For the first few minutes, Dallas girl Nastia Liukin didn’t even know the score, unable to see anything beyond the “2″ in front of her name.

When she finally did look, she figured she had to be seeing double.

The Olympic all-around champion finished with the same score as China’s He Kexin in Monday night’s uneven bars final, but He got the gold medal and Liukin went home with a silver thanks to gymnastics’ convoluted tie-break system that sent everyone scrambling for the rulebook. Reading hieroglyphics might be easier than explaining why He won.

He’s teammate, Yang Yilin, won the bronze.

He is one of the girls that is in the center of the controversy over whether the Chinese gymnasts are even of age to compete in these games. They are several inches shorter and up to 30 pounds lighter than the girls on all the other teams.

Gymnastics used to give out duplicate medals at the Olympics. In a bit of irony, Liukin’s father, Valeri, got one of his gold medals at the 1988 Olympics after tying teammate Vladimir Artemov on high bar. But the International Olympic Committee told the FIG to stop sharing medals after the Atlanta Games, and a tie-break system was implemented in 1997.

It’s a complicated formula that is based on deductions from the execution mark and involves more math than the SAT. Even Liukin wasn’t quite sure how the tie was broken — and that was after someone explained it to her.

The short answer is that He Kexin had .033 less in deductions when you apply the second tie-break formula.

For the long answer, grab a pencil and some scratch paper.

He and Liukin both finished with 16.725. They had identical 7.7 start values (the measure of a routine’s difficulty) and they each had a 9.025 for execution after the highest and lowest of the six judges’ marks were tossed out.

The execution mark is based on the perfect 10 scale, and the first tie-break takes the average of the four deductions that counted. He and Liukin were still tied after that.

For the second tie-break, the three lowest deductions that counted are averaged. When that was done, He had .933 in deductions and Liukin had .966.

Got that?

Not that Liukin will raise a fuss about it.

Besides, Liukin has the medal that REALLY matters….the all-around gold.

And with four medals, she’s pulled even with her father in the race for family bragging rights. Valeri Liukin won four medals in 1988, two gold and two silver.