, Maurice Greene, Adam Nelson and mysterious French sprinter Marie-Josi Perec, the Garbo of track, who has raced just once since winning both the 200-meter and the 400-meter finals in Atlanta, and has been cast by Australian tabloids as the evil nemesis to homegrown torchbearer and Aboriginal heroine Cathy Freeman.

Medal tally

1. United States 10 (gold) 7 (silver) 6 (bronze) 23 (total)

2. Australia 7 8 7 22

3. China 6 4 7 17

4. France 6 7 3 16

5. Russia 3 7 6 16

6. Italy 4 2 6 12

7. Germany 3 4 4 11

8. Korea 2 4 5 11

9. Britain 2 5 2 9

10. Netherlands 5 1 2 8

11. Ukraine 2 3 3 8

12. Japan 3 3 1 7

13. Bulgaria 3 1 1 5

14. Cuba 2 1 2 5

15. Slovakia 1 3 1 5

16. Romania 2 1 1 4

17. Switzerland 1 2 1 4

18. Czech Republic 1 0 3 4

19. Belarus 0 1 3 4

20. Spain 2 0 1 3

21. Brazil 0 2 1 3

22. Turkey 2 0 0 2

23. Poland 1 1 0 2

24. Hungary 1 1 0 2

25. Sweden 1 0 1 2

26. Canada 1 0 1 2

27. South Africa 0 1 1 2

28. North Korea 0 1 1 2

29. Greece 0 1 1 2

30. Taiwan 0 1 1 2

31. Indonesia 0 0 2 2

32. Belgium 0 0 2 2

33. Costa Rica 0 0 2 2

34. Lithuania 1 0 0 1

35. Colombia 1 0 0 1

36. Croatia 1 0 0 1

37. Mexico 1 0 0 1

38. Nigeria 0 1 0 1

39. Yugoslavia 0 1 0 1

40. Uruguay 0 1 0 1

41. India 0 0 1 1

42. Georgia 0 0 1 1

43. Estonia 0 0 1 1

44. Latvia 0 0 1 1

45. Portugal 0 0 1 1

46. Kuwait 0 0 1 1

47. Kyrgyzstan 0 0 1 1

48. Thailand 0 0 1 1