Carly Patterson

Carly Patterson is the 2004 Olympic All-Around Champion and 2004 US National Co-Champion in gymnastics. She also won a silver medal with the US team and a silver medal on balance beam at the Olympics in Athens. In 2003, she was part of the world championship team that won the US's first team World gold medal and won silver in the individual all-around. She trained at World Olympic Gymnastics Academy in Dallas, Texas, also the home of her good friend, the 2008 Olympic All-Around Champion and sometime model and actress Nastia Liukin. Carly announced her retirement from gymnastics in 2006. "It's hard to top an all-around gold," her coach, Evgeny Marchenko, said. However, injuries also contributed to her decision to quit the sport. "Not a lot of people know this - I started having some back issues, and honestly, my doctor was like, 'Carly, you really need to stop if you want to be able to walk when you get older'," she said in 2009. "So I retired and moved on to singing." She'd first discussed her interest in pursuing a singing career in March of 2005. After singing part of "Damaged" on August 21, 2005, on FOX Sports Net's Sports Sunday, she announced on December 18, 2005, that she had signed a demo contract for four songs with Papa Joe's Records. Together with singer and writer Chris Megert, she wrote and produced songs titled "Time to Wake Up" and "Lost in Me." In the fall of 2006, Carly participated in the reality show Celebrity Duets (produced by American Idol judge Simon Cowell), in which celebrities not known for singing performed duets with professional singers. The show premiered on August 29, 2006, airing every Thursday and Friday with alternate performance and results shows. During the September 8 results show, Carly joined Cheech Marin and Lea Thompson in the bottom three, but the audience spared her from elimination. The following week, however, she was eliminated from the competition after singing a duet with Jesse McCartney. Carly signed with MusicMind Records in Chicago in February 2008. The single "Temporary Life (Ordinary Girl)" was released on iTunes on March 25, 2008, and her debut album, Back to the Beginning, was scheduled for an August 8, 2008 release, which happened to coincide with the opening of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. However, the release was pushed back, and Carly first released another single, "Time to Wake Up," on iTunes on February 17, 2009. Back to the Beginning was finally released on iTunes on August 25, 2009 and was also available for purchase at the 2009 Visa Gymnastics Championships on August 12-15 in Dallas, Texas, where Carly was inducted into the USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame and honored with Nastia, Evgeny, and Nastia's coach & father Valeri Liukin (the latter two are also the founders and owners of WOGA) for WOGA's remarkable achievement of back-to-back Olympic all-around champions.