Olympic gymnastics champion:
Before the American gymnastic powerhouse, Simone Biles, came a shy girl called Nadia Comăneci, who became an international sensation at just 14 years old. But now the abuse she suffered to achieve that “perfect 10” has been revealed.
The shocking secret behind her success
Atthe 1976 Olympic Games, as big-name runners blasted from the blocks and heavyweight boxers battered their way towards glory, a tiny 14-year-old girl in an off-white leotard became the greatest sporting superstar on earth.
Nadia Comӑneci, a car-mechanic’s daughter from a down-on-its-luck town in eastern Romania, twisted and whirled her way to the first “Perfect 10” in gymnastics history.
The packed Montreal arena went into meltdown for more than one reason. The electronic scoreboards had been programmed on the assumption that such a score was impossible, and were unable to display Nadia’s marks. Several minutes of confusion followed before the dark-eyed schoolgirl’s feat was confirmed.
Then she went on to score six more perfect 10s. Mesmerised by her pixie-like presence as much as her skill and poise, the world watched in disbelief. It was as though a longjumper had sailed clean over the stands, or a weightlifter had hoisted 200kg with his little finger.
By the time the great tidal wave of interest hit, Nadia had been whisked away by the grim-faced minders assigned to stop any of the Romanian team defecting. A stronghold of the old Soviet empire, the country was ruled by ruthless Stalinist hardman Nicolae Ceaușescu and his paranoid wife, Elena, both of whom, it was revealed, had taken a “personal interest” in Nadia’s career.
Years of abuse
In the decades since, little else of substance has been revealed about the young gymnast’s early days, but a new book, published in Romania earlier this year and drawing on previously secret police files, alleges that Nadia, along with several of her female teammates, suffered systematic, state-sanctioned abuse. It charges that she was subjected to beatings, starvation,
psychological trauma and forced separation from her family. “When she became famous, the Ceaușescus made her a Heroine of Socialist Labor,” writes author Stejӑrel Olaru, a respected Romanian historian.
“But she was nevertheless tormented, intimidated, humiliated, and exploited for political purposes.”
The newly declassified cache of documents from the vaults of the feared secret police, the Securitate, shows that Nadia was kept under constant surveillance. The monitoring extended to her coach, Béla Károlyi, the squad’s doctor, administrators and even the pianist who played at the gym sessions.
Given the codename “Corina” by the Securitate, Nadia was regarded as a “state asset”. Her friends and family were checked for ideological transgressions, and regular reports on her progress were sent to the top echelons of the ruling party.
The book provides harrowing accounts of the girls’ training regimen under the ultra-demanding Károlyi, whose training camp was lavishly funded by the government. Two years before Nadia’s sensational Montreal triumph, an agent wrote: “The girls were hit until their noses bled, and pushed through physical exercises to the point of exhaustion.”
Another tells of Károlyi calling the girls “fat cows” and “pigs”, and denying them food if they put on even a few grams of weight. “Starving the gymnasts was regular practice,” writes Olaru. “Sometimes the girls were reduced to eating their toothpaste at night. That is how hungry they were.”
In desperation, Nadia and her teammates would steal whatever scraps of food they could find and hide them in the hems of curtains. To reinforce their punishments, Károlyi and his wife, Márta, would eat large meals in front of them.
Even the Securitate agents appeared shocked by Károlyi’s treatment of the girls, describing him in one report as: “… unmoved by human suffering”.
Apparently alarmed by the changes in her daughter’s appearance and behaviour, Nadia’s mother, Stefania, attempted to see Ceaușescu in person. The records show that a meeting was arranged at the presidential palace in Bucharest, but at the last minute and without explanation, the dictator cancelled it. After that Nadia was “discouraged” from close family contact.
“To the party, sport was an extremely important weapon of propaganda,” says 48-year-old Olaru, a former government security advisor, and author of several books on the Communist era. “The message it sent was that only under our system can such success be achieved. It suggested that the Ceaușescus were infallible and the credit belonged to them.”
