Fri, Dec 06, 2002 page24

• Nadia Comaneci leaves Taiwan but the legend lives on

  At the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci became an instant international superstar when, on the women's uneven bars, she executed a move of airborne daring that has never been seen -- or imagined -- before and which earned her the world's first-ever perfect score of ten. At those same Olympics she would achieve seven more perfect scores and win three gold medals, one silver and one bronze. She appeared on the covers of `Time,' `Newsweek' and `Sports Illustrated,' all in the same week. Nadia arrived in Taiwan last Saturday for a five-day visit and `Taipei Times' reporter, Charles Engelbrecht, went to talk with her

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  At the age of six Nadia Coma-neci's mother sent her to afternoon classes at a gymnastics school in her hometown of Ornesti, Romania, because Nadia was literally bouncing off the walls.

  "My hyper-activeness was taking a toll on my mother's couches," she says, "so she thought gymnastics classes would drain some of my energy and give her furniture a break."

  

  Nadia teaches a local gymnast, Monday in Taipei.

  COURTESY OF DYNAMICS PR

  Nadia soon started to like the classes, but she never thought it would lead to much more than afternoons of fun.

  

  Nadia Comaneci showing her class at the age of 17.

  COURTESY OF DYNAMICS PR

  "It felt very temporary. I liked it but I never thought that I had a future in it."

  This is perhaps why, today, Nadia's first word of advice to anyone who wants to win a gold medal in gymnastics one day is "not to want it too much."

  "When children start to do gymnastics, they must train only because they enjoy it and want to improve their skill. Children who do gymnastics only because they want to win gold one day are in for a lot of pain and disappointment. It's just too much of a long shot."

  This may explain Nadia's perfect performances at high-level events. Perhaps the fact that she enjoyed what she was doing -- and therefore did not need so desperately to impress anyone -- helped her to avoid performance anxiety and stay calm during performances.

  In her lifetime she managed to win three and two golds respectively at the two Olympics she competed in, in 1976 and 1980 in Moscow. In all, she won nine Olympic medals and cleaned up at the European and World Championships.

  "It was very fortunate that my mother happened to choose gymnastics classes, if she chose anything else I doubt my life would have turned out the same."

  But the young Nadia's fun-oriented view of her sport did not keep her from getting noticed by Romania's coaches. By word of mouth she gained the attention of Romania's sporting complex -- and the coaches were impressed by what they saw.

  "After a while I sensed that I was learning things faster than others and started doing things others had difficulty with, but it was never as if I knew I was going to be a star."

  At the age of 13 she competed in her first big competition, the European Championships in Norway. There she won three golds and "there the world found out about me" -- and thus the stage was set for Montreal.

  When asked how those 1976 Olympics changed her life, Nadia replies: "Nothing!"

  "I went back home, I got a big welcome and I went back to the gym -- and everything went pretty much as before."

  Perhaps a big reason for this is the fact that Romania was a Communist-controlled satellite state of the USSR and the country was thus behind the Iron Curtain, its people controlled by an all-powerful government that chose where its heroes were seen -- and when.

  The incredible thing about Nadia was that many Westerners, especially Americans, rooted for her at the Montreal Games and hoped she would beat even their own gymnasts, despite the fact that the West was at that time locked in a bitter cold war with Romania and her allies.

  Because of her popularity in the West, she was considered to be a prime candidate for defection and, except for a brief, heavily supervised guest appearance at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, Nadia was rarely seen by the public after the 1980 Games.

  With travel forbidden, she started coaching the sport she once dominated.

  "But I didn't think it was fair to keep me from experiences and places I was invited to. Nobody could give me any reason why I was not allowed to travel. I felt trapped and I resented that."

  In 1989 Nadia could no longer stand the restrictions. She decided to make use of the easing border tensions caused by glasnost to walk at night across the mountains into Hungary and from there into Austria -- a feat that took six hours to complete.

  "From Austria I flew to New York and there I was contacted by a friend who worked at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, so I went to live in Montreal. But he tragically died a year later in a diving accident. Then I asked other friends I had met in Montreal, Paul Ziert and Bart Conner -- who I also first met at the '76 Games -- `what should I do' I asked them, and they said: `pack up and come to Oklahoma,' and that's how I landed in Oklahoma."

  Bart, also an Olympic-award-winning gymnast, and Paul were at that time working on the Bart Conner Gymnastics Academy in Norman, Oklahoma. Today the academy is one of the biggest in the US.

  Nadia and Bart were married in 1996. Together they run the Bart Conner Academy and are also editors of International Gymnast magazine.

  "But most of our work is on the road -- we fly a lot to different parts of the world to promote gymnastics and good causes," Nadia says.

  "One of my favorite moments was when I introduced President Bush to my fellow Romanians just a few weeks ago."

  Nadia accompanied Bush on the presidential balcony when he gave an historic speech to thousands of Romanians gathered in Bucharest's Revolution Square, just after NATO decided to give Romania membership.
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