By the time the lights went down, a few minutes before the start of the floor exercise at the Pan American Games last month, Guillermo Alvarez was ready for something big - really big.

For the past decade, the quiet, 24-year-old Denver native has been upstaged by rivals as celebrated as he is understated and overlooked.

At Gymnastika, in Lakewood and Wheat Ridge, he labored in the shadows of Alexander Artemev - he was the 2006 U.S. all-around champion - and his father and coach, Vladimir Artemev, the 1984 Soviet Union all-around champion.

At the University of Minnesota, Alvarez chased Big Ten Conference championships while standouts such as Paul Hamm counted down the days to the 2004 Athens Olympics.

But in Rio de Janeiro, despite jeering Brazilian fans and bumpy moments, Alvarez continued his delayed climb to the sport's top rung, earning a silver medal in floor exercise and a bronze in team all-around.

That performance kept him on track for the finals tonight at the Visa Championships, in San Jose, Calif., and the 2008 Beijing Olympics - events even Alvarez assumed a couple of years ago were beyond his reach.

"It gave me a boost of confidence and put my name out there, which isn't bad," he said.

Unusual path

Modest, methodical, restrained: Those words describe the Green Mountain High School graduate, who never will be known as a drama king on or off a mat.

Yet his Olympic odyssey is anything but routine, reaching back into 1950s migrant labor camps, where his father, Amando, picked fruit, moved irrigation pipes and planted the seed to achieve that he passed on to his youngest son.

The journey began when Amando's father gathered his family and left Rio Verde, Mexico, slipping over the border into south Texas, where Amando was born. Unable to survive in Texas, the family took off for Arizona and, eventually, Idaho.

"They just loaded us up in a truck as full as they could. We were packed in like sardines," Amando said.

In Idaho, their life settled into a bleak routine: Cars hauled them to the fields before dawn and hauled them back at sunset; in between, the eight Alvarez children worked on their knees, making their way down rows of potatoes and sugar beets.

Destitute and desperate at times, they slept in boxcars, ate rabbits for dinner and braced themselves for another day in their sweatshop in the sun.

"My parents had it very, very rough," Amando Alvarez said. "My father didn't make it past the first grade. My mother made it to third grade. Two of my brothers were taken out of grade school to work in the fields. I guess that's where I got my drive."

After serving in Vietnam on a destroyer escort, Alvarez earned a college degree from Idaho State on the GI Bill, then a master's in library science (Emporia State University in Kansas) and Spanish (University of Colorado).

After a 23-year career with the Denver Public Library, he and his wife, Janet, moved back to Idaho, where Amando teaches Spanish at Idaho State and writes for several Latino publications.

Five years ago, he wrote a coming-of-age book chronicling his migrant worker experiences, Rising River: The Blackfoot Chronicles.

"My dad is always reading," Guillermo Alvarez said. "He has a houseful of books. He was always emphasizing school, college."

The message trickled down. Two older brothers are working on master's degrees at CU; Guillermo graduated summa cum laude from Minnesota in psychology and plans to start full time on a master's in linguistics after the Olympic season.

For now, he's focused on the national championships in San Jose, a crucial springboard to the 2008 World Championships. But the past always is near.

Two remarkable journeys

On his way to California, Alvarez will fly over the same bumpy roads his father traveled on the way to labor camps a half-century ago. They're two very different journeys, entwined in a remarkable way for Amando Alvarez.

"I would've never imagined this," he said. "I would've said, 'What are you talking about?' I was just trying to save enough money to eat. I knew nothing about academics, nothing about college education."

By the 1990s, though, Amando had settled into a comfortable middle- class existence with his young family, a life of hearty meals, summer vacations and Guillermo's weekend gymnastics meets.

"I'd swing him around the lawn when he was young. You could tell then," he said.

Under Gymnastika coach Alexei Koudria, Alvarez gradually developed a cool, steady style that reflected his personality and earned him five junior nationals appearances.

Alvarez initially wanted to attend CU and continue working with Koudria, but the plan changed when he finished fourth in the 2001 junior nationals, luring Minnesota coach Fred Roethlisberger to Denver with scholarship papers.