Both Nadia and the Károlyis later defected to the United States.
“Starving the gymnasts was regular practice. Sometimes the girls were reduced to eating their toothpaste at night.”
Reached at her home in Norman, Oklahoma, Nadia, now 59 and married to American fellow gymnast Bart Conner, with whom she runs a training academy, offered a brief statement: “I was aware of this book and the research on the police files and informers. My whole memory is in the book I wrote: Letters to a Young Gymnast. Nothing more to add. Life goes on.”
Her long-time friend and manager, Paul Ziert, however, tells The Weekly that Nadia – if not exactly reconciled with the past – has moved on from it. “She’s never talked to me about it in detail,” he says, “but I think we all know it was very tough, and that she grew up in a society where this kind of thing could happen. I guess she holds to the old adage about ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, and what I can say is that today she’s very happy and fulfilled, and I don’t think there’s much in her life that she sees as a negative.”
The hand of fate
Nadia was born in Onești, a fairly nondescript town in the remote Carpathian mountains, the first child of Gheorghe and Stefania Comӑneci. The high-altitude air was fresh and clear, except when the wind was blowing from the local oil refinery, and Nadia remembers spending much of her early childhood outdoors.
Life in Onești was simple, but not necessarily easy. Gheorghe was a heavy drinker – he later died of liver disease – and sometimes struggled to find work. “Although my family had the necessities – food, clothing, shelter,” Nadia says in her memoir, “there were not a lot of extras. For many people life was drab and colourless because they focused on what they did not have. But as a child all you see are endless possibilities.”
Everyone who knew Nadia as a little girl recalls her precocious energy – climbing trees, exploring forests, trying to gatecrash the boys’ soccer team. According to Stefania, it was her daughter’s natural “friskiness” that first gave her the idea of enrolling Nadia in gymnastics class.
Almost from that moment, gymnastics became her life. Nadia remembers an insatiable longing for school lessons to end so that she could get to the gym. It was all and everything she wanted to do.
And while Nadia admits she wasn’t even the best girl gymnast in her school, she sensed there was something special within her that needed someone equally special to bring out.
Which is when, by fateful chance, Béla Károlyi entered her life. The man now considered one of the most successful – if controversial – gymnastics coaches ever was on a mission to open an experimental academy, funded by Romanian state money. He wanted a place well away from what he saw as the temptations and corrupting influences of the big city, and after looking all over Romania, chose Oneşti.
Károlyi, a burly former boxer and hammer-thrower, was the wrong shape to succeed as a gymnast, but he was fascinated by the sport’s intricacies and disciplines, and hurled himself into becoming a coach. Working with his equally tough wife, Márta, he quickly built a fearsome reputation as a man who could deliver success.
Whatever harsh treatment she suffered, however cynically her achievements were exploited, Nadia acknowledges that the Károlyis’ win-at-all-costs methods worked.
“Show me 50 kids in a gym,” she writes, “and I can pick out one or two with talent, which means they have incredible flexibility, balance, desire and something magic, which is indefinable and very rare. The Károlyis did that with thousands of kids and whittled them down to the team at the 1976 Games.”
Nadia’s achievement in Montreal can never be repeated. The minimum age limit for the Olympics is now 16, and the scoring system has been changed to make a Perfect 10 impossible.
“No-one knows when he or she is about to make history,” Nadia writes. “I can only tell you that it was business as usual as I swung on to the uneven bars. I executed each skill with the extension and movements expected of me, and I dismounted.
I knew that my routine was good enough. It wasn’t perfect, though.”
The judges begged to differ, and as the noise and confusion slowly cleared, Nadia, the 1.5m waif from nowhere, became the Queen of the Games.
She continued competing until 1984, when, although still only 23, her body had grown out of the elfin silhouette that moved with such lightness and elasticity. She was taller and heavier, and the years of hard training were taking a physical toll.
Three years earlier, the Károlyis had defected during a tour of the US. Back home in Romania – no longer the regime’s most precious adornment, and under a degree of suspicion herself – life became darker and more difficult for Nadia.
