“My mom told me, you can inspire a nation,” said Gabrielle Douglas after she’d made the biggest splash at the Games since Mary Lou Retton in 1984 and gotten her face on a Kellogg’s cornflakes box.

Now, with Monday’s apparatus final on uneven bars and Tuesday’s on balance beam, the 16-year-old Virginia native has a chance to be the first female gymnast to win four gold medals at one Games since Czech immortal Vera Caslavska in 1968.

Five months ago Douglas ranked no better than third among US contenders, behind world champion Jordyn Wieber and team captain Aly Raisman, who’d placed fourth. But when Wieber failed to qualify for the all-around and Raisman wobbled on beam, the “Flying Squirrel” stepped in to beat a brace of Russians and give the United States its third straight gold medal, equaling the record established by the Soviet Union between 1952 and 1960.

“I think she did exceptional, unbelievable,” said Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian icon who won three golds at Montreal in 1976.

What Douglas did inside North Greenwich Arena was what she saw Carly Patterson do in Athens in 2004. “After the Olympics [Gabby] said, ‘I’m going to do that one day, Mom, that’s going to be me.’ ” said her mother, Natalie Hawkins.

Hawkins was not sure how to respond. “You don’t want to crush your child’s dream. You can do anything you set your mind to do. But in my mind I’m thinking, “OK, what is this, point-zero-one-percent that actually make it?’ But then I said to myself, ‘somebody’s got to make it. Why not her?’ ”

Douglas, the youngest of Hawkins’s four children, despised ballet. “I made her do it, kicking and screaming,” Hawkins said. “She didn’t want to wear the tights, she didn’t like the shoes.” Gabby wanted to be barefoot and airborne.

By the time she was 12, it already was clear she had national potential. “I was winning all the competitions,” said Douglas. “Little girls would come up and say, hey, I want your autograph, I want your picture. I was like, ‘wow, am I really that good?’ I just went out there and did what I was supposed to do.”

Before long Douglas was too good for her Virginia Beach club and unlikely to make it to the international stage without more sophisticated coaching and rigorous training. So in the autumn of 2010 she went to Iowa and worked with Chow Liang, who’d coached former world champion Shawn Johnson to four medals in Beijing and had worked with Douglas at a clinic in her gym.

It was a “fantastic” decision for the 14-year-old, said national team coordinator Martha Karolyi, who has coached the last four Olympic squads. “She was in a program that did not expect world-class . . . She knew she could do better.”

But it was a wrenching decision for Douglas’s mother, who was reluctant to let her child move halfway across the country to chase a five-ringed fantasy. “That was the hardest decision of my life,” Hawkins said. “I’m a single parent so it’s not like I had someone else to help me. It was rough because I don’t know that this is going to pay off. There’s no guarantees.”

Douglas had struggled that year with hamstring and hip flexor injuries, and when they sat down with Chow, he told them they probably had come to him too late, but that he’d do what he could.

For Douglas, the geographic and demographic transition to West Des Moines was jarring. “I remember flying over and seeing all these cornfields and thinking, ‘What did I get myself into?’ ” she recalled.

Her two sisters and brother were 1,200 miles away. Her father Timothy, a staff sergeant in the Air National Guard, was stationed in Afghanistan. “I’d e-mail him and say, “Dad, I had a really bad dream about you, are you OK? He was like, I’m fine. Don’t think that, don’t worry. Pray to God and have God take over.” The next time she would see him would be in the Olympic trial, waving an American flag.

Douglas was a black teenager in a white sport dropped into the middle of a state that is 97 percent Caucasian. “I’d be listening to rap and I’d say, you don’t know this song?,” she said. “And they’d say, you don’t know country? I thought, this is awkward.”