HER squeaky voice, elfin mien and the inevitable “Saturday Night Live” caricature of both ended up stealing some attention from what she’d pulled off, but make no mistake: Kerri Strug was heroic.

Remember those Olympics? Atlanta in 1996? With the United States women’s gymnastics team closing in on a hard-fought gold medal, Strug was told that she needed to vault one last time, even though the legacy of the vault she’d just bungled was a limp and serious pain in her left leg.

So she did. Sprinted toward the apparatus, repeatedly pounding and digging that leg into the gym floor. Shot like a missile through the air, somehow blotting out the certain misery that awaited her plummet back to earth. Nailed a steady, near-perfect landing, by shifting the load of it onto the one good leg. And held off her howl of agony until she’d pantomimed the ecstasy — puffed chest, ear-to-ear smile — that the judges prefer and expect to see.

It remains one of the most unforgettable moments in recent Olympics history. And it belonged not to some lavishly muscled gladiator or long-limbed merman but to an 18-year-old woman who stood just 4-foot-9, weighed under 90 pounds and must have established a world record for grit per volume.