The Romanian expatriate stood up and shouted with his thick, heavy accent midway through Carly Patterson’s show-stopping floor exercise routine.
“Yes!” Bela Karolyi bellowed. “Pull hard! Come on!”
Twenty years ago he had used similar words as his protege, a 16-year-old named Mary Lou Retton, scored a perfect 10 on the vault and became the first American to win an Olympic all-around gymnastics title.
There he was again Thursday night at Olympic Indoor Hall, an impassioned madman cheering for the first American women’s all-around champion since Retton.
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Patterson won the gold medal only one day after Paul Hamm of Waukesha, Wis., became the first American to win the men’s all-around title.
Together they established the country’s status as a world power, a concept that would have been laughable four years ago in Sydney, when neither team nor its individuals reached the podium.
Earlier this week, the U.S. men and women won silver medals in team competition. The Americans could win as many as 11 more medals next week in the individual event finals.
“It feels like I’m having a non-stop dream,” USA Gymnastics President Bob Colarossi said. “This proves what we’re doing is working.”
After the Sydney Games, the women’s program adopted Karolyi’s plan to bring gymnasts together every four to six weeks at his 2,000-acre ranch in New Waverly, Texas, for intense weeklong training sessions. His wife, Martha, is the national team coordinator and directs the workouts, working closely with the gymnasts and their club coaches.
“This in a way is my baby,” Bela Karolyi said. “We are finally an American system that works very well.”
Patterson was all the proof he needed.
She completed her floor exercise routine to rave reviews from the judges, jumped into the arms of her coach, Evgeny Marchenko, and sobbed.
The gold medal was hers.
“You dream about this your whole life, and then you have a gold medal,” Patterson said. “And it’s just amazing.”
Much like Retton during her gold-medal run, Patterson is 16 and only 4-feet-9-inches tall. She is not as bubbly as Retton, but, as the Karolyis noted months ago, she has Retton’s competitive drive.
Just before she stepped on the floor as the final competitor, Patterson asked her coach what score would win the title. He told her she needed to be close to a 9.6.
Patterson began with a smile for the judges and proceeded to hit every one of her four tumbling passes. The judges rewarded her with a 9.712.
A dream was realized. A country was in awe.
Patterson had all but won the title in the prior rotation when her balance beam routine produced a score of 9.725. The level of difficulty in her routine was unmatched, and she launched herself from fourth place to first.
“Not too many gymnasts are going for those daring moves,” Nadia Comaneci said before the competition. Comaneci scored the sport’s first perfect 10 in Olympic competition in 1976 for Romania.
Patterson, in her Olympic debut, held off three-time Olympian Svetlana Khorkina of Russia for the all-around title, scoring 38.387 to Khorkina’s 38.211. China’s Zhang Nan won bronze with 38.049.
Khorkina stumbled very slightly during one pirouette on the balance beam, which wound up costing her gold.
Khorkina, 25, had beaten Patterson in last year’s world all-around championships, but in defeat Patterson had left her mark as a gymnast with gold-medal potential. Retton took her aside at that competition and told Patterson her time was coming.
“I think Carly is special,” Retton said in an interview last spring. “She is the complete package for our sport. She is extremely talented and she has a sweet, confident, approachable personality that our sport needs.
“We need a new queen of American gymnastics, and I think she’d make a great one.
“I’m as excited now as when I won 20 years ago,” Retton said by telephone from her home in Houston. She was among the first to offer congratulations to Patterson.
“She said she knew I could do it, and she knew I had it in me,” Patterson said of the phone conversation.
In preliminaries Sunday, Patterson had the highest all-around score but made costly mistakes in the team final. Thursday in the all-around, her chances looked bleak in the first rotation when she landed poorly on the vault and started in eighth place.
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She recalled Hamm’s jump from 12th place to fourth to first a day earlier and didn’t give up hope.
“I knew if I could just do the best routines in all my other events, then I could have a chance,” Patterson said.
Patterson said she couldn’t find the words to describe her elation.
It was up to her coach to give it the proper historical perspective.
“We turn a new page in USA Gymnastics,” Marchenko said. “It’s been 20 years of waiting.”