Academics first

"We recognized Fred as a very good coach," Amando Alvarez said. "But I said, 'OK, this is my opinion: Academics should be the priority.' My wife comes from a family of teachers. Her father was a teacher; her mother was a teacher. What drove me is that no one else in my family had an education."

Not to worry. Though his paternal grandfather had come to America with nothing, Guillermo Alvarez graduated with a 3.85 grade-point average, was picked for prestigious laboratory jobs and still found time for a serious reading habit and to study Russian, which he speaks fluently.

On the mat, he won All-America honors as a freshman and was named national senior gymnast of the year in 2005, bookends to a complete career.

"It was such a great opportunity," he said. "There was a real balance between class work and the gym."

But until Alvarez made the U.S. national team in 2005, he never considered a post-college gymnastics career, much less a run at the Beijing Olympics, where he and Artemev could represent Colorado.

In the first round of the all-around Wednesday, Artemev was tied for first and Alvarez was third heading into tonight.

"About two years ago, I asked him: 'Are you ready for the Olympics?' " Amando said. "He said, 'I don't know if I'm good enough; I don't know if can compete with them.'

"Then he really made a turnaround; now he's going out there to compete for the Olympics - period."

The transformation started when Alvarez made the national team two years ago and finished first in the floor exercise and sixth in the all-around at the 2005 nationals.

Pan Am Games a success

At the 2005 Pan American Championships, he placed second in the floor exercise, sixth in the vault, first in the team all-around and raised some eyebrows between routines.

"He's sitting there with all the top guys, waiting on the bench for his turn, and he pulls out this crossword puzzle," said Mike Burns, Alvarez's coach at Minnesota - he succeeded Roethlisberger - and at the Pan Am Games this year. "All the other guys are prancing around and making a big thing of it, and he's doing this crossword. It was pretty funny; it put him in his own little world.

"He's very steady - he doesn't have high highs and low lows. What you see every day in practice is pretty much what you're going to see every day in practice. From a coaching standpoint, that's really comforting."

Roethlisberger once said Alvarez's modesty undermines his talent, a judgment Alvarez brushes off.

"There is a thin line between confidence and cockiness. You see the cockiness and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth," he said.

Added Burns: "It's not his style. It would put him out of his comfort zone and his comfort zone has served him pretty well."

Alvarez's style has become his ticket to international success, earning him invitations to meets in France, Denmark and South America, a gratifying but startling sight to his father.

"I see a lot of kids in sports nowadays, the way their parents are there to help. I never had that advantage," Amando said.

Old memories

Amando's thoughts, in fact, often drift to the old days, to images that never are far away: Digging in for another cold night in a crowded boxcar; worrying about friends who ended up dead in their teens; laboring in choking dust; moving with the seasons on the migrant route.

A while ago, Amando returned to his former haunts with Guillermo.

"He pointed out the different fields he used to work in. He showed me boxcars that were similar to the ones he lived in," Guillermo said. "I grew up knowing about it, so it wasn't a shocking moment. But I realized there was quite a difference; I definitely know I've had a great opportunity."

But Amando says his son doesn't really understand.

"I don't think any of my children truly understand what we went through," he said. "It's almost inconceivable. When people talk about the Third World, I tell them that in many cases there are enclaves of the Third World in this country. I definitely have a lot of feelings about that time."

But they're leavened now by his son's emergence as a world-class athlete. A legacy of dreams that started in a boxcar could culminate in Beijing.

"I'm not surprised by this," Amando said. "I knew he had it in him. I had a lot of confidence in him. I actually thought he was going to be this good. You have to be driven - and he's driven."

Guillermo Alvarez file

• Hometown: Denver.

• High school: Green Mountain.

• College: University of Minnesota.

• Residence: Minneapolis.

• Birth date: Oct. 24, 1982.

• Nicknames: Memo, G-Mo, Charhutme, Guanme.

• Favorite TV shows: Scrubs, The Simpsons.

• Favorite music: Sufjan Stevens, Billie Holiday, Bright Eyes, Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse.

• Book recently read: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.

• Favorite food: Gigantic burritos.Sources: Usa Gymnastics, Wcsn.Com

latimerc@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2596

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