Bar Has Been Set High for Gymnast Atler

Vanessa Atler lost her confidence, then her hope and then her heart for the sport she had always loved, gymnastics.

Atler couldn’t hang on to the uneven parallel bars. She fell and lost a U.S. all-around gold medal. Atler fell again a year later and lost another gold medal.

She laughed about it in public, but inside Atler was losing her essence, the part of her that allowed her to try the hardest vault in the world and never be afraid, the part of her that knew, just knew, she could do everything she wanted when it came to gymnastics.

“I was,” Atler said, “really low for awhile.”

Atler, 18, of Canyon Country, has spent the last two years being touted as the U.S. successor to Mary Lou Retton, Shannon Miller and Kerri Strug, anointed most likely to become a star at the 2000 Olympics.

Atler finished fourth Saturday night in the all-around competition at the 2000 U.S. Gymnastics Championships. It was her lowest finish in four years at the nationals, but Atler said she was pleased with her performance.

“I thought I had a great meet, especially [Saturday] and I’m looking forward to the next step,” she said.

Atler has a sweet personality and a way of laughing about herself that makes everybody believe she can never be unhappy.

But Atler was unhappy last year. She was lost, she was hurting and she wasn’t even sure she wanted to go to the Olympics.

At the 1999 World Championships in China, she fell off the beam. At least this was a change of pace, a beam disaster instead of a bars bobble. Atler had gone to China without a coach, having left her longtime mentors Beth Kline-Rybacki and Steve Rybacki. Her ankle ached on every landing. Her confidence had disappeared, forever she thought.

“My self-esteem was gone,” she says.

But it wasn’t gone, merely hiding. Atler has found it all again, her confidence, her health, her love of gymnastics, her eagerness to compete. All that was hiding in Plano, Texas. It has been 100 degrees practically every day for two months. The humidity can make Atler’s perfectly straight hair frizz, but it doesn’t matter.

“This is the best thing I’ve ever done,” Atler says. “It was the best move I can make.”

The move came nine months ago. Atler sat down with her family--her mother, Nanette, and father, Ted, and brother, Teddy, who is a baseball player and who understands the drive to succeed in sports--and talked about what Vanessa wanted to do.

“I wanted to try a new coach,” Atler said. “I needed a change and I liked this new coach.”

The new coach was Valeri Liukin, a Russian medal winner at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Liukin is part-owner of World Olympic Gymnastics Academy in Plano. Bela Karolyi, U.S. women’s national team coordinator, had recommended Liukin to Atler.

So the decision was made. Nanette and Vanessa would move to Plano. Ted and Teddy would stay in Canyon Country. Ted is an electronics engineer for the post office.

“It was hard to leave home but not hard to make the decision,” Atler said. “I had to do something different. I just wasn’t happy at all with myself or how things were going.”

Atler moved to Plano in November. Less than a year to the Olympics and Atler was changing her life, the way she trained, the way she ate. She had two operations on her sore left ankle, and bone chips were removed. She hired a nutritionist and began eating pineapple instead of candy and found both her energy level and mental health were better.

What has been special about Atler’s gymnastics is her tremendous strength. She is 4 feet 11 and weighs only 105 pounds, but there is thunder in Atler’s vaults, explosiveness in her tumbling passes on the floor exercise.

It is that strength that has caused Karolyi to comment positively on Atler, calling her “a sturdy little dynamo,” and which has made Atler such a favorite to make this Olympic team.

Atler came to St. Louis on a high note. She won the U.S. Classic in Tulsa, Okla., two weeks ago.

And wouldn’t you know, Atler drew, for her very first event on Thursday night, the uneven bars. “I laughed when I saw that,” Atler says, “and then I got over-excited I think.”

Atler didn’t fall this time but had two big breaks in her routine, causing her to score so low that she was in 21st place after the first rotation. By the end of Thursday’s preliminaries, she was up to sixth place and laughing.

“Really, it’s not a mental block anymore,” she said of her bad bars performance. “I didn’t fall, but I think I went out way too excited just because I wanted to compete so much.”

Being in 21st place didn’t faze her, Atler said. “I’m so used to coming from behind now. I feel like I’m doing it all the time.”

It takes guts to change your life a year before an Olympics. It takes more than that, Atler says. It takes a feeling of desperation.

She is 18, so she can pack up and move to Plano. She talks about going to a Texas Ranger game packing a blanket and a jacket because, hey, you need a blanket and a jacket when you go to Dodger games. Boy, was I a goof or what, Atler can say. Everybody laughs.

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