The height of the balance beam in Olympic competition is 125cm, but Alicia Sacramone must feel like she fell from the top of a Beijing high-rise.

To understand the import of those 125cm, we need to appreciate the significance of women’s gymnastics team event, the fact that it has been portrayed as the ultimate head-to-head, the definitive USA-China collision, that NBC, the American broadcaster, had insisted on shifting the Games schedule so over 30 million at home could watch it, or that the “Indianapolis Star”, using language not uncommon to this event, described it as “a clash of superpowers not seen since the demise of the Soviet Union.”

Or get this from the writer from Sports Illustrated: “The showdown is upon us. It's showtime. With all due respect to the 100-meter dash and Michael Phelps, here comes the marquee event of these Beijing Games.”

And so the event came with baggage too. Even before anyone arrived here, American media investigations had accused China of fielding three athletes below the 16-year-old minimum age threshold. And then when we got here, Bela Karolyi, the former US head coach, reheated the issue by claiming that China “are using half-people” and that their flouting of the regulations was so obvious that “these people think we are stupid.”

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Indeed, so highly charged was the event that the aftermath was mired in finger-pointing inquests and accusations of foul play. None of which will have made it any better for Sacramone, the team captain and an apparently sunny 20-year-old from Winchester, Massachusetts who has to live with the fact that it was she who blew it.

Sacramone blew it not once but twice and she could not have found a more public place to do so. Her team were already playing catch-up before they got to the third of four disciplines, the beam, when she was first up. She was first down, too, because it was on mounting the beam that she lost balance and fell. She then completed the routine, executed her dismount and was forced to endure her disappointment with a TV camera about 12 inches from her nose waiting for her to cry.

She did not cry because she had to straighten out her head and prepare for the floor exercise. However, first up again, she failed to land her second tumble and fell back, literally, onto her backside. A second TV camera was then assigned to her, in search of the inevitable emotional breakdown (tear count: minimal), occasionally panning to her team-mates who would hug her in a way you might do when attending a friend’s relative’s funeral.

“She kept telling us that she was sorry,” Nastia Liukin, her team-mate said afterwards. “It was a little bit hard because she’s the one who usually keeps us up.”

But that, in short, is how America lost the battle of the super powers: an American silver behind China’s gold, two strong teams and one single girl saddled with the crushing disappointment that comes when you are exposed so publicly in pursuit of a collective dream. There were six other teams out there and the Romanians won a bronze but were irrelevant to the dramatic narrative which was by no means complete.

Within minutes of the medal ceremony, Martha Karolyi, the American head coach (wife of Bela), was suggesting that Sacramone had been the victim of foul play. The order and timing for each competitor, Karolyi explained, is minutely regimented but after Sacramone’s name had been announced for the beam, she was then twice forced to wait.

“It’s a psychological war,” Karolyi said, adding that the organisers had “bounced her out.”

Was this a concerted attempt to psyche out her girl? “I think so,” she replied, before correcting herself by saying: “No. I have no way to know.” But then she immediately acknowledged that, between beam and floor, she had said to Sacramone: “They tried to break your focus and you let them do that.”

“It seemed it took forever, like five minutes,” Sacramone said, holding her head impressively high as the inquest raged around her.

But there was plenty more. There was further venting on the age-regulation issue which was hardly helped by the fact that the three questionable Chinese girls - who Martha Karolyi calls “the little babies” - were the same three whose performance on the asymmetric bars had built the Chinese their initial lead.

The Americans can clearly not reconcile themselves with the fact that the International Gymnastics Federation’s inquiry into the issue consisted of asking the Chinese for the relevant documents and then accepting them as bona fide. Were they 16? “I have no proof on age,” Martha Karolyi said. “So I cannot say they are.”

The final punch was then thrown in the press conference when He Kexin, whose documents say she turned 16 on New Year’s Day, was asked how she celebrated her 15th birthday. Her answer was that she spent it with her team, but the implication that she had not yet celebrated her 16th could hardly have been clearer.

“It’s an honour to win silver,” Sacramone said afterwards. Not that others seemed remotely to concur.