Letters to a Young Gymnast

by Nadia Comaneci

  As a young adult, it’s hard to negotiate between people’s expectations of you versus your own expectations and the reality of your situation. It’s impossible not to feel upset when what you believe you deserve doesn’t mesh with reality. It’s impossible not to feel upset when other people believe you are living a life that is not, in truth, your own. Figuring out how to find dignity and happiness within yourself, instead of searching for it from other people or from material things, is one of life’s toughest lessons. It took me many years to learn that lesson, but with it came peace.

  Friend, back in Romania I didn’t have many material things. I had a car that my mother had bought with some of our savings, but it was little more than a tin can with four wheels, not a Mercedes. Sure, there were some Romanian athletes who made money, such as soccer players, who, for whatever reason, were considered huge national heroes and deserving of monetary rewards for their accomplishments. But in gymnastics, there was very little money to be made, and I was given only a small amount from my exhibition tours. I don’t know who in the government decided on the amount of money and special treatment that went to individual athletes, but whoever it was didn’t think much of gymnasts, even though the Romanian people considered me to be a national hero.

  Back then, Olympic athletes in Communist countries had no opportunities to make money off endorsements or public-speaking engagements. We didn’t have sport agents, and our only “representation” came from our government. So if the government didn’t see fit to give us much money, then we didn’t have much money. Today, top athletes have so many opportunities for fame and wealth, and I don’t know if that helps or hurts their careers. Gymnastics was never about money for me, but it was humiliating to have worked so hard, in part for the glory of my country, and to still be struggling to survive.

  In Bucharest, I continued to train, but I was mentally finished with gymnastics, this time for real. I played around a lot in the gym, but I maintained my level of fitness. When Bela came for a visit, he was amazed at my abilities and said I would definitely be on the Romanian team. The Romanian government touted the 1980 Olympics as the first all-Communist Games because the United States and other democratic countries were boycotting as a result of the Russians’ invasion of Afghanistan (several non-Communist countries did participate, however). The boycott didn’t make much difference to me. I’m not judging whether it was warranted. Back then, I paid no attention to politics. The bottom line for me was that our gymnastics team was competing against the Russians and Germans because they were our strongest competitors. American gymnast weren’t on our level at that time, so they wouldn’t be missed at the Games.

  You mentioned something in your last letter about how courageous I was to compete in the 1980 Olympics. I must admit I’m a little confused. Do you think it took courage to compete because I was older than the rest of the team? It didn’t, since the truth is that I was better. I knew at the time that the competition going into Moscow would be tough, but when wasn’t it tough? I believe that everyone reaps what he or she has sown. I was a great gymnast and deserved to compete at the 1980 Games and to do well.

  In Moscow, we walked into the mouth of a lion’s den; it was the Russians’ home turf, but the only fear I felt entering the arena was the nerves that come before the start of any competition. The hardest time is always the waiting. The waiting kills me and twists my stomach into knots. But once the competition begins, the fear is gone. There’s nothing to do about nerves except to stay focused and know that the feeling will go away once it is replaced by concentration. If a gymnast can’t replace fear with concentration during a competition, then she will have more problems than a few knots in her stomach.

  Did you know that we had team psychologists who trained us to do routines over and over again in our heads? I could perform every movement, leap, twist, and somersault and almost feel each apparatus beneath my hands just by closing my eyes and summoning up the events. Those same psychologists also taught us to see our capacity to solve problems by working on actual puzzles, brainteasers with pieces we needed to unlock, and cubes with colors that had to be manipulated in patterns. They tested how quickly we became frustrated by those puzzles and helped us to work on managing our frustration levels. We did a lot of that type of training. Bela used to bring people from the street into our training sessions to make noise and try to break our focus by yelling and whistling. Sometimes we even practiced doing our routines without warming up just in case such a situation ever arose. If they’d awakened me at 3:00 A.M., I could have done a perfect beam routine. We were prepared for everything, and a little booing couldn’t hurt us.

  Day one of the Olympics, Bela patted all of us on the backs and told us we could do it; he told us we’d do great. But as it happened, I didn’t do that great. I fell during my bar routine. It happened so fast that there was nothing I could do to save my performance. One minute I was up there, the next I was on the mat. As a gymnast, you naturally hope it doesn’t happen, but it does. And there’s no way to go back and fix it. That happens in life, too, those times you wish you could just do something over so that the results would be better. The only thing to do is try again and try harder. Overwhelm the negative. After my fall on the bars, I’ve heard that many of my fellow Romanians wanted to blame the Russians or the flashes of cameras for my mistake. Neither had anything to do with it. I just lost my concentration and fell.

  You might not believe this, but it does not take that much courage to get back on any apparatus after a fall. It’s actually easy. Once a mistake is made, nothing worse can really happen. It’s a done deal. The worst part about a mistake is dealing with the disappointment once the routine is over.

  You’ve asked me if after a mistake, I ever hoped another gymnast would fall. The fact is, I rarely watched my competitors during competitions because I was usually warming up or performing at the same time. If not, I was helping to move the springboard or doing measurements for the teammate who competed after I was done with an event. Almost every moment during a competition is planned out—there’s no time for idle thoughts. There’s certainly no time to wish anyone difficulties.

