Ron Judd / Times staff columnist
Patterson rallies for gold

DEAN RUTZ / THE SEATTLE TIMES U.S. coach Evgeny Marchenko holds up Carly Patterson after Patterson won the women's gymnastics all-around gold medal last night.

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

ATHENS — In the time it took Carly Patterson to walk 50 feet across the floor, the Games that still lack soul suddenly got a heartbeat.

It wasn't over, and the gold wasn't yet hers. But just the way she walked between the just-completed balance beam and the final showdown, the floor exercise, lit a spark — finally — in an Athens Olympics crowd.

Patterson had the bounce, the gait, the smile, the steely look of a young woman who couldn't wait to star in a famous final scene.

She looked at her coach and nodded affirmatively. She looked at the crowd and grinned. She looked at the floor and concentrated.

She looked like a girl who should be a lot more than 16 years old to face this much pressure with this much aplomb.

Leading, by a smidgen, over defending world champion Svetlana Khorkina of Russia, Patterson went last in the floor exercise, one of her specialties. She watched her competitors, one by one, shuffle through routines that were solid, but not special.

	DEAN RUTZ / THE SEATTLE TIMES Carly Patterson rotates off the vault during the women's all-around competition. Her vault score put her in eighth place, but she rallied to win gold.

Then she took the floor and stole the show.

Patterson's four runs across the floor would be described by her later in technical lingo: full-out, double Arabian, two-and-a-half layout, double pike.

Laymen's terms: Charm, grace, spark, life.

It wasn't perfect. It didn't need to be.

Patterson rocked the crowd and earned a 9.712, highest floor score of the night. Before it was ever announced, everybody knew who would be atop the medal stand as the women's all-around champion.

She leaped into the arms of her coach, Evgeny Marchenko, who carried her halfway across the floor, saying a lot of words they will both forget, and two they will always remember: "Olympic champion."

Khorkina, at 25 already feeling herself fading into the gymnastic sunset, looked to the floor and forced a smile — one of the few attempts at even feigned emotion arising all night from the woman who, let's face it, looks horribly in need of big slab of souvlaki.

The departing champ was swept fully off the stage last night by Patterson, who made the second major American gymnastics comeback in as many nights at the Athens Games.

Stars of the Day Aaron Peirsol: Two backstrokes, two golds, after a bit of controversy. Michael Phelps: Another day, another gold medal. Carly Patterson: She and men's all-around winner Paul Hamm put U.S. atop gymnastics heap.

Like Paul Hamm before her, Patterson faltered — granted, not nearly as spectacularly as Hamm, who fell into the judges' table after a vault. During her first exercise, the vault, she landed outside the line for a mandatory two-tenths deduction. Her score, 9.375, put her in eighth place.

She got her bounce back on the bars, then hit the balance beam — her nemesis at last month's Olympic trials — first in her group. A moment later, when she planted her feet on the mat with a picture-perfect landing, the contest was over.

Patterson, her coaches say, doesn't wilt when the camera lights come on and the crowd starts buzzing. It fuels her. When she walked away from that beam, she was wearing what is bound to become a trademark, game-over sly smile.

	AMY SANCETTA / AP Russia's Svetlana Khorkina holds her pose at the finish of her floor exercise last night. Khorkina, the defending world champion, took silver.

"It had to make them nervous," women's coach Kelli Hill said of competitors Khorkina and Zhang Nan of China, who took the bronze.

The truth: Khorkina never looked nervous. She looked finished, summoning up the strength, the moves, the pixie smile and the gymnast's lilt one final time for the fans, her country and those pesky judges before she could say goodbye to this silly business forever.

Gymnastics can get to you, and so can the cult of personality that mysteriously clings to its greatest champions, some of whom leap right off the bars and into pop-icon status.

American media are trying to thrust Patterson into that role. The questions she got after the competition, while she was still getting used to the weight of that medal around her neck, were all about Mary Lou Retton, American legacies and all sorts of other terms people throw about in advertising pitch sessions.

Mary Lou Retton?

Today on TV 9 a.m. (CBUT): Swimming, track and field, cycling. 12:30 p.m. (5): Beach volleyball, swimming, track. 8 p.m. (5): Diving, women's gymnastics (event finals), swimming, beach volleyball. Complete listings

Please. It's true that Patterson became the first U.S. female all-around champion since Retton lit up the 1984 Los Angeles Games, and that her victory in the all-around last night was the first for an American in a non-boycotted Games.

But Carly Rae Patterson was born in 1988 — four full years after Retton's Wheaties box started to fade. In a month, she will be an 11th grader in Allen, Texas.

She didn't know how to answer those questions. Why should she?

She's a 16-year-old who said all that could be said, all that needed to be: "You dream about this your whole life."

The fact that the life has been short makes the dream no less sweet.

Looking at what comes next — the television cameras, the endorsements, the ups and downs of fame, you almost wanted to grab the kid and spirit her straight out of here. Wouldn't it be nice if the world could let Patterson, Olympic champion, just get used to the look, the feel, the touch of that medal before more demands are made?

For weeks, Marchenko had assured Patterson that an instant would come when it would all come together — when the years of pain and struggle would be behind her, and a brilliant future would be at hand.

You'll know it, he assured her, when you see it.

"Today," he said, "this moment came."

Carly Patterson seized it. And no matter where she goes from here, that medal around her neck will remind her to never let it go.

Ron Judd: 206-464-8280 or at rjudd@seattletimes.com.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

E-mail this article

Print this article

Search archive

More Ron Judd headlines...