He’s the coach
to the Olympic athletes

Kids Stuff
By William Feldman

Welcome to Kids Stuff. Today’s column includes an interview with the legendary Bela Karolyi, coach for the most recognized gymnastics athletes.
Through Sunday, the Wachovia Center is hosting the U.S. Olympic team trials, which will select the new gymnastics team that will go to Beijing in August. Top gymnasts from the U.S. men and women’s teams will compete for gold in the Olympic Games.
Bela Karolyi was born Sept. 13, 1942, in Cluj, Romania. He attended the University of Physical Education in Romania, which is considered a very prestigious university. It trained students to become physical education teachers and offered special training in certain sports so they could become coaches.
The educational levels and degrees are different and include three grade levels and then a doctorate in science.
Combining his 30-year stellar coaching techniques in Romania and the U.S., Bela has produced 28 Olympians, nine Olympic champions, 15 world champions, 12 European medalists and six U.S. national champions.
Some of his best-known students were Nadia Comaneci, Mary Lou Retton, Julianne McNamara, Phoebe Mills, Kim Zmeskal, Betty Okino, Kerri Strug and Dominique Moceanu.
Bela’s experiences prior to coaching in the U.S. are amazing. He was a premier coach of gymnastics in Romania.
“At that time, Romania was a Socialist country and everything was government run,” he said. “I was starting out my coaching career employed by the ministry of education as a physical education teacher and coach. These two areas were combined back then, so there was not a particular coaching position.
“I graduated as a physical education teacher,” he added. “We were able to see that in elementary school there were certain indications that these young people had a tremendous potential to succeed in the sport of gymnastics. So we pursued this line and later developed a very prestigious group of kids winning the 1976 Olympics with Nadia Comaneci.”
Prior to gymnastics, Bela was involved in several sports, including boxing and team handball, and he played rugby at the highest level of competition. His experiences taught him for the future that “you have to be physically prepared, and the stronger you are and the harder you work and the people with the most endurance are going to be the winners.”
From team handball, he took a lot of the physical moves, particularly preparing for the competition and preparing particular strategical moves. From boxing, he brought the ideas of the importance of the sturdiness and the aggressiveness, along with the willingness to stay on your feet and not give up. These factors helped play a role in creating a new trend in gymnastics.
Bela explained that his gymnastics career started relatively late. In high school he was not involved in gymnastics, but at the University of Physical Education it was a mandatory sport. After being obligated, he became involved and found it was such an amazing sport.
“I didn’t realize before what kind of amazing insight you can get about yourself. My appreciation for the sport grew as the years went by. After college I decided to go and pursue this particular sport,” he said. “Another important factor was my wife, who was a competitive gymnast. Being at the same college and the same circumstances, we met and became very good friends. and this was a major factor in the direction I was going to take. So, after graduation we both went out to teach physical education but at the same time, we were acting as coaches on behalf of the elementary and university levels.”
How different was it to train Nadia Comaneci in the 1970s in Romania vs. American gymnasts today?
“There is a huge difference! First, Romania at that time was a Socialist country. Everything was run by the government. Everything had to be run in that government format,” he said. “If you were running a school there, you had to be in accord with all of the rules and regulations. You had to be responsive to the number of hours and several other obligations.”
He had the opportunity to go from school to school, kindergarten to kindergarten, testing students and recruiting them for the special school of gymnastics, which he was honored to accept in 1986.
“After their selection I had the opportunity to teach those children with full scholarships,” he recalled. “That was the most superior forum for preparation for the high performance sports in gymnastics. But time has changed and the world has changed. Those programs have become decentralized and are disappearing after the end of Socialism in Eastern Europe because of the lack of government support.”
What are the challenges in developing Olympic-caliber gymnasts?
“First of all, you have to identify the right people, the ones who in many, many months and years are going to be able to grow into competitive gymnasts and athletes,” he said. “The second need is to stay next to them for many, many months and years, through the good times and the bad times. Developing them, instructing them, educating them to mold them into competitive gymnasts. Then you have a very particular challenge introducing them to a competitive program from a recreational program.
“Some of the young gymnasts perform very powerful physical activities,” he continued, “but at the moment that they must compete they may act their age because their mental approach is not strong enough.
“Finally, the ultimate challenge is going with them to the competitions, making them competitive enough, supporting them strongly and hoping they can deliver the type of performance they are capable of.”
I was curious if Bela has a way to tell if a young athlete has what it takes to become an Olympic-caliber gymnast. He explained to me that it’s hard to tell just by looking at their physical skills.
He feels the major factor is what they have inside more than pure physical talent. He focused on the individual’s competitiveness and what he calls their lion-heart. He feels that the mental and psychological makeup of the athlete is just as important as the physical.
Of all the athletes that he has worked with and trained, I was curious which he felt was the most talented.
“There were very many young talented athletes that I was fortunate enough to work with,” he said. The best known, because of her amazing performance in the 1976 Olympics, was Nadia Comaneci.
“She was very talented physically and she had a very, very strong mind. She was a fierce competitor. With the combination of the mental strength and the physical ability, she became at that time a dominating force in the sport of gymnastics,” Bela said.
Another great example of the great combination of physical ability and mental strength was Mary Lou Retton, who won at the 1984 Olympic games.
“She had great physical abilities and was very strong and explosive. She was very strong but very pleasant and very lovely,” he said.
Another was Kim Zmeskal, whom Bela always called his “fiercest competitor” in his coaching career.
“She was a strong competitor and extremely confident in herself, winning the first women’s overall championship for the United States in 1991,” he said.
Kerri Strug, a two-time Olympian (’92 and ’96), helped bring the gold medal home for the women’s gymnastics team in 1996.
Kerri personally told me, “It was in the Olympics and my teammate had fallen on both of her vaults and I thought I had to make that final vault in order for us to win the gold. I had two torn ligaments, but I was fortunate that all of the training kind of paid off, because it was like automatic pilot. I knew what to do,” she said.
Bela jumped in to create one of the most memorable Olympic moments in history by carrying Strug off the mats.
I read this in an official press release: Bela and Martha, his wife, defected to the United States during an exhibition tour in 1981. He worked menial jobs to support them at first, but within one year they were coaching gymnastics once again in Oklahoma.
Shortly thereafter, Bela was approached by a group of businessmen with an offer to coach at a private gym in Houston. When the group faced financial difficulties in October 1982, Bela convinced them to sell the gym to him. He then built the gym into a cornerstone of the American gymnastics movement.
Bela and Martha own a 500-acre ranch outside of Houston that is used as a summer training camp. They have one daughter, Andrea. ••
Columnist William Feldman can be contacted by e-mail at wmkidscolumn@aol.com