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eudes
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read my profile
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Name: engeland
Country: Malaysia
State: sabah
Birthday: 8/10/1987
Gender: Male
Interests: Eating fried egg yolks, spining books at tip of my finger, drumming on almost anything, testing the limits of a human heart, juggling any 3 identical objects, gazing at vast objects and sceneries and last but not least, cracking music tunes outa anything that produces sound.
Expertise: Telepathy.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Other
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
MSN: eudes9@hotamil.com
Member Since:
7/21/2004
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amazing pics.w00t | | |
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just to add in the entry | | |
| Check out this pic. I just got it surprisingly in high resolution!! It's her mum's car. w00t!!
and thanx to hollievise...carly's best friend, i got this pic.
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| It's been a while. but we can manage.
Carly on ESPN Special
 
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| Three months ago in Athens, Carly Patterson sprinted across our television screens, punched the floor, tucked and spun like a pony-tailed pinwheel to win Olympic gold.
When she did, our spirits soared with her.
In that instant, Carly, a 16-year-old high school kid from Allen who favors flip-flops and scalloped skirts, who wears thick black eye liner, whose moods are both sweet and sour, who sings out loud and flirts with boys and loves on her mother in public, was transformed.
Also Online
Photos: The road to Athens
Photos: Bringing home the gold
Photos: Life in the spotlight
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More Carly Patterson
She became an American symbol.
Carly is living proof that hard work pays off. That clean living is rewarded. That dreams held tight may produce calluses and blisters the size of quarters, and they may also come true.
Tonight, Carly comes home. She is more mature now, those who know her say, more famous, and in an odd corollary, potentially more alone as the star of the 2004 T.J. Maxx Tour of Gymnastics Champions, which begins at 6 p.m. at American Airlines Center. Ticket sales suggest the largest crowd in the 42-city tour may greet her.
Carly is the second woman in U.S. history, behind Texan Mary Lou Retton, to win the all-around gold in gymnastics. Coming out of the Olympics in August, Carly's celebrity star burned hot and bright.
She did Letterman and Leno, the Today show, Live With Regis and Kelly and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. She was on CNN. She presented an MTV Video Music Award. She is still on the front of the Wheaties box.
Smiley N. Pool / DMN
Carly Patterson waves to the crowd during a parade on Sept. 4. Next week, she will ride in the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and a week from today, at 2:30 p.m., she will be featured in an NBC television special: Carly Patterson, Life After Gold.
Only one prize has eluded the petite champion – a million-dollar endorsement deal.
The Olympic Games no longer come with the appeal of the 1970s and '80s, when Mary Lou, Bruce Jenner and Dorothy Hamill stepped so gingerly between the worlds of sport and celebrity.
Today, the American public is marinated in images of sports heroes, bombarded by big names reciting familiar slogans: Got Milk? Just Do It. Tastes Great; Less Filling.
Marketers agree that Carly's wholesome, all-American, fresh-scrubbed good looks would work in makeup, clothing and health food, but with each day that passes, the odds grow longer against her.
"Athletes have come to believe that they go to the Olympics, they do well, they get on the medal stand and they're handed a gold medal, their flowers and two endorsement contracts," said Jerry Solomon, an agent and executive who married skater Nancy Kerrigan in 1995.
"A lot of things go into this, many of which have nothing to do with Carly Patterson," he said. "She may be the smartest, prettiest, most clever athlete out there, and it may not matter."
That's not to say Carly, her mother, Natalie, Plano coach Evgeny Marchenko and New York agent Yuki Saegusa of IMG sports management company have not been able to parlay her gold into a healthy pile of green.
She could clear $100,000 or more from the T.J. Maxx tour; she's agreed to do paid appearances for Tyson Foods, Ford Motor Co. and the American Dental Association. Carly extended her pre-Olympic relationship with Visa, and may continue to work with Wheaties.
A children's book based on her life is expected to publish by spring.
