Gymnastics

In gymnastics, it's usually the younger the better, and they came pretty young as students from eight Philadelphia elementary-school districts competed at the third annual Edwin R. Popper Open Invitational Gymnastics Meet last week. The tournament again proved a showcase for the gymnasts of the Morrison School in Olney, which was the host school for this year's competition. The Morrison team not only won the meet for the third time, but it extended a five-year unbeaten string. In fact, Morrison teams haven't lost an event in five years.

Gymnastics tickets are the toughest to obtain in Seoul, but good seats are still available for canoeing, rowing, field hockey and baseball on the third day of the Olympics. By the opening day of the Games on Saturday, the organizing committee said, only 752 of the 154,621 gymnastics tickets were unsold. Also popular are cycling, volleyball, track and field, table tennis, shooting and archery.

The day after Kerri Strug and the U.S women's Olympic gymnastics team won its gold medal, the telephones at Kindercise Gym started ringing. By the time the director of the gymnastics program arrived, she had 15 messages on her answering machine. That's more calls than Sonja Zalenfki typically receives in a month. "People are interested in signing their children up," she said. It has been same story at the Northeast YMCA, which offers three sessions of gymnastics camp.

Freshman Alicia Brandt of District 3's James Buchanan High won the PIAA individual advanced all-around state gymnastics championship yesterday at Shippensburg University, edging Marisa Dinatale of Central Dauphin on a tie- breaking procedure. Both finished with 36.85 points in the four events: vault, beam, bars and floor exercise. Officials add up all judges' scores in the tie-breaker, instead of the usual procedure of eliminating the highest and lowest scores given to a girl in an event.

Mark Eaton, a former NCAA gymnast who became a nationally known gymnastics coach, was killed when a small plane in which he was a passenger snagged an electrical wire and cartwheeled onto a freeway on-ramp in Winslow, Ariz. Eaton, an All-America in 1970-71, was 45. Pilot Davis M. Ellis, 55, also died in the crash Wednesday. Ellis had flown to Lake Powell, on the Arizona-Utah border, to help Eaton, who coached Ellis's 12-year-old daughter, repair a boat, authorities said. They were returning when they crashed.

They don't air Olympic boxing in prime time for a few reasons. They lose 75 percent of their female audience, NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol says. A history of too much scandal, too much cheating. It's seedy. It's brutal. It's a turn-off, the dirtiest word in television. The American public is turned on by gymnastics. Specifically, women's gymnastics. This, despite charges that, boiled down, the sport contains many of the same elements that disgust them about boxing. There is documented cheating in gymnastics in the form of growth-stunting hormones and biased judges.

The first thing you notice about high school gymnasts is the chalk. It is everywhere. On the calloused hands, coating the muscular shoulders, hanging in the air like a winter snowstorm. It is used to help the gymnasts get a better grip on the equipment, and it is being used less and less as gymnastics loses its grip at the area high school level. There aren't many high school gymnasts left in the area. West Chester East has the only boys' team in the Ches-Mont League; there are none in the Southern Chester County League.

Olympic medalist Mitch Gaylord may have four ribbons dangling with bronze, silver and gold, but as a screen hero the gymnast flubs his compulsories. Tears well up in his doe eyes, his nostrils flutter, his well-toned deltoids twitch in high tension. No, this isn't before a dramatic confrontation in American Anthem - this happens every time Gaylord opens his mouth. Who is this, Ralph Macchio after a Charles Atlas body-builder course? American Anthem, brought to you by Purple Rain director Albert Magnoli, is a thrilling gymnastic competition beggared by a who-cares melodrama.

Jennifer Keating had been perfecting her gymnastics routines for three years before she arrived at Springfield High, in September 1985. Then she quit the sport. There were a lot of reasons for quitting, she said. She was preoccupied with the start of her freshman year. Many of her friends had dropped out of gymnastics, and there were no girls her age left at John Pancott Gymnastic Center, the club she worked with. "I was burned out, I guess," she said. "There were other things more important.

Like most of the competitors who populate women's gymnastics, Brandy Johnson is trim, tiny and tenacious - and already fighting the age-old problem of age. Bela Karolyi, the Houston-based guru of the sport whose proteges have included past Olympic champions Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton, has said that at 17, Johnson faces a problem in qualifying for the 1992 Olympics. The games of Barcelona, Spain, Karolyi said, "will be for the younger competitors. They are the future of gymnastics in this country.

