No tomorrow for rhythmic gymnasts
Tomorrow died for Britain's rhythmic gymnasts on Tuesday.
A group of seven teenage girls who, with their parents' help, funded their own bid for Olympic glory, fell a minuscule fraction short of the standard required to reach London 2012 - by the sum of 0.273 marks.
If that sounds small, it is. The margin between the greatest success they could have imagined, reaching their home Olympic Games, and the horror of failure after all that time and money, could scarcely have been smaller.
Everybody cried. The girls, some of them lying prostrate on the floor in tears, hid behind a gigantic black curtain away from the crowd and media.