updated 5:21 p.m. ET Sept. 4, 2004

ALLEN, Texas - Thousands lined the streets of Carly Patterson’s adopted hometown Saturday, honoring the 16-year-old gymnast who joined Mary Lou Retton as the only American women to win the all-around gold medal.

Girls with pigtails held signs such as “Allen’s Golden Girl” and “Way to Gold, Carly,” while five teenage boys painted their chests red with “C-A-R-L-Y” spelled out in bright blue letters.

Along the parade route, spectators screamed with delight as the Allen High School marching band played and Patterson smiled and waved from the back seat of a black convertible. Police estimated the flag-waving crowd at 10,000.

“It’s just really great to come home to Allen,” Patterson said at a rally inside the school gymnasium. “I’m really glad to live here and have this much support from the whole town and everything.”

Patterson, a Baton Rouge, La., native who moved to Texas in 1999, lives with her mother and 14-year-old sister in a single-story brick house in this city of 66,000 about 25 miles from Dallas.

“I think it’s good to have wholesome role models for young girls nowadays,” said Allen resident Tracy Henderson, whose 7-year-old daughter, Kate, cut out pictures of Patterson from the newspaper and glued them to a pink poster.

Evgeny Marchenko trains Patterson at the World Olympic Gymnastics Academy in nearby Plano.

“Today, riding in the car in the parade, you guys supporting Carly in her hometown and seeing so much love, I think today is the most exciting day of my life for sure,” Marchenko told the rally.

Since winning the gold — along with a team silver and an individual silver on the balance beam — Patterson has been a presenter at MTV’s Video Music Awards in Miami and hobnobbed on TV with Jay Leno, David Letterman and Ellen DeGeneres. Already a familiar face on McDonald’s cups, she will be featured this month on special-edition boxes of Wheaties.

Signs will be put up soon declaring Allen the “Home of Carly Patterson.”

“Man, can you believe that she did it and brought the gold medal home to the great city of Allen, Texas?” said Mayor Stephen Terrell, who joined Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and other dignitaries in showering Patterson with flags and proclamations.

Asked what advice she would give her cheering young admirers, Patterson stressed confidence and hard work.

“Just believe in yourself and your dream,” she said.

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