The Penn women's gymnastics team defeated Ursinus, 189.425-185.375, in Collegeville on Sunday for its third dual meet victory of the season. The Bears' Kristina Steffenhagen (Boyertown) finished fifth in the vault. Teammate Allison Patton (Moorestown) was seventh.   Baseball Gettysburg 4, St. Mary's (Md.) - Junior Nate Simon (Abington Friends) doubled in the go-ahead run and Drew Felsenthal induced a bases-loaded, game-ending 6-4-3 double play as the Bullets defeated the host Seahawks in their season opener.

Area women's gymnasts earned ECAC honors announced this week. Temple junior Brittanie DeMeno was the Division I gymnast of the week. Owls freshman Tara Kilkenny received the coaches' choice award. Penn's Elyse Shenberger was rookie of the week. Ursinus junior Monica Durham was the Division III gymnast of the week, and sophomore Kristin Aichele was named the specialist of the week. Ursinus senior Chris Rountree (Haddon Heights) was named the Centennial Conference indoor field athlete of the week.

Temple's women's gymnastics team picked up its first win of the season, coming out on top in Sunday's dual meet at Ursinus. The Owls defeated the Bears, 190.675-186.975, in Collegeville. Temple's Brittanie DeMeno scored 38.2 points to take first place overall through all four events. Ursinus' Monica Durham was second with 38.125. The Owls' Alexis Arena won the vault with a score of 9.625. Stephanie Verry had the best floor exercise of the day, scoring a 9.825. Ursinus' Johanna Warren won the uneven parallel bars with a mark of 9.75, while Kristin Aichele set a school record on the balance beam at 9.85.

Now is when Aly Raisman needs to keep her balance. The 18-year-old gymnast, captain of the captivating U.S. quintet that won both the team gold medal at the London Olympics and an alliterative nickname that always seems to go with that honor - "Fierce Five" in their case - has been swept along in a post-Games whirlwind. The 40-city gymnastics tour she is enduring brought her Sunday to Indianapolis, where she rolled off a mat and badly bruised both knees. Monday and early Tuesday she was in New York for a fashion show, photo shoots, and interviews.

For the third straight year, the Temple men's gymnastics team has placed in the top two for highest grade-point average among all men's gymnastics programs in the nation. The Owls registered a GPA of 3.479. Only ECAC-rival William & Mary had a higher average at 3.530. The Owls' Chris Mooney and Blake Collins were among six gymnasts in the nation to be designated Academic all-American Scholar Athletes based on all four years of eligibility. Thirteen other Temple gymnasts were also named all-American Scholar Athletes by the College Gymnastics Association.

LONDON - What happens under the towel, stays under the towel. Even more important for Danell Leyva, though, what happens outside is blocked out by his green-spangled bath towel. If that seems silly, well, Leyva has a bronze medal that says otherwise. The Cuban-born American success story rallied from a wobbly start to third place in the Olympic men's all-around gymnastics meet. This is not Curt Schilling, the last notable athlete to hide under a towel. It isn't that Leyva can't bear to watch what's going on with the other gymnasts.

When Tattle was asked to weigh in on the "controversy" over Gabby Douglas' hair, our excitement was palpable — who better than a white guy who's had the same haircut since the Carter administration to offer up thoughts on a black woman's hair. Nothing could go wrong there. Maybe it's the way we views sports — as sports — but in watching Gabby achieve all kinds of Olympic and athletic firsts and perhaps become the Tiger Woods of women's gymnastics, we hadn't even noticed Gabby had hair.

LONDON - They were hailed as the Magnificent Seven, the U.S. women's gymnastics team that won gold at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. And their heroine was Kerri Strug, who sealed the triumph with a gutsy vault on an ankle so badly injured she had to hop just to stay upright. Tuesday at the London Olympics, America's current generation of female gymnasts staged its own display of grit. And it was a tour de force, with the U.S. women winning the prestigious team gold for the first time in 16 years and only the second time in Olympic history.

LONDON - Jordyn Wieber was Kerri Strug in reverse. To win the first gold medal for Team USA since 1996, Wieber and her four best friends didn't need a dramatic final moment like Strug's sprained-ankle vault landing in Atlanta. Instead, Wieber started the competition off with a terrific, confidence-boosting vault and the American team never looked back. "I watched that vault, and she took it, and I was like, 'Yesssssss!' " vault specialist McKayla Maroney said. "Then Gabby [Douglas]

The American women's gymnastics team won the gold medal by lunchtime here Tuesday, but of course the Olympic event in London wouldn't air on television until prime time, beginning at 8 p.m. So I ventured out of my man cave around dinner time to ask men and women on the street if they already knew the results in this hyper-connected world of ours, or if they had managed to remain uninformed. And did they really care about knowing or not knowing before they had a chance to watch. "I love the Olympics," said Julie Christman, of Haddonfield, a second-grade teacher, coming out of the local 7-Eleven.