  I rarely watched my own teammates perform at events for two reasons. First, Bela suggested that it would help all of us concentrate if we didn’t watch each other because that was just another distraction. Second, if one of our gymnasts messed up, it put too much pressure on me. Only one person on a team is allowed to make a mistake on any event because the lowest score is thrown out. If there had already been a mistake before I competed, then I had to hit an event with no reserve. That was too much pressure. And if I made the mistake? I never spent time trying to calculate what needed to happen for me to win. That was a waste of time. So was competing against my teammates. If a fellow gymnast does well, then the whole team benefits.

  People tend to believe that it’s a catfight between the gymnasts. What they don’t understand is that everyone knows what their teammates are capable of doing in any event. It’s not like you need to spy on them. Gymnasts accomplish the skills they perform in training. You cannot do more in a competition than you can in training. It’s not possible. Maybe you stick a landing here or there and that’s better, but there are no big surprises. Gymnasts compete against themselves. Nobody else really makes a difference in the big picture. But the media like to play up rivalries and create heroes.

  Our team as a whole performed so well in the team competition at the 1980 Olympics that we were second to the Russians. Despite my earlier fall off the bars, I still had the chance to win the gold in the individual all-around finals, but I didn’t assume I would. Another gymnast who’d done all four events without any errors could potentially knock me out of first place because my low score from the earlier round when I fell off the bars was carried over into the final competition. That meant I had to perform a near perfect routine on each apparatus, plus another gymnast had to make a mistake so that my score would be higher than hers.

  Today, the
rules are different. Gymnasts’ scores don’t carry over into a final competition. So, if you fall off the beam during the team competition, you aren’t penalized during the individual all-around. It’s a good change because it makes a competition more interesting and because each girl has the chance to win: One bad day or a single mistake can’t ruin an entire Olympics. But in 1980, we were still using the old rules, and though I wanted to win the individual all-around, I didn’t think I had much of a chance.

  The beam was my final event at the 1980 Games. Yelena Davydova was set to finish on the bars, and if she made no mistakes, she would take the all-around gold. In the competition order, I was to perform second on the beam, and Yelena would be the sixth and final gymnast on the bars. Simple, right? Wrong. After the first competitor finished her beam routine, I prepared for the judges to signal my turn. But they didn’t. Instead, they huddled together, and I thought they were conferring about a score. Meanwhile, the bar routines continued. First, second, third . . . I still waited for my turn on the beam.

  Bela instructed me to do some more warm-ups on the floor. As I said, the waiting was the hardest part. The fourth and fifth girls did their bar routines. Impatient, Bela tried to ask the judges what the holdup was, but they had no answer. Yelena did her bar routine—and there were no major mistakes. She received a 9.95. I was finally motioned to the beam. Apart from a slight bobble, I turned in a very solid routine and was scored a 9.85. That was a good number in Moscow; if we’d been in Romania, I probably would have gotten a higher score. Home turf makes quite a difference. No one can argue with a perfect routine, but if there’s the slightest mistake and a gymnast is competing in another country . . . well, the scores just won’t be as high.

  Davydova won the gold. I wasn’t that disappointed. I’d won the silver. But Bela was angry because he thought I’d deserved a 9.95 on the beam. More than that, he believed that the judges had conspired to have Davydova perform her bar routine before I competed on the beam so that they could score her higher and ensure her the gold medal. Personally, I don’t believe that’s true, but I can’t know for certain. At the time, I just sat on a mat and watched Bela run around the arena demanding to see individual scores and yelling for justice.

  I knew that the Romanian people were watching the Games on television and that they would be upset because they would believe we’d been cheated. But nothing at the 1980 Olympics was different from past competitions. For me, I knew I had made a mistake on the bars. That day, Yelena just performed better. I didn’t think about scoring or whether the judges were playing fair. I’d made a mistake; losing the gold was my fault alone. And still, I’d moved from fourth to second, and that was satisfying in its own right.

  I have heard that Bela got into a lot of trouble when he returned to Romania for disrupting the Moscow Olympics by making a scene about the fairness of the judges’ scores. A friend told me that the people were filled with hate for the Russians and believed that we were cheated. But I went down on the bars, I thought, did no one see that? It’s a strange feeling when what you know for certain clashes with what the media or the people of your country are saying. I was baffled about the situation, but in my heart, I knew what had happened and refused to lie to myself or anyone else. If you are not true to yourself, then your life becomes a lie. I was told that Bela was called to Bucharest to report to the Central Committee, composed of the powerful leaders under Ceausescu who ran the country.

  It has been said that Ceausescu never liked Bela because he was of Hungarian heritage and that the president was looking for an excuse to bring him trouble. Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former head of Romanian Intelligence (he was the highest-ranking defector from the Eastern bloc) wrote in his exposé, Red Horizons, that Ceausescu was a fanatical nationalist. “Only ethnic Romanians going back two generations and born within the Romanian borders are allowed to hold Party and government positions affecting national security,” Pacepa said in his book. “For the job I held in the DIE [Departamentul de Informatii Externe—the Foreign Intelligence Service], the requirement was pure Romanian blood going back three generations.”