Carly recited the list from memory last week before an evening show in Las Vegas, saving her favorite for last – a two-year, gratis lease from Prestige Ford in Dallas.
"I get a 2005 Ford Mustang, loaded," she said, nearly levitating with joy. "It's silver, and I drove it. When you step on the gas, it makes the coolest sound, like hrrrrrrm."
Exhausting schedule
Carly's eyes are watery and far away.
It's 5:42 a.m., and the world's best female gymnast is miserable. She slept three hours last night, she wants coffee, and the limo is late.
She sits in the lobby of a luxury hotel, beneath a 50-story mahogany and polished chrome atrium, and stares straight ahead. She is motionless and silent.
Outside, through etched and beveled glass doors, Atlanta's morning stirrings are greeted by whipsawing wind and sideways rain.
Carly, her Russian-born coach, Mr. Marchenko, and teammate Courtney Kupets rode the ragged edge of Hurricane Ivan into town only a few hours ago and are up early for morning radio shows and daylong publicity to promote the tour.
"So you'll do a few phoners in the car on the way over," explains Steve Obert, marketing director for USA Gymnastics, who is standing before the young athletes. "And then we'll do a couple morning shows ... some other stuff and CNN at 12:30, I think."
The coffee shop opens, and a nonfat, no-whip, no-sugar mocha improves Carly's mood.
The stretch white pulls up moments later.
Deep inside, Carly and Courtney, who shared a room in the Olympic Village in Athens, slip cellphones from their jacket pockets and, with nimble thumbs, begin to type text messages.
They are oblivious to the traffic outside tinted windows and the relentless rain.
"Did we really sell more tickets than Van Halen?" Courtney asks Anne-Marie Dixon, marketing director for the Philips Arena, where the '80s band will play that night, followed the next evening by the T.J. Maxx tour.
"I don't know," Ms. Dixon replies. "I think it's going to be close."
Carly looks up from her phone and remarks, "I don't really know who they are."
It's 7:35 a.m. when Carly and Courtney belly up to an oversized microphone at Sports Radio 680 "The Fan" with Christopher Rude and Jamie Dukes in downtown Atlanta.
Mr. Rude leads the discussion and starts off on the wrong foot:
"You guys are both so pretty. You look so severe with your hair pulled back like that."
The gymnasts thank him, but there is irritation in Carly's eyes.
The talk-show hosts move on to the standard line of questions, including an invitation to dish on Svetlana Khorkina, the pouty Russian diva Carly defeated for gold.
Mr. Rude: "She's on the skinny side, isn't she? She looked like a skeleton going over that vault."
He is answered with polite but silent smiles.
"You're not going to talk bad about her, huh?"
Carly: "No, we're nice girls."
They ask to see Carly's gold medal, and it is passed around the room.
Mr. Rude: "You going into the private sector now and live happily ever after?"
Carly: "No. I'm going to keep training and see what happens."
Mr. Rude: "What are you going to do after the Olympics? College?"
Carly: "I'm going to go to college and be a dental hygienist or a dentist ... or a singer."
Mr. Rude: "A singer? You've got a little Avril Lavigne thing going on."
Carly's anger flashes: "What?"
She does not appreciate the comparison.
Mr. Rude attempts a retreat: "Well, I just mean you've got that black eyeliner on."
Carly bites sarcastically: "Should I have worn something pink?"
Driven to succeed
Carly is not the world's most athletically gifted gymnast.
Certainly, she is among the elite. But for all the post-Olympic discussion of Carly's explosive power, her coach, Mr. Marchenko, says that during strength tests at the Olympic selection camp, she ranked closer to the bottom than the top.
Physical ability, he said, is not what elevates her. It is her focus and desire to win.
"She is one of those rare gymnasts," Mr. Marchenko said, "who perform their best during competition."
Carly has an almost spooky level of cool.
