Recovery Continues for Bachar : Pan Am Games: A year after reconstructive surgery, Encino gymnast looking forward to competition in Havana.

A year ago, Carmit Bachar was undergoing major surgery. Thursday, she will undergo a test of another kind.

Bachar, 16, will represent the United States in rhythmic gymnastics group competition in the 11th Pan American Games in Havana.

“I’m so excited,” Bachar said by telephone from Detroit, where she had been training most of the summer. “I can’t believe that we’re leaving. . . . (Cuba) sounds really exciting. I can’t wait to see the beaches. It’s going to be great.”

Last August, Bachar, who lives in Encino, was recovering from major maxillofacial surgery to correct a cleft lip and cleft palate. It was the latest in a series of operations.

“I was waiting to have the surgery, but they couldn’t do it until I was fully grown facially, so they waited until I was 15,” said Bachar, who is scheduled to undergo additional surgery later this month. “They moved my maxilla (upper jaw bone) forward about an inch. Normally, jaws are within millimeters, or maybe centimeters (of the maxilla), but I had mine an inch back.”

Bachar was supposed to stay away from gymnastics for two months after the surgery, but she was able to return two weeks earlier than planned.

“I really wanted to go back to the gym,” Bachar said. “People aren’t supposed to jump or do other things, but I felt pretty stable.”

Bachar said she was “really scared at first” to work with some of the sport’s equipment after her operation.

“We have clubs that are pretty dangerous,” Bachar said. “I was being really gentle, but I got over it. Because I love the sport, getting back in was exciting.”

Bachar originally competed in artistic gymnastics, the more popular branch of the sport and the one that produced Mary Lou Retton, Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci among others. But she switched to rhythmic gymnastics six years ago at a summer camp. The sport combines the floor exercises of artistic gymnastics but also requires competitors to twirl ribbons and work with balls and hoops.

“Artistic gymnastics puts a lot of pressure on your back and it’s very easy to get injured,” Bachar said. “I tried rhythmic once and it was so graceful. It incorporated dance and gymnastics without doing the bending over backward, flipping and dangerous stunts. I was so turned on by the ribbons floating through the air and equipment used while you dance.”

Bachar will be a senior this fall at Hamilton High’s Academy of Music, a magnet school on Hamilton’s West Los Angeles campus. She finished second in this spring’s Western regionals in San Rafael, Calif., and qualified for May’s national championships in Colorado Springs, Colo.

An 11th-place finish in the nationals was not good enough to earn one of three berths for individual competitors on the U. S. Pan American Games team. But as a consolation prize, Bachar and seven others were selected to represent the United States in the group competition.

“Group is so different,” Bachar said. “In group, you have to be together as a team. You have to be a group, unified as one. Everyone depends on everyone else. One little mistake and you’re out.

“The routine is much longer than individual. The individual routines take at most a minute 30 seconds, and a group routine takes 2 1/2 to three minutes, so you’re constantly putting out all your effort so nothing goes wrong. It’s frustrating when six girls are trying so hard and one makes a mistake and it throws the whole thing off.”

There is no group competition in the Olympic Games, so if Bachar hopes to realize her dream of competing in the Olympics, it will have to be as an individual. She concedes that her task is formidable because “all sports are very political, but it’s not stopping me.”

Bachar’s coach, Alla Svirsky, said the dream is not completely out of reach.

“She needs more mental preparation to deal with the stress and pressure,” Svirsky said. “She was very fragile with all that surgery.”

In Svirsky’s view, Bachar also must improve on her stability and consistency.

“She used to drop little things, which would put her back,” Svirsky said. “If you drop one element, that can put you back three or five tenths of a point. The difference between first and second sometimes is five-hundreds of a point, so consistency is important.”