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Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape by Stejarel Olaru, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth

There is that little face: the face of a child.  Brown eyes, contemplative eyes, eyes that stare at you emotionlessly, a little defiantly.  Dark rings; she is tired, she could sleep for hours.  Young Nadia looks as if she has been crying.  She is a child.  If you found yourself with responsibility for her, you would make her some hot milk, give her some cookies and put her to bed, not send her to train with the toughest coach there has ever been, or force her to have her photograph taken.  


The metal chains around her neck give away that she has achieved something momentous.  The lettering declares her name:  'Nadia Comaneci'.  If only it had been in gold leaf; that would tell a story.  As you glance at the cover, you get the impression that the gymnast is wearing a golden crown, a laurel wreath perhaps, something to match the Romanesque features.  Nadia could easily be posing for a portrait, one that you might find in the ruins of Pompeii, or somewhere with a similar proud history.


You see the words 'Secret Police' in a deep blue.  You know that Nadia didn't have an easy time of it in Romania.  You know that there have been stories of her country's human rights record, that other athletes have squeaked about their treatment as athletes at the hands of the great bear, Bela Karolyi.  Nadia hasn't spoken.  You might suspect her story, you might have read books that pretend to be authoritative.  But this book promises much more, drawn as it is from an extensive review of the Securitate (Security Police) and other Government files in Romania.  While Nadia continues to maintain air silence about her experiences in Romania prior to her defection to the West in 1989, this book will be the best source available.   


It's a massive statement in itself that state records exist of her conversations, her behaviour, her trauma.  It establishes the fact that Nadia's life was of great interest to the secret police in Romania and to the Romanian government.  From childhood to adulthood this 'little gymnast' was followed and tracked and recorded, almost every minute detail of her life was written up and filed in state archives.  What if Nadia were to speak up about the first 39 years of her life ... what would she say?  Would she even know what to say?  Which version of events, of the many that exist, would we believe?


History involves the evaluation of the various stories available, acknowledging their sources, and resulting in an interpretation of them based on wider context and evidence.  Absolute truth is difficult to find; there is always more than one story to tell.  And you will, therefore, have to do some work as part of this reading to identify where the gaps and weaknesses are, and make your own mind up.  There are a few small mistakes in this book - ones that followers of the sport will be able to pick up on fairly easily - but they don't really detract from the overall heft.  This book doesn't claim to tell the whole story, nor to provide a quick - tada! - moment of revelation.  But it does address the gaps in the narrative, and asks the right questions about Nadia's life and subsequent defection from Romania.  The point is HOW do we know what we know about gymnastics in that period of time, as much as WHAT we know.  


There are books that you should read to help you to understand the gaps and inconsistencies in knowledge.  Bela Karolyi's Feel No Fear is one of them, and Nadia's own personal account, Letters to a Young Gymnast, another.  Graham Buxton Smither's biography of Nadia provides a framework, and you should also watch the videos of the relevant competitions - in particular the 1977 Europeans, 1978 Worlds, 1979 Worlds and the 1980 Olympics.  


Everyone knows the rough story of Nadia's gymnastics career - the perfect tens in Montreal, the uncomfortable adolescence and suicide attempt, then time in hospital during the 1979 World Championships; her coach's defection in 1981, followed by her own dramatic defection to the West in 1989, only a few weeks before the collapse of the Romanian state and the murder of the evil despots, the Ceausescus.  One of the challenges of writing this book, I expect, was trying to find a clear plot line  in the light of the many diverse plot lines that already exist.  In places, I guess that the factual evidence in the archives is pretty thin, so the author had to rely on existing accounts.  Not all of the sources are referred to - for example, certain face to face interviews with the gymnasts on Nadia's team are not included, and they triangulate with accounts of Karolyi's treatment of his gymnasts - but this is a developing area of history - at some point the book had to draw a line.  


Comaneci was one of the world's greatest athletes.  Yet look at the statistics and it's quite surprising.  Nadia's competitive career spanned six years and a bit, from the 1975 European Championships to the 1980 Olympics.  (She also won the 1981 Universiade, but we never really make much of that for some reason).  In addition to the ground breaking tens she scored in Montreal in 1976, Nadia won three consecutive European Championships; this was at a time when Europeans were almost as important as Worlds.  But she never won an all around title at a World Championships, and only won one individual gold medal (beam in 1978).  Her original moves are limited to those she invented on uneven bars, and unlike her close competitors from the Soviet Union, Loudmilla Tourischeva and Nelli Kim, she has never held a leading position on the FIG WTC or similar.  


This is not to denigrate Nadia's influence on the sport, and her achievements - far from it.  It's just to say that, for one of the world's most talented gymnasts, her laurels are somewhat scanty; and this book explains why.  For Nadia was so cruelly treated by her coaches and by the Romanian state, that it was extraordinary that she managed to survive at all, let alone compete in the Moscow Olympics in 1980, and almost win a gold medal all around.  Her impetuous flight from her country took phenomenal courage, and is astonishing.  