  I cannot say that I was surprised by the time I read Pacepa’s book about Ceausescu’s nature. But I’m constantly surprised to read that Ceausescu really cared that much about the Karolyis or me. Pacepa said that “by the end of 1977 Ceausescu had decided to change Nadia’s coaches. ‘I don’t want to share Nadia’s fame with a couple of dirty boanghen [a derogatory term for Hungarians],’ he said. ‘We have to find Romanian coaches for her, people of Romanian blood.’” That was the time when the government decided that Bela and I should have a trial separation and I was moved to Bucharest. It’s strange to interpret your own history through the eyes of someone else. I like to believe that I chose to go to Bucharest, but I’m not so naive that I can’t accept other possibilities.

  Regardless of what was said between Ceausescu and his most trusted adviser, Bela recalls that when he arrived at the committee headquarters in 1980, he was forced to stand before a table of men and explain why he had disturbed the Games, spoken to the Western media (Bela told an ABC affiliate reporter that the Games were corrupt), and insulted our “Soviet friends.” He was told that he’d humiliated Romania and Ceausescu, and his life was threatened; the possibility of imprisonment for his “crimes” was also raised. I was not there, but I can say that Romanians have gone to prison for lesser offenses.

  Meanwhile, I went with the flow and didn’t talk to anyone about the Games or make any comments. I was settling down to life in Bucharest.

  ■ The Struggle

  In Romania, the process of creating our floor routines began with Geza Pozsar, our choreographer. Geza would play different kinds of music and have all the gymnasts out on the floor dancing. He’d watch us and see what type of music we moved to best. Then he’d have each girl try to create specific moves to go with the music so that he could envision what kind of choreography would work for each of us. I loved to dance to Harry Belafonte, so Geza used that music for me.

  Back when I was competing, there were no tapes or compact discs for music, and each gymnast executed her floor routine in competitions to a song performed live by a piano player. Only one accompanying instrument was allowed. That might seem simple compared to today’s floor routine music, but there were advantages. A compact disc won’t wait for a gymnast to recover from a mistake, but a piano player will.

  Life in Bucharest after the 1980 Olympics was, at best, mundane. I was going to school, supporting my brother, who was living with me and also at school, and trying to survive through the second half of each month because I was so broke. I’m not proud of this, but you should know the truth, my friend: My situation bothered me a lot. If I’d always lived my life as a “regular” person, I never would have known any different. But I’d won numerous international competitions and made my country proud, and I still had nothing.

  Life isn’t fair, I knew that . . . but in addition, it was exhausting. An acquaintance used to get me clothes because she worked in a clothing factory; I’d trade fruits and vegetables every day so that I could figure out what to make for dinner each night. To this day, I don’t have recipes for anything, I just improvise with what’s available. I’m a good cook, very inventive. If a friend had a little extra fish, I’d trade it for a piece of cheese. It was a constant challenge. I was twenty and felt the weight of my life as well as my family’s, and at times it was overwhelming.

  The only “special” groceries I received were two loaves of bread from a friend who worked in the bread factory. This was a favor but not a government favor. Getting food was extremely difficult for everybody. We had an old neighbor, Aleca Petre, who must have been seventy, and he used to wake up at 4:00 A.M. and stand in line at the grocery store in the freezing winter weather, waiting to see if there was anything on the shelves. Usually, there was only mayonnaise, mustard, and beans. That was it. He’d bring us a few bottles of milk and on rare occasions a piece of meat. I’d always i
nvite him to join us for meals, even though we didn’t have much. That is the way Romanians are: We share what we have.

  Not a day went by that we didn’t share something with our neighbors. We used to joke that we’d borrow each other’s old meat bones to make soup. It was a tragic and difficult life for everyone. People would have been happy if they could just have put something on the table for their kids to eat. Meanwhile, all of the good food in our country was being exported. I later came to understand from newspaper articles and books that it was Ceausescu’s way of filling his coffers and paying off the debt he’d incurred on behalf of our country (I’ll tell you more about that later, if you are interested). I realized when I left gymnastics just how lucky I had been. When I was training, I ate incredibly well by comparison. It’s no wonder I still find it difficult to complain about those days, as I was so much better off than most everyone else. But when my gymnastics days were over, I was left in the same unhappy position as the rest of the people of my country.

  Life was unfair and difficult, but I still considered myself to be lucky because I had the opportunity to attend school. That meant I could get a job outside of the factories. The sports diploma at the university was a four-year program, but students didn’t have to attend lectures; instead, they took books and assignments home and then took exams with the rest of the student body at the end of each course. While at the university, I got my first job as a choreographer for a dance team. It was there that I met Nicu Ceausescu, who worked in the same building. A lot has been said over the years about my “relationship” with Nicu, President Nicolae Ceausescu’s son. Even you asked if I was his girlfriend toward the end of my gymnastics career and later, when I worked as a coach for the government. It is one of the tamer questions I’ve been asked about Nicu.