ATHENS, Greece - There’s at least one sore loser at every Olympics, and I don’t know where we’d be without them. After a while, the standard yard-wide smiles of the winners and choked-back tears of the losers become numbing in their predictability.

That’s when you find yourself actually grateful that people like United States swimmer Gary Hall Jr. and Russian gymnast Svetlana Khorkina are around to dilute the saccharine overload with a healthy dose of bile. And, while they’re at it, remind us why we admire people who know how to lose with dignity.

They are divas of their respective arenas, Hall in the pool and Khorkina in the gymnastics hall. Like every athlete here, they hate losing. The difference is that, unlike almost everyone else, they don’t cry when life doesn’t go the way they had it scripted. They call a press conference to tell the world how they were cheated.

Along with Hall and Khorkina, there is the South Korean men's gymnastic team.

Both of their medal hopefulls in the men's all-around competition, Kim Dae-eun and Yang Tae-young, blew their chances at the individual all-around gold medal by making mistakes on the high bar and parallel bars giving Paul Hamm the chance he needed to sneak back into the gold medal position.

With two perfect routines on the parallel bars and the high bar, Paul became the first U.S. men's gymnast ever to win the individual all-around competition at the Olympics. With this protest, the South Korean's are mitigating the significance of Paul's accomplishment by making it seem as though he really didn't win the gold medal.

Add this team to your poor-sports list along with Gary Hall and Svetlana Khorkina.

If you cover sports long enough, you learn that, other than in boxing, cases in which athletes actually are jobbed is rare. In sports, as in life, you make your own luck.

And if you get passed over for something you think should be yours, it’s usually because the person replacing you is better.

You can’t expect athletes to understand or accept that. You don’t even want them to. To win, you have to think you’re the best; you have to burn with the desire to be in the game and seethe with anger when you’re not.

But you’re not supposed to show it. It shows no respect for those who make difficult decisions, and, more than that, an insult to the people who either replace you on a team or win the event.

Hall is a great swimmer who was once the best short freestyle sprinter in the sport. He’s 29 years old, an athlete who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes five years ago, a three-time Olympian whose father also swam in three Olympics.

Born with an inability to keep from giving voice to every thought that pops into his head, Hall has been over the years a journalist’s dream, always ready with a controversial quote, and, for the same reason, a coach’s nightmare.

Four years ago in Sydney, he stoked Australia’s swim team by predicting the American 400-meter freestyle relay team would “smash Australia like a guitar.” For the first time in history, the Americans lost that race, and the jubilant Aussies played air guitar on the pool apron.

Hall later won the 50-free in Australia in a dead heat finish with teammate Anthony Ervin, one of eight medals he had won in Olympic competition coming into Athens.

The record for total medals in swimming is 11, which Mark Spitz, Jenny Thompson and Matt Biondi. Hall wants it, and he hoped to do it by swimming in two relays — the 400 freestyle and the 400-meter medley — and in the 50 free. But team coach Eddie Reese replaced in the first race with Michael Phelps, who was going after a record of his own — eight golds. The Americans finished third, and not even Hall would have gotten the gold.

Hall complained bitterly and publicly, insulting Phelps in the process by implying that he didn’t belong in the race. Hall didn’t even show up to support the team at the race. A week later, Reese told Hall he won’t be in the medley relay, either. Again, Hall criticized his coach.

It’s not entirely about medals. Hall swam in the qualifying rounds of the first relay and got a bronze — his ninth medal — for his contribution. As for the medley, Hall didn’t qualify for the 100 free at the U.S. swimming trials. There are two faster sprinters than him on the team, and only one can swim the freestyle leg of the race.

“What happened a year ago or four years ago doesn’t matter,” said Reese in explaining that he made his decision not to make Hall or Phelps happy, but to try to give the team the best chance to win.

That should be the end of it, and usually it is. But thanks to Hall, we got two more rounds of stories and columns out of it. We also got a new poster-child bad sportsmanship.

Then there’s Khorkina, next to whom Hall is a rank amateur, a mere dabbler in finger paint attempting to imitate Georgia O’Keefe.

The unnaturally tall — which is to say almost as tall as a normal woman — and reed-thin Russian has been for eight years the diva of the gym. But, despite three world all-around championships, she’s never won the Olympic all-around medal. Both in Atlanta and in Sydney, she crashed on her best apparatus, the uneven bars, losing too much ground to make up in the other disciplines.

This year, at the age of 25 and in her last Olympic competition, she was determined to rectify that situation. But she ran into a 16-year-old single-minded dynamo named Carly Patterson, who trailed Khorkina going into the final two events — the balance beam and the floor exercise — and dominated both of those events.

Everyone in the building knew Patterson won. Everyone, that is, but Khorkina. In the formal interview afterwards, she pouted, seemed ready to cry at times, glared defiantly at others, and dripped sarcasm and venom in her every utterance.

“I am Olympic champion,” she said. And that was just the preamble. Asked to elaborate, she said, “Anyone who wins a gold medal in the Olympics is an Olympic champion.”

She implied that the judges jobbed her in scoring her floor routine. Her mistakes there, she sneered, “was a minor mistake. It was barely noticeable.”

Patterson sat next to Khorkina, dumbfounded that another competitor was essentially saying that Patterson didn’t deserve to win. The American champion finally left the press conference early, abandoning Khorkina to her hissy fit.

Khorkina may not have gone gold in the all-around, but she’s locked up gold, platinum and plutonium in bitching. And forever after, when we encounter another bad loser, she’ll be the standard against whom that person is compared.

I don’t applaud Khorkina for that any more than I congratulate Hall, but I thank both for being such self-absorbed jerks. Without the likes of them, we could forget why we should always admire those who can suffer misfortune with grace and dignity.

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