Endless workouts seasoned with insults, slaps and hunger, very hungry.
It was the method with which
Béla Károlyi and his wife, Martha,
turned the babies who passed through their school in Onesti into gymnasts and champions.
In that small town in the mining region of Romania where he grew up, the career of the girl that changed his life was also forged.
Károlyi immediately saw the potential of this 6-year-old calf, as flexible as it was obedient and disciplined.
Nadia comaneci
ended up becoming a legend
and he is the most famous coach in the world.
To achieve this, Károlyi applied a
regime of terror,
where everything was worth to get champions in Romania of the 60s and 70s. His excesses became known a few years ago, when the scandal of the sexual abuse of Larry Nassar, the
doctor of the Federation of Gymnastics of the USA
, where the Károlyi worked, but a new book published in Romania delves into them.
Nadia y la Securitate
, by historian and political scientist
Stejarel Olaru,
shows the
suffering
that Comaneci suffered especially at the hands of
the communist regime
during his career.
Olaru has accessed
unpublished files of the Ceaucescu secret police
, declassified reports made up of complaints and telephone conversations intercepted by the Securitate. The communist dictator's police closely watched the Károlyi due to the importance that the Romanian gymnastics team acquired, especially after their performance at the
Montreal Olympics in 1976
and on the 10th of Comaneci.
These files reflect the harshness of the marriage methods, which even scandalized the Securitate agents.
"The girls are beaten so hard that they often suffer from nosebleeds,"
said an informant in a statement collected in one of the archives about "terror and brutality" that took place during training.
"Starving gymnasts
was a common practice of the Károlyi," says another of the reports.
Nadia Comaneci in Montreal, performs her parallel bars exercise in the final, in which she obtained a score of 10AP
"The girls ate toothpaste at night
before going to bed because they were hungry. Some even secretly talked about drinking water from the toilet tank because
many times they were not allowed to drink water
." In the book it is also related that some of the gymnasts ended up bulimic and were
experts in stealing food
, which they hid in the most anodyne places, like the hem of a curtain, "while they ate steaks and chips in front of the starving girls ".
The text reflects an
unpublished interview by Comaneci in 1977,
where she told Romanian journalists that she had been insulted and
slapped for having gained 300 grams
. In the same interview, which was never published, he acknowledged that he was so hungry that he could barely stand.
Olaru, who was
director of the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism between 2006-2010
, also reveals that in those years the gymnast wrote a diary where she described the beatings that girls suffered when they did an exercise wrong. In the newspaper, according to another Securitate informant who read several excerpts, Nadia recounted how they were
forced to train to exhaustion even when they were injured
and without receiving medical attention.
Montreal launched Comaneci but also the Károlyi, creators of a factory of Olympic champions, to world stardom, and the Ceaucescu set their eyes on them. Nadia began to be constantly
monitored by a device of secret agents
, doctors, officials of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation and even by the choreographer of her performances. She was named a Hero of Socialist Labor but, far from being treated as such, Olaru assures that she became a
victim of the regime
, "persecuted, intimidated and humiliated."
After retiring from gymnastics in 1984, she became a
prisoner in her country
. She was forbidden to travel abroad, with few exceptions, and when she did, she was accompanied by agents of the regime. In November 1989, he managed to cross the Hungarian border illegally and
escaped to the United States, where he requested political asylum.
Comaneci, who is now 59 years old and lives in Oklahoma, has barely commented on Olaru's book, who spoke with her to contrast data and stories. "I was aware of the book, but I told him that everything I remembered I told in my book,
Letters to a young gymnast
. I have nothing more to add,
life goes on
."
Károlyi, for his part, has denied all the accusations although he has recognized his level of demand. "My gymnasts are the best prepared in the world.
They win, that's all that counts,
" he told the agency France Presse.
He and his wife made the same journey as Comaneci a few years before.
In 1981 they applied for political asylum in the United States and became coaches for the American Gymnastics Federation.
Their factory of champions was cloned at the Karolyi Ranch, near Houston, the national training center where stars such as
Mary Lou Retton, Phoebe Mills
and Simone Biles
were forged
.
And there the pedophile Nassar, the doctor
convicted of abusing at least 160 girls,
rocked at ease
.
The Karolyi
looked away
.
Only the medals mattered.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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