ATHENS, Greece - For only the second time ever and the first time since 1984, the queen of gymnastics is an American. But do Carly Patterson and her sport a favor. Don’t call her the new Mary Lou Retton.

This is no knock on Patterson, but there will never be another Retton. Mary Lou was the Arnold Palmer of her sport. She was a kid from West Virginia with a gigawatt smile who left charisma slicks wherever she went.

In the interview room in Los Angeles after Retton vaulted into America’s heart, I asked her if she realized that she was shortly to be showered with more money than she had ever dreamed of having. She laughed, flashed that incredible smile, almost blushed, and said she hadn’t. And you knew she was telling the truth.

No one had to ask Patterson that question, because she knows exactly what her Olympic gold means. She’s worked all her life for it, put in punishing hours in the gym, sacrificed everything, all the time dreaming of joining Mary Lou.

FREE VIDEO Patterson strikes gold in all around Aug. 20: Carly Patterson became the first American woman since Mary Lou Retton to win gold in the individual gymnastics all around competition. She talks with "Today" host Katie Couric about her performance. Today Show Olympics

If Retton was Palmer, Patterson is Jack Nicklaus, which isn’t anything to sneer at. Just as Nicklaus was better than Arnie and won more titles, Patterson is already more decorated than Retton was, and will continue to collect the hardware. It’s what she’s driven to do, what she was born to do.

But she’ll never equal Retton in the personality department, and again, that’s not a knock any more than it would be to say that Rodin’s “The Thinker” is a nice piece of sculpture, but it’s not Michelangelo’s “Pieta.”

With Patterson, it’s just gymnastics. Afterward, there wasn’t a single answer to anything that sounded unscripted and spontaneous.

“I tried to treat it like any other meet,” she said of her mental approach. Told that she had joined the likes of Retton and Nadia Comaneci, she said, “I won the Olympic gold medal and now I can be a part of them.”

That was immediately after she had won. Later, in the formal press conference, she said, “You dream about this all your life and to get the gold medal is just amazing. It means a lot. I’ve worked all my life for this.”

What she did was bigger than what Retton did. Patterson didn’t win her gold, as Retton did in Los Angeles, at a boycotted Olympics against a field that lacked most of the world’s great teams, but here in Athens, against the Russians, the Romanians, the Chinese. Carly Patterson didn’t beat just the best athletes who chose to attend. She beat them all.

The story line had a lot of similarities to Retton’s, too. Patterson is 16, the same age Retton was in L.A. Like Retton, Patterson is solidly built with big, muscular thighs. Like Retton, she wins with power.

Also like Retton, Patterson came from behind to win, reeling in Svetlana Khorkina, the painfully thin and exquisitely graceful prima donna of Russian gymnastics, with a solid routine on the balance beam and burying her with a 9.712 floor exercise that was as close to perfection as the sport’s tough new scoring rules allow.

Khorkina, the gold-medalist in the high bar in both Atlanta and Sydney but never the all-around Olympic best, bitched – there’s no nicer way to put it – and pouted during her interviews, saying that the judges had scored her floor exercise too low – she got a 9.562 - all but saying straight out that she was robbed of the gold.

But the judges saw it differently, and when Patterson, the last athlete to compete on the final exercise, the floor routine, was done, neither she nor the crowd needed to wait for the scores to be put up to know she’d won. She was that good when she needed to be her best. There was no doubt.

Afterward, she leaped into the arms of her coach, Evgeny Marchenko, when she knew she had won, just as Mary Lou had run into Bela Karolyi’s embrace after the vault that won the gold.

But that’s where the comparisons should end. Mary Lou was and remains the one and only, the woman who put her sport on the map, the woman who inspired generations of little girls to take up gymnastics and try to do what she had done.

Carly Patterson, who wasn’t even born when Retton landed her perfect 10 in the vault, was one of those girls. And of all the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of little girls who took up tumbling in gyms in every nook and cranny of the country, she was the one who actually made it happen.

She did it a night after Paul Hamm became the first American male to win the all-around gymnastics champion, the crowning act in the greatest two nights American gymnastics has ever seen.

Patterson beat the world and is on her way to millions. She’s earned every bit of it.

So give her all the credit and all the glory. Call her the best American gymnast ever. Just don’t call her the new Mary Lou Retton, because no one will ever be that. No one ever can be that.

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