Karolyi saw the genius of Nadia Comaneci, and stole her for himself; not to create a legend for her, but to create power and money for himself.  Not only did Karolyi concoct the story about his discovery of Nadia in an Onesti playground, he also rewrote her gymnastics history almost entirely.  He was not Nadia's first or only coach, nor was he the only coach of the Romanian team.  He coached Nadia for perhaps four or so years, not long when you consider it takes ten to create a champion and fifteen a legend in gymnastics.  He was not trained as a gymnastics coach, and his grasp of nutrition and health was extremely poor and next to dangerous.  He was so cruel to Nadia, both emotionally and physically, that eventually she refused to work with him.  His methods included verbal abuse, physical beatings, starvation and dehydration.  


Nadia protested at his treatment, and eventually demanded to be allowed to train at another facility, with different coaches.  Finding herself off his very tight leash opened Nadia up to possibly worse privations at the hands of the state, whose agents were terrified that she may abscond, give up gymnastics, or, worse still, put on a few pounds in weight.  She found herself hemmed in by police who monitored her every move and noted down when she took food from the fridge in the athlete's hotel where she lived.  Her friendships were even poisoned; Karolyi tried to suggest that compatriot Teodora Ungureanu, who was close with Nadia at the Montreal Olympics, tried to encourage Nadia to eat and to behave badly in order to make her own life easier.  Once Nadia had spoken out against Karolyi, he did his best to discredit and damage her.  


The reason, then, that Nadia did not achieve as much as one might have expected of a gymnast of her stature and abilities is because her physical and mental state suffered so much under Karolyi's system that she was too ill and broken to train.  Her physical state at the 1979 World Championships - indeed the poor health of the entire Romanian team - was down to overtraining and a hellish programme of exhibition tours directly before the competition (which rivals said were designed to generate income for the coach), that exhausted them, reducing them to their skeletal appearance.  Karolyi, it is said, tried to blame Nadia for her own health problems, an infected wrist that saw her hospitalised overnight.  The story of her 'realising' her responsibilities as a team mate and jumping up on the beam to rescue the Romanian team and help them to win a glorious gold medal is false.  Karolyi commanded Comaneci to compete on beam not to help the Romanian team to win, but it wasn't because he thought she could win the medal for them; he hoped that she would perform so badly that she would destroy her own reputation, and take the blame for Romania's failure.  


Karolyi's own defection in 1981 was met with cheers by the Romanian team, in particular the younger girls.  Emilia Eberle said she was just happy to be able to train without being beaten.  Ekaterina Szabo expressed relief that they would be free of what she called the horror, and could train with the coaches they knew and trusted.  


There are multiple accounts from the gymnasts, who say that the beatings and the training were awful, but the worst thing was the hunger and starvation.  While they ate tiny meals of steak and lettuce, Karolyi would tuck into lavish three course meals right under their noses.  This was more than medals-at-all-costs; Karolyi was deliberately cruel.  Other coaches and the doctors expressed concern that the gymnasts were not taking on board the right nutrition, Karolyi was the one who was obsessed with limiting their intake of food.  At times the girls starved completely for days on end.  No wonder, then, that they wolfed down sweets and snacks that others gave to them when they could.  Look at the physical state of the Romanian gymnasts, particularly at the 1979 World Championships; they are rake thin.  They do not look healthy.  I will add here that out of the six gymnasts on that team, three needed their appendices removing at short notice following those Championships.  Starvation.


It was a cold, dark and rainy night when Nadia finally made her flight from Romania.  The most detailed part of the book is the analysis of the Securitate records relating to the interrogations that resulted from her disappearance.  Nadia was helped by many people and circumstances, including some particularly lax reporting by the local Securitate, who may have been trying to help her.  But in the main, she just got lucky and avoided entrapment by the border guards.  The consequences of being caught would have been terrible for Nadia, but she had already had enough of the limitations placed on her life in Bucharest.  She wasn't especially well off, given that she was paying off debts accrued in the repair of her house in the capital; she couldn't fulfill important roles for Romania in the FIG as a judge or official, because she was largely denied all requests to travel abroad.  If America's CIA had arranged for her to be rescued, it's likely that they would have made far more political points from her arrival in the country than they did.  Nadia just decided that she needed to get out, and she did it quickly and efficiently with the help of some fairly reliable people.  


Only a few weeks later, the Romanian state fell.  Since 1990 Nadia has settled in America, got married and had a child.  She leads a normal life, works and seems to be reasonably healthy.  She is loyal to the country of her birth, visits family and friends there regularly, and although she is friendly and polite with everyone, she mainly maintains silence about the difficult times of her life.  


You should read this book.  While much of the narrative that it recounts is already in the public domain, it adds important detail, in particular regarding the sources, and opens the field for questioning of the narrative.   It is fairly long, and some passages require quite an effort to read., but it is worth the effort.  The long footnotes do add detail; I feel there could be even more referencing to indicate sources for the 'core' stories and help the reader to identify where new material is added.  However, the work is already extensively referenced, and in general it contributes significant new material and insights to the story of Nadia Comaneci and a formative time in gymnastics and world history. 


Afternote :


I should also add here, entirely personally, that Karolyi of course went on to recreate exactly the same horror of a gymnastics state in America. Within three years he was claiming credit for Mary Lou Retton, AA champion at the 1984 Olympics; within ten America had its first World Champion.  It took another thirty years before the West started to believe the gymnasts' stories of harm and abuse.  This is not the subject of this book, but it does tell the back story of how the whole of America was taken in by a bogus coach who sold a promise of medals at the cost of minors' misery.  He did it twice, once in an authoritarian dictatorship, and the second time in the land of the free.  Shame.













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