Balance of power

She has been hailed as "the next Mary Lou Retton" since February, when she kicked into overdrive at the international American Cup in New York. Carly Patterson, the ponytailed pixie with the 1,000-watt smile, calmly executed her first three performances, each routine polished and controlled, a perfect mix of energy and elegance.

Among spectators in the cavernous Madison Square Garden, tension ran high at the gymnastics event. For the American men, it had become a brutal outing. The team captain dropped from the still rings with a potentially career-ending injury. One man after another blew his routine.

Carly stayed cool. In each event she focused on the move at hand, and then the next. The anxious crowd of thousands, shouting and waving signs, seemed to strengthen her composure.

She began her final event, a floor routine, with a flourish, exploding in a running pass. She tumbled and danced. Another explosion, another running pass. At the end, her wide grin said it all: She had nailed the routine, and swept every top prize at the meet.

Within minutes, Bela Karolyi, the famed coach of Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou, ran onto the stage and swept her up in a hug. Both his champions won the American Cup just months before going on to Olympic glory.

But if Carly does become the world's next golden gymnast, it won't be because of Mr. Karolyi or the stringent - some say bullying - East-bloc approach he brought from Romania. It will be because of a Russian, Yevgeny Marchenko, who has softened old-school methods for the American youths he trains. Together, he and his petite protégée could usher in a somewhat kinder, gentler era for gymnastics.

First, Carly needs to earn a ticket to Athens.

That means performing well at the US Nationals this week, at the Olympic Trials later this month, and at intensive camps at the Karolyi ranch in Houston, to which Mr. Marchenko sends his top charges. The six-member Olympic team, coordinated by Martha Karolyi, will be announced in July.

"I have worked really hard all my life just to be here," Carly told a pack of reporters after the American cup in New York. "I don't think about the pressure," she said, her voice high and thin, her delivery somewhat rote. "I try to be as prepared as I can and hit all my routines."

She'll have to hit every routine for the next six weeks if she wants to join the ranks of Nadia and Mary Lou. Gymnastics is an unforgiving sport, and like the four-inch-wide balance beam, Carly's favorite event, the path to success is narrow. One unfocused performance could send the 16-year-old back home to Allen, Texas, instead of into the sport's history books.

For Carly, the bounding run for Athens began in earnest last year, after she won the American Cup for the first time. Yet her journey in the sport began much earlier.

"I was flipping around the house at age 2," she says. She took her first gymnastics class at 6, after she attended a cousin's birthday party at Elite Gymnastics in Baton Rouge, La., where the Pattersons then lived. The gym's head coach, watching the first-grader, approached Carly's mother, who recalls him asking: "Is she in gymnastics? If she isn't, she should be."

Carly competed in her first meet six months later. She entered as a level 4 athlete - there are 10 levels in all, above which come the elites - and placed 13th. By age 9 she was working out 30 hours a week, fitting in schoolwork with tutors at the gym. Her progress was rapid. Gymnastics, she says, was a "fun challenge." Sometimes, she adds, it felt like flying.

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