Remember that final Olympic floor routine? Remember those near-flawless tumbling passes? Remember the high-pressure landings she stuck like there were magnets in her feet?
Eleven days after capturing the world's imagination, Carly stood in baggage claim at JFK in New York, sighed, and tried to explain what was going through her head in Athens that night.
"I didn't go out there thinking, 'I'm going to win the gold,' " she said, poking fun at the hype. "I wasn't thinking about the gold. I was thinking about doing good routines. That's all I was thinking about."
In the days ahead, she shows a similar calm while taking a spin on the television talk show circuit. She giggles with David Letterman, hugs Katie Couric and jets across the country to join her teammates on Jay Leno's couch.
That night, the U.S. women's gymnastics team reserves a table at the back of Dolce, a Los Angeles restaurant co-owned by actor Ashton Kutcher. It is the kind of place where, if you get up to go to the bathroom, a waiter re-folds your napkin before you return.
Carly's mom, Natalie, sits across the table from her daughter. They speak with their eyes.
There is tension among the young gymnasts, who compete against each other for three years before the Olympics, compete against each other for the nine spots on the Olympic team, and compete against each other for the five or six prime positions on the team.
In the two weeks since the Olympic Games ended, Carly has emerged as the clear fan favorite.
Before the main course arrives, three fans approach the table. Each of them asks for Carly's autograph, but not the other gymnasts'.
The first time it happens, Carly passes a postcard around the table for each of her teammates to sign. The next two times, she just signs and hands the paper back. Then, Steve Penny, senior vice president of USA Gymnastics, asks the waiter to pull a privacy curtain around the table.
"I stayed up every night and watched Carly Patterson," said Carly Abramson, 13, from North Caldwell, N.J. "I was more nervous going up to that table than she was on the beam."
Tensions subside
Over the next month, resentment among the gymnasts builds and then subsides.
After each show, the athletes board luxury buses, like rock stars, and are driven through the night to the next stop. They often arrive very late, or early in the morning. They rest for a few hours at a hotel before the next show.
Early in the schedule, USA Gymnastics required the gymnasts to share a room. Later, officials decided most athletes needed private quarters.
Carly is still asked to do most of the major media appearances for the T.J. Maxx tour, but Mohini Bhardwaj, the team's captain, said she earned the privilege.
"She's the all-around Olympic champion," she said last week. "Carly is going to be popular, and she deserves all the credit she's getting. Most of those earlier issues were just girl stuff. Right now, we're all laid back and having fun."
Carly said the private room helps provide space and breathing room.
"They live in close quarters on that tour," Natalie Patterson said. "Everybody was on the same playing field before, and now Carly's done something, and there's tension there. My advice to Carly has been to kill people with kindness ... but at the same time know when to stand up for yourself."
It's one of the things Carly's learned since the Olympics, she said. Accomplishment often comes with a measure of isolation, and celebrity involves some risk.
Carly has received tens of thousands of fan mail letters, she said. Most of them are from kids, but one series of multi-page letters from an adult man in Minnesota raised a red flag, she said.
The FBI was contacted, and a federal agent provided an extra layer of security at the T.J. Maxx tour stop in Saint Paul, Minn., according to Carly's coach.
"I've told Carly to always be aware of her surroundings," Ms. Patterson said.
Her daughter's gymnastics future is uncertain, Ms. Patterson said.
"Carly has accomplished everything she ever dreamed," she said. "What's left? Carly doesn't have anything to prove."
Ms. Patterson said she's closer than ever to Carly and her 14-year-old sister, Jordan.
The high point, she said, came this month in New York, when Carly received a Glamour magazine Women of the Year Award.
When Carly took the stage, she broke down in tears, thanking her mother for her sacrifices. The room erupted in applause.
"That's really not Carly," said Ms. Patterson, tears in her voice. "When your kid gets up there at 16, and she knows you believe in her, and you know she gave it her all ... that was the best moment of my life." | | |
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