Ten athletes from the Paramount Sports Acrobatics Team brought 12 gold medals home from their first National Championships as part of Sunnyvale's Paramount Tumbling and Acrogymnastics gym. The 10 athletes were part of five teams, including two men's pairs, one women's pair and two mixed pairs.

Four of those athletes, the junior elite mixed pair of Andre Solodar--son of coach Anatoliy Solodar--and Xiau-Ling Wee, and the men's pair of Lukas Martinicik and Ting-Tien Wee, went to France earlier this year to compete in the World Championships and International Age Group competition, but nationals brought them their first golds.

"We went out there and did our best. I think we impressed the judges, and to get a reward for all the hard work we do was great," Martincik said.

Martincik said having more of his teammates there might have helped them all win.

"We all got to hang out in the same hotel and cheer for each other during our competitions," Martincik said.

Part of that camaraderie comes from practicing three hours a day, six days a week, in the gym off of Fair Oaks Avenue. While most of the athletes are from the immediate area, two members of the national team--Samantha and Courtney Olivencia--drive four hours from Los Banos for practice.

Coach Anatoliy Solodar said it's the practicing that won them the medals. He says his work ethic, matched only by that of one or two gyms in the country, comes from training and becoming a Master of Sport in his native Ukraine.

"It definitely came from how we do it in my country," Solodar said. "There, we'd practice every day, sometimes twice a day."

For Samantha, 12, and her partner Kevin Smith, 18, the gold medal meant even more because they spent the last three months having to train around Samantha's ankle injury. The pair only had two weeks to prepare for competition once she got healthy. Olivencia and Martin are considered a level 9 pair. Level 10 is the highest rating below "elite." "For us, it was a big deal to show people that we were able to come back from an injury and win the gold," Smith said.

The championships were also a milestone for Solodar and Wee, the gym's only junior elite mixed pair. They were selected for the USA Gymnastics Sports Acrobatics Junior National Team. They will be competing in Australia in December with the team. In addition, the two groups that went to France are going to Switzerland in October for an international meet.

Coach Anatoliy Solodar said the medals were especially great because the athletes got to watch other gold medalists in the Summer Olympics. He said gymnastics of all kinds are growing more popular in the United States, although they still aren't as popular here as they are in Europe and Asia.

"It's a good advertisement for our sport," Solodar said. "Every nationals, it's getting bigger; there are always new clubs coming."

That popularity is growing in part due to the media coverage of major gymnastics meets and the emergence of stars like Hamm and Patterson. Acrogymnastics is not yet an Olympic sport but may become one in the future because it is now part of U.S. Gymnastics, signaling its merging into the mainstream. The difference between acrogymnastics and traditional gymnastics comes from the former's emphasis on floor routines and lack of apparatus like parallel bars or rings.