Patterson, like Mary Lou, lands thrilling gold

ATHENS, Greece - There really are no surprises anymore in the world of women's gymnastics. No out-of-the-blue Nadia moments, no Mary Lou punctuation marks. Let it suffice to say that the teenage girl on the bags at the McDonald's drive-through just won the Olympic gold medal. Talk about synergy. What could be more perfectly all-American than that?

What Mary Lou Retton accomplished with one vault 20 years ago, Carly Patterson did Thursday night with a scintillating 90-second routine on the floor at the 2004 Olympic Games.

America, say hello to Carly. You will not be saying goodbye for a long, long time.

Following in the footsteps of U.S. men's gymnast Paul Hamm and his improbable comeback to a gold medal Wednesday in the men's individual all-around competition, Patterson swept into the lead on her favorite event, the balance beam, and kept it through her final event, the floor exercise.

Who knew the USA was this kind of individual gymnastics juggernaut?

Unlike two nights earlier, when Patterson and her teammates stumbled to a disappointing and underwhelming silver medal in the women's team competition, the 16-year-old from Plano, Texas, did not falter.

After holding her own in her first two events, it was fitting that she would take the lead on the balance beam. At the Olympic trials in Anaheim in June, Patterson fell off the beam not once, but twice, over two nights of competition.

She continued to insist that the beam was her favorite apparatus, but there were doubts about her ability to handle the pressure that comes with being labeled the next Mary Lou. She has been carrying that title for the past year and a half. That's almost a lifetime in the sport of little girls gymnastics.

Patterson performed magnificently on the beam, and her score was a strong 9.725. Two gymnasts later came the willowy 25-year-old queen of the sport, Russia's Svetlana Khorkina, the three-time world champion. Could she keep up? Looking uncertain at times, she wobbled once but otherwise hung on and acquitted herself.

When she was finished, the wait for her score seemed interminable. A few judges conferred. The old jokes about the Russian judge came to mind. Soon, though, the relatively low score of 9.462 flashed next to Khorkina's name on the small scoreboard by the beam, and the big scoreboard up in the rafters immediately reordered the rankings.

Patterson's name popped to the top. The American sprite took a look, then tapped the arm of her coach, Evgeny Marchenko, motioning for him to look over his shoulder at the big scoreboard. He turned back to her, and they smiled at each other like little kids in on some kind of secret.

No more than 15 minutes later, when Patterson nailed her floor exercise, receiving a 9.712 to Khorkina's 9.562, Marchenko lifted her high for the crowd to see. Patterson was the final competitor. They knew the gold medal was hers.

Plus, this was women's gymnastics, and some little girl had to be carried somewhere in the arena. Eight years ago, it was Bela Karolyi bringing injured hero Kerri Strug to the medal podium. Now Patterson was riding out on her coach's shoulders.

Why not celebrate if you were the Americans? It had been 20 years since a U.S. woman won the prestigious and lucrative Olympic women's all-around title. That woman was Retton, who surveys show still is one of the nation's most popular athletes, now 36 and two decades removed from her last competition.

But this victory was different because, unlike Retton, Patterson had to face all her competition for this title. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics were, of course, boycotted, so Retton missed out on going against the Soviets, among others.

But that, and the fact that Retton won at home, in the USA, while Patterson won in an Olympics on foreign soil, might be the only visible differences between the two - at least from this vantage point so early in Patterson's reign.

Every victory of this nature comes with a certain amount of luck. In this case, Patterson avoided the dreaded injuries that are a very serious part of seemingly every women's competition, and alarmingly so. On this night, Romania's Oana Ban, one of the standouts from the gold medal-winning team the other night, withdrew from the individual all-around competition after feeling pain in her right ankle while landing her routines. And Patterson's U.S. teammate, the fiercely athletic Courtney Kupets, finished ninth in large part because of a hamstring injury.

At the end, Kupets was left to applaud her rival and friend, the new queen of this sport. Carly Patterson, Olympic gold medalist. Has a rather nice ring to it, don't you think?