The Older New Guard

By Alice Park/Boston

"The team has a leader, and that's Elise Ray." With those words, the voluble Bela Karolyi, national women's team coordinator and the man behind the Magnificent Seven gold-medal winners of the 1996 Olympic Games, unofficially crowned America's next darling of the mats. It was the verbal equivalent of one of his trademark bear hugs. "I'm not afraid of taking on that role," Ray said last week after earning her ticket to Sydney by accumulating the highest score in four qualifying meets.

Don't expect a waiflike Nadia Comaneci, or a baby-faced Dominique Moceanu. At 18, Ray is the new face-and body-of women's gymnastics: older, wiser and, in Karolyi's words, "sturdier." Because gymnasts must now be in their 16th year to be able to compete, they're more likely to be heading to college than high school, and physically, they're better representatives of a women's rather than a girls' sport.

As the leader of the new class, Ray began her steady ascent to the top of women's gymnastics as the history-making 1996 troupe retired one by one. At last year's world championships, the U.S. team finished a disappointing sixth, but Ray stood out as the highest-placed American gymnast in the individual all-round competition.

Some of those golden oldies are still around, including Dominique Dawes, 23, Ray's training partner and friend who came out of retirement to rejoin the team. The two have been close since the day a reluctant Ray, then 13, was dropped off crying at Hill's Gymnastics in Gaithersburg, Md., where Dawes trained. "She didn't want to leave her friends at her other gym," recalls her coach, Kelli Hill, of Ray's first visit in 1995.

Ray soon proved herself worthy of the intense competition and risky skills at the elite level. A self-professed perfectionist, she exudes a graceful, dancelike quality on the floor, with a toe point that ballerinas would envy. Ray performs one of the most difficult programs of any female gymnast, which should place her shoulder to shoulder with the favored Russians and Romanians in Sydney. Already, she has a signature move, a gasp-inducing uneven-bars maneuver in which she flies off the high bar, twists 360[degrees] in the air like a diver heading for the water, grabs the bar, swings through and does it all over again. "When I saw it, I couldn't believe she did that," says Comaneci, 1976 Olympic gold medalist, of the double release that Ray was the first to master in competition.

But even with such innovation, the U.S. women are unlikely to repeat as Olympic champions, although they do have a good chance of getting onto the podium. Ray's team is a mix of the old and the new; in addition to Dawes, Amy Chow, another '96er, earned a place on the squad; they will be joined by two-time national champion Kristen Maloney, 19; Jamie Dantzscher, 18; and Morgan White, 17.

Ray, for one, isn't worried about her chances, because she will have two veterans of the Atlanta Games on her side: Dawes and Dawes' good-luck talisman, a small blue Cookie Monster doll that she passed on to Ray when she first retired. They've agreed to share him. Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. Sounds as if Ray is ready for the most important meet of her career.