Balance of power

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.

Balance of power Carly Patterson prepares to chase Olympic gold. View slide show

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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.

In 1999, her father, who worked for Honda, was transferred to Houston. The family didn't know it then, but they were moving to the gymnastics capital of the United States. Some of the country's best coaches are here in Texas, as is the famous Karolyi ranch.

A year later, Carly's dad was transferred again, this time to a suburb north of Dallas. That move brought Carly and Marchenko together at one of the sport's magnet gyms: the World Olympic Gymnastics Academy (WOGA) in Plano, Texas.

Since then, Carly has performed in nearly 20 national and international competitions. She was the youngest competitor at the US Junior Championship in 2000. Two years later, she won that title. In 2003 she won her first American Cup. She also nabbed a silver at the World Championships last year, despite two undiagnosed stress fractures in her elbow.

Yet even as she rolls up victories, other gymnasts, such as Courtney McCool, still follow hard on her heels. Carly remains conscious of her sport's competitive reality: She knows she is one of 19 young Americans eyeing those six slots on the women's roster. She cannot let up.

For Carly, ensuring success means continuously refining the complex skills that have made her the top US gymnast for the past two years. Every day but Sunday, Carly walks through the door at WOGA shortly before 8 a.m., passing beneath a larger-than-life poster of herself.

In it, she is smiling; her straight brown hair sits softly on her shoulders, her black leotard sparkles. But that carefree Carly usually stays outside the gym, up on the wall in the entrance, along with posters of five other elite gymnasts at WOGA. Once Carly steps onto the sea of blue mats, she is mostly business.

Each workout begins the same way, near the ballet barre, where she and other athletes stretch. Carly bends so far forward, her legs in a split, she looks as if she's going to break. Marchenko walks over and pushes her even farther; his 6 ft., 4 in. frame overwhelms her 5ft. figure.

On Monday and Thursday, the elites begin with a ballet class meant to honeartistic presentation and proper positioning of legs and feet. The barre routine is fairly relaxed - pliés, ronds de jambe.

Then the athletes move in rows - doing scissor jumps, backbends, bold leaps, up and down the length of the mats like fierce ballerinas. By 9 a.m., the class ends, and they line up for hugs from Natalya Marakova, their instructor. It is a simple, surprising gesture that says much about the gym's philosophy.

"This is hard work," says Ms. Marakova. "I want to be supportive. Every time, I want to tell someone she did good."

Carly and the others then move on to their first gymnastics event of the day - the uneven parallel bars. Within moments Marchenko joins them, a coffee cup in his hand. One by one, the athletes take turns on the bars. Marchenko spots, calmly issuing a steady stream of comments and corrections. "Good opening, but you've got to put your foot down," he says. "Wait until you reach the bottom of the swing, and then kick."

If he were loud or gruff, Marchenko might be terrifying, standing, as he does, a good 15 to 19 inches above the girls. But intimidation is not his style.

When he immigrated to the US he was the product of a gymnastics system that required him, as a young athlete, to move3,000miles from home to attend a camp . Buthe brought what many consider the best of the East-bloc system with him: an emphasis on healthy habits, a focus on fundamentals, and high standards . What he did not bring: the tyrant mentality that many observers privately associate with Karolyi. (Criticism is often muffled because of the immense power Karolyi still wields.)

Marchenko does not yell or berate. He will not throw an athlete out of the gym if she has a bad day, nor will he embarrass her if she cries. The Russian also refuses to pit one athlete against another. He doesn't expect them to perform at peak level every day. His job, he says, is to make sure they're at the peak of health and fitness when they enter key meets. And almost every meet is key. "They have very short careers," he says.

What really earns the girls' respect, though, is the fact that Marchenko was once a competitive gymnast himself. He and his partner were five-time world champions in Sport Acrobatics, which looks like pairs skating without the ice. At the time, it was not an Olympic event.

"He went through the exact same thing we're doing," says Nikki Childs, who is going to the University of Georgia in the fall on a full scholarship. "He pushes us hard, but he's like a father to me. I can tell him anything."

Marchenko demonstrates his fatherly approach when Carly falters on the parallel bars, her least favorite event. On her first run-through, she has trouble with a key turn and lands sloppily. On her next try, she lands on her bottom.

"Come on, Carly," shout the other girls, who gather at the chalk bucket.

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