“The party put it about that she was given this privileged life,” Olaru says. “It was ridiculous. The money she was allowed to keep was a tiny fraction of what she had earned for the state. Every time she appeared abroad, she brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the accounts show she received almost none of it. What ‘privileges’ did she get? Maybe a colour TV or skipping the waiting list for a car. It was nothing more than anyone the party owed a favour to got.”
In her memoir, Nadia confirms: “I had to live like everyone else. I had to stand in lines and miss out and be followed by the police. I had no money, no special treatment.”
Flight to freedom
In 1989, with a small group of accomplices, Nadia trekked for six hours through dense, frozen woodland, crossed the border into Hungary, and with the help of friends entered Austria, from where she later flew to the US.
Just weeks later, Ceaușescu, 71, and his 73-year-old wife were toppled from power in a popular uprising. They were given a brief trial before a ‘people’s court’, then executed by a firing squad.
Károlyi, 78, went on to coach a string of top stars and run the US national gymnastics team. He has made no direct comment about the new book, but has previously denied mistreating his charges. When confronted by earlier allegations, he retorted: “I ignore it. I’m not commenting. These people are trash.”
“The girls were hit until their noses bled, and pushed through physical exercises to the point of exhaustion.”
Although Nadia and Bart, a double Olympic gold medallist, had briefly met in their youth, they didn’t meet again until she had defected. The two reunited on an American TV show, and after a long-distance courtship, married in Bucharest in 1996, in a two-day ceremony broadcast live on Romanian TV. They live with their 15-year-old son, Dylan, in a stylish, sixbedroom house with a swimming pool.
“She’s as busy as ever,” Paul Ziert says. “In the beginning, it wasn’t easy for her in America, because she came from a completely different society, and there were misunderstandings, and she took some criticism. But she’s risen to it, and now she’s just revered here, and she puts so much back.”
The couple’s academy trains hundreds of young gymnasts every year, and Nadia still returns regularly to Romania, where she has a home and finances the Nadia Comaneci Children’s Clinic, which provides free medical services for poor and orphaned children.
Decades on from the events described in the Securitate papers, allegations of ill treatment continue to haunt gymnastics. Last year, Netflix released a documentary called Athlete A, which detailed shocking accounts of abuse, mistreatment and cover-ups within American gymnastics. It included accusations of emotional and psychological abuse levelled at Béla and Márta Károlyi, who opened a national training ranch in the US following their 1981 defection.
Elite gymnasts spent months at the centre under the tutelage of the Károlyis and their personal coaches. No family was allowed to visit. It was on this ranch that Larry Nassar, then team doctor and now convicted serial rapist and sex offender, allegedly carried out many of his assaults on female gymnasts, an accusation the Károlyis have denied.
The Károlyi Ranch was closed in 2018, and the entire USA Gymnastics board quit in the midst of the Nassar sex scandal.
Aly Raisman, two-time Olympian and Captain of the 2012 and 2016 US Olympic teams, described the ranch as “disgusting” in a Washington Post piece. She reported that anyone who appeared noncompliant or complained about conditions was sent home or left off the team.
Aly also alleged that gymnasts were forced to train for seven hours per day without adequate nutrition and judged severely on their weight.
In May, the Australian Human Rights Commission issued a report citing evidence of a “culture of abuse”, particularly of young girls, at all levels of Australian gymnastics. It highlighted “emotional and verbal abuse, physical abuse and medical negligence, sexual abuse, negative weight management practices and body shaming”.
Gymnastics Australia said it would accept the report’s recommendations, adding: “While important work has been undertaken in recent years to improve policies, education and support mechanisms for our athletes and coaches across child safety and athlete wellbeing, there is clearly more to be done.”
And while Nadia has been reluctant to address the shocking new claims, Australian gymnasts have not been so silent about their own abuse. One can only hope we’re seeing the dawn of a new era in which excellence is no longer sought at all costs.