Gymnastics star ‘starved and beaten’
Relentless pursuit of perfection that drove Nadia Comaneci to the top had a dark side, as secret police reports reveal coach’s alleged abuse.
In 1968 the Romanian gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi saw a six-year-old girl executing immaculately graceful cartwheels during her break at a small rural school.
Afterwards he went from classroom to classroom until he found her, and signed her up for his training facility. Eight years later the girl, Nadia Comaneci, became the first gymnast to score full marks at the Olympic Games, an achievement thought unattainable.
Yet the relentless pursuit of perfection that drove Comaneci to the top allegedly had a dark side: a historian has claimed that she and other pupils in Karolyi’s charge were frequently starved, beaten and psychologically abused. Stejarel Olaru, 48, discovered a large cache of reports on Karolyi’s coaching operation in the archives of the Securitate, the Romanian communist regime’s Stasi-like secret police.
Comaneci was so valuable to the state as a propaganda instrument that its dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, was routinely briefed on her progress.
Allegations about the aggressive methods used by Karolyi and his wife, Martha, have long circulated. Three years ago the American gymnastics world champion Sabrina Vega, now 25, accused the pair of fostering a culture of “fear, intimidation and physical and emotional abuse of minor child gymnasts” at their training ranch in Texas. The Karolyis have denied that they were physically or verbally abusive.
Simone Biles, 24, the reigning Olympic champion, has claimed that she was sexually abused by the ranch’s doctor, Larry Nassar, although the Karolyis said they were unaware that he was molesting their pupils. Nassar is serving a lengthy prison sentence for sexual offences against children.
Olaru’s research suggests that the alleged pattern of torment may stretch back to the late 1960s. In his book Nadia si Securitatea he argues that even the secret police agents were sometimes shocked by what they witnessed. “The coaches Bela and Martha Karolyi starved the gymnasts, beat them, took some of their modest financial profits, verbally humiliated them and often denied them medical treatment,” Olaru claimed. “Starving the gymnasts was a regular practice by the Karolyis. The girls ate toothpaste at night - this is how hungry they were. In some cases they talked about drinking water from the toilet tank. Some ended up suffering from bulimia. They became experts in stealing food, which they hid in places they thought no one would discover, like the hem of the curtain.”
In an unpublished 1977 interview with two Romanian journalists discovered by Olaru, Comaneci claimed that she had been slapped and starved for up to three days at a time. Now 59 and living in Oklahoma, she was reluctant to address Olaru’s book. “I told him that my whole memory is in the book I wrote, Letters to a Young Gymnast. Nothing more to add. Life goes on.”
Bela Karolyi did not respond to a request for comment. However, he did not explicitly deny Olaru’s allegations in a statement issued to the AFP news agency: “By nature I am never satisfied: it’s never enough, never. My gymnasts are the best prepared in the world. And they win. That’s all that counts.”
The Times
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