Torre figured he was sparing Contreras and maybe saving the Yankees, but all Weaver did was perform almost as miserably as Contreras.
On this day, the only thing they could do was perform their jobs, to help a very large nation get into the World Cup.
Both Wieber and Raisman, first and fourth in 2011, accepted theirs so the best Douglas could do was perform as a scored exhibition competitor.
"He was walking downhill and I was walking uphill, and when I saw him, all I could do was perform a nervous army salute," Qi Xin, the student leader, recounted later.
"We wanted to return to that feeling, what we used to do, which was perform at 2 a.m. at Luxx," a defunct club in Williamsburg that was part of the (equally defunct) electroclash scene.
What he had done was perform rigorous quantitative experiments, using standardized instruments and methods, aimed at reproducible results; taken the mean of the result of several experiments; and identified and allowed for sources of error.
