No Break This Spring for Antolin

Her right shoulder aches, the rotator cuff is sore and what would help most is a couple of weeks off, just nothing but rest and some anti-inflammatory medication.

But this is the Olympic year for Jeanette Antolin. She is 18 years old, a senior at Marina High and a gymnast with realistic dreams of being among seven women chosen for the U.S. team that will travel to Australia in September.

And so, for now, there is no rest.

For starters, there are the trips to Houston every month.

Houston is home to Bela Karolyi, who had retired from his job as taskmaster, tyrant, motivator, champion maker and miracle worker until USA Gymnastics called after the U.S. bombed at the 1999 world championships.

Antolin was thrilled to make that world championship team, her first. She and her teammates were not thrilled to finish sixth.

Enter Karolyi, whose mandate is to make things better, to bring back the magic that was 1996, to refresh our memories of the Magnificent Seven, the gold medal winners who will always be marked by the picture of Karolyi carrying his tiny protege, Kerri Strug, onto the gold medal platform after Strug dislocated her ankle on a final vault, a vault that assured the U.S. of its first-ever Olympic gold.

That is a fading magical moment, and so Karolyi is back. Since January, Karolyi has been holding monthly camps at his ranch outside Houston. Some 12 to 15 girls are invited each month. If you’re not invited, forget about the Olympics. If you get uninvited, forget about the Olympics.

Antolin has been invited. She and Don Peters, her coach at SCATS, the Huntington Beach gym, pack up for a week of exhilarating exhaustion, of inspirational tension, of climbing the ropes and pounding out floor exercises, of doing strength training, of being bellowed at and then praised as a “lee-tle Tiger” by bellicose Bela.

“For the coaches it’s tough,” Peters says. “It’s a camp. Your cell phone doesn’t work. There’s no phone in the dorms and we all line up every night for the one phone line so we can check our e-mail. When you’ve got three gyms to run like I do, you have to check your e-mail.

“But for the girls I think this is necessary. Is it panic, bringing Bela back? I don’t think so. We should have panicked two years ago. When all the girls are spread all over the country with their individual coaches, it’s easy to get complacent. I think this is healthy. The girls can push each other.”

And then there are the competitions. This weekend, Antolin and Peters are in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to compete with Alyssa Beckerman of Cincinnati, Tasha Schwikert of Las Vegas and Lindsay Wing of Washington, D.C., for the U.S. at the Spieth Sogipa competition. This is an honor for Antolin and an indicator that she is going to be a serious challenger for the U.S. Olympic team.

So though her shoulder hurts, and hurts the most on her best apparatus, the high bar, and though she is a little tired from commuting to and from Houston, Antolin is happy to be in Brazil, happy to be on the Bela track and learning every day how hard this year will be.

“Everything is a lot different this year,” Antolin said from Brazil. “Everything is a lot harder. I’m realizing what it takes to be a top athlete and it’s a lot harder than I expected, both mentally and physically.”

This realization has largely come from her experience at Kamp Karolyi.

“Our U.S. team needs to perform under pressure, to get the best level of fitness possible,” Peters said. Peters is coaching the U.S. team in Brazil and he said that since the 1996 Olympic triumph, “There has been a lot of disorganization in U.S. gymnastics. It was a system where all of the personal coaches were coming together, arguing. All the decisions about the U.S. team were compromises. You need somebody in charge. Yes, we’re all making sacrifices but you have to push each other, the kids have to push each other and if you do, nobody will relax.”

Antolin followed her older sister, Katie, into the sport. Katie, a sophomore at Cal State Fullerton, was once a 13-year-old member of the U.S. national team but a congenital back injury forced her from elite competition. Jeanette, who is compact and strong, has learned from Katie that she wants to compete on a college team and will join recently crowned NCAA champion UCLA next season.

But before UCLA is this Olympic dream, the same dream her sister once had.

Peters describes Antolin as a “bubble girl.” She was seventh in qualifying for the 1997 U.S. World team, which left her as an alternate, and then she made the 1999 team. “Jeanette is one of those girls who will be fifth, sixth, seventh,” Peters says. “She will be in a dogfight for the Olympics.”

Suffering with her sore shoulder at the last Karolyi camp, Antolin was disappointed not to be chosen to the U.S. team for the Senior Pacific Alliance championships, which are also this weekend in Christchurch, New Zealand.

“That was the ‘A’ team,” Antolin said. Amy Chow of San Jose, a member of the 1996 gold-medal team, Vanessa Atler of Canyon Country, Elise Ray of Columbia, Md., Morgan White of Cincinnati, Erinn Dooley of Gaithersburg, Md., and Marie Fjordholm of Frisco, Texas, are in New Zealand.

Making the Brazil team, though, means Antolin was one of the top 10 at Bela’s training camp. Peters said that so far only Chow and Ray have consistently performed better than the others. “The Olympic trials are going to be wide, wide open,” Peters said.

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com