BEST FOOT FORWARD

Vanessa Atler never saw Sang Lan fall.

“I heard it, when everyone gasped,” said Atler, a gymnast from Canyon Country who was warming up nearby. “You knew it wasn’t good.”

Sang, a 17-year-old Chinese gymnast, lost a big part of the rest of her life that night at the Goodwill Games in New York when she was paralyzed by a fall on a routine practice vault.

Atler, 16, won the competition--taking the gold medal on the vault by blocking out the awful thing that had happened to another gymnast.

It’s that sort of single-minded ability to zero in on competing that Atler and her coaches hope will carry her to the 2000 Olympics.

“I just warmed up for vaults,” Atler said. “I wasn’t scared. Lots of people get fear of things. I didn’t.”

She’ll take another of a thousand steps toward Sydney this week in the John Hancock U.S. Gymnastics championships at Indianapolis, where Atler will try to repeat as U.S. champion, a title she shared last year with Kristy Powell.

Things happen in gymnastics--difficult things, tragic things--just as they do everywhere. In other sports, or even driving to work.

“It was freak thing, like being in a car accident,” Atler said. “That was almost like a cartwheel for her, it was so easy. Just like a car accident, you can’t be afraid to go in a car again after it happens. . . . I’m kind of glad I didn’t see it. It was an awful thing for her.”

Steve Rybacki--who along with his wife, Beth Kline-Rybacki, coaches Atler at the Charter Oaks Gliders gym in Covina--was 15 or 20 feet away when Sang fell. When he saw she was being attended to, he found Atler and turned her away from the scene.

“The competition was going to go on. She stayed very focused,” he said. “ It’s not like it was a surprise or a shock, that she didn’t know that could happen. She’s accepted the risk.”

Things far less terrible than a paralyzing injury can seem cataclysmic to a young athlete who has spent her life in a gym.

Atler had one such setback last year, when she qualified for the World Championships by winning the U.S. championships at 15, but couldn’t go because a new rule required gymnasts to be 16 to compete in world or Olympic meets.

“It kind of stunk,” she says.

She also knows that Kline-Rybacki trained her heart out as a teenager and made the 1980 Olympic team, then sat at home because of the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games.

Besides all that, Atler knows that because of the year she was born, Sydney is probably her only chance at the Olympics.

“I mean, I’ll be 18 when I get to the Olympics, competing against 16-year-olds,” she said. “Usually you’re at your peak around 16 or 17. It kind of stinks. This is going to be my only shot.”

Still, Atler is in position to go to Sydney. She won the floor exercise as well as the vault in the high-level international competition at the Goodwill Games, and has a chance to repeat as U.S. champion--even though this field includes 1996 Olympians Dominique Moceanu and Dominique Dawes, as well as Kristen Maloney, another hopeful for Sydney.

Being in position for 2000 is one thing, though. Atler has to hold that position.

“There’s definitely a lot of gymnasts out there,” she said. “Kim Zmeskal just made it to the championships. Kristen Maloney is awesome. And my teammate Jamie Dantzscher, who is coming back from wrist surgery.”

And then there are the other gymnasts, the younger ones, the pixies.

“You don’t even know who they are,” Atler said. “They could just pop into the spotlight and you might barely make it--or not make it at all.”

Atler doesn’t have to worry, as some young gymnasts are worrying, about her body suddenly maturing.

“I’ve had my a growth spurt--just not much of one,” she said.

At 4 feet 10--with a mother who is 5-1 and a father who is 5-4--Atler is probably not going to grow too tall. And her build is already solid and powerful, not whippet thin.

“I’ve always been kind of buff and stocky,” she said. “I’m short for life. I wish I could just get taller after gymnastics.”

As gymnastics go, she is approaching her peak.

“I’m pretty close. I think really close,” she said. “Things are getting a lot easier. I don’t have the problems I’d have before. Before I’d fall, now it’s a matter of perfecting things, which is a lot easier. Just pointing your toes, things like that.”

In 2000, she will just have graduated from high school, though most of her classes are independent study.

“To graduate and go to the Olympics,” she said. “The coolest thing would be to get ‘00’ on your jacket [for 2000]. That would be the coolest.”

Winning the U.S. championship again would qualify as cool, too.

Atler was ahead of Powell last year before trying a difficult move and falling on the bars, allowing Powell to tie her.

“It was the first senior meet for me. I thought I was going to win. I was in the lead,” she remembered.

And then a tie? No playoff.

“I wasn’t sure I wanted one,” she said, laughing. “I could have gotten second.”