Letters to a Young Gymnast (4 page)

I read a book by Ayn Rand when I was in my thirties, and in it, a character is asked what he would do if he were Atlas and had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He answers, “Shrug.” At nine, I was unable to do so. I had practiced countless hours and knew my routine to perfection. But I found myself unable to concentrate because of the pressure I'd put on myself.

I could taste how much I wanted to do well, but with my first high leap, I fell off the left side of the beam. Embarrassed, I climbed back on and immediately fell off the right side. Determined not to fall again, I remounted. My ears burned with the imagined laughter of my teammates and other competitors, and I couldn't bear to think of facing Marta when I was done. I will not fall
again, I promised myself. I fell again. I felt shame and stupidity. You fall once, it's a mistake, but twice is a lack of brains. Kids do things wrong, but that was a little much, like hitting myself in the head three times. It was my first taste of failure, and I didn't like it at all. Maybe that is what makes a champion more than any other thing: hating to fail and hating to not exceed your goals.

Back then, I had never even heard of the Olympics. Success and failure weren't tied to the Games but to my own personal accomplishments and mistakes. Think about it . . . in those days, there were only a few professional sportswomen in the entire world, and I didn't know about them because my government strictly monitored what we saw on television. Messing up at a competition didn't mean you weren't going to qualify for the next one. All it meant was that you hadn't done well and that you needed to improve. I never wanted to hear that I was incredible or perfect. I wanted to know I had talent, that I learned skills faster than the next girl, and that I was pretty good at my sport. That wasn't possible after my first Nationals.

Marta was fuming when I finished my beam routine. She believed in discipline, and she was terribly demanding. It was not enough to just do a skill: We had to do it correctly, or it was a waste of time. Marta also believed there must be mastery over the basics, which are truly the most important building blocks of a gymnastics career. The basics include strength, conditioning, and the perfection of the easiest of skills so that the more difficult ones are built upon a rock-solid foundation. A gymnast cannot do a flip on the beam unless the leaps and steps before that skill are so smooth that she will be perfectly positioned and balanced for the more difficult
elements. Without the basics, a gymnast gets into dangerous accidents—rips muscles, breaks bones, cracks vertebrae. In my life, I have never seen another beam coach who has Marta's dedication to detail or who produces such incredible results in her gymnasts.

The Karolyis understood that, as children, we young gymnasts were incapable of disciplining ourselves, so they had to do it for us. They told us how many hours to practice (ranging from four to six a day) and how long to study (which was always as much as necessary to finish our work). Every night, we slept eight to ten hours so that our minds and bodies could be fresh. And each meal included specific portions of meat, vegetables, and milk so that our bodies and bones would grow stronger. Some kids hate being told exactly what to do down to putting out the light at night, but as a little kid, I didn't mind. I wanted to do everything Bela and Marta said because I wanted to be better; because I craved organization; and because, from early on, I was the leader of my group of little girls and felt I should be their role model.

But conditioning the body and the mind are two different things, and at age nine, my mind wasn't a steel-tight drum. What Marta didn't understand that day when I fell off the beam was that no matter what she said to me, I said worse to myself. I was frustrated, furious, humiliated, and determined to never have those kinds of mistakes plague me again. I came in thirteenth at that competition. In the end, my low score on the beam actually won the competition for our team, but I still felt miserable. I'd disappointed everyone, especially myself.

You asked in your last letter if I ever wanted to quit gymnastics, and that's a fair question. The answer is, never in the early days. Never. Gymnastics was fun. Bela
had a vision of bringing all his experience in boxing, rugby, handball, and general athletics to gymnastics. He believed we could have the team spirit of rugby players, the toughness of boxers, and the aggression of handball players as well as all-around strength. Due to his size, he was a great spotter, and out of that grew respect and trust. The spotter is the person who keeps a gymnast learning new skills from getting hurt. If a gymnast knows that his or her spotter is dependable, that gymnast will have the courage to try more and more difficult skills without fear. With Bela, I always knew he wouldn't let me hit the ground or an apparatus. Plus, his attitude was light and easy compared to Marta's, so I really enjoyed working with him. Later, though, our relationship would change.

But I am getting ahead of myself. On the heels of failure came my first success, at the 1972 Friendship Cup. Our team's gymnasts were only ten years old. All the gymnasts from the other countries were in their late teens and early twenties. Bela and Marta hadn't even known how much younger we were before we arrived at the competition because they'd never seen the Soviet gymnasts, let alone the Czechs or Germans, compete. We walked into the arena, tiny little girls with pigtails, facing the likes of Lyudmila Turischeva, a long-legged and unbelievably graceful gymnast from Russia.

Today, Bela says that he always had a theory about copying. He explains that if, as a coach, you copy the style and training of the best gymnasts, your own gymnasts will never be as good—they'll be almost as good but not quite there. They will run behind but never catch up. If, however, you create gymnasts with unique styles, they will have a chance to outshine all others. I
believe Bela's theory is true in life, too. Trying to be someone else may get you through the door, but being unique will get you noticed!

The Friendship Cup competition pitted the little girls against the big girls. We weren't as seasoned as some of the Czechs and Germans. Most of us had been training for years but had not been in as many competitions as gymnasts such as Tourischeva. But we concentrated and fell back on all the practice, training, and emotionally and physically demanding hard work we'd put in, and we exploded like fireworks. As a result of our conditioning, we had fantastic power and technique and performed skills never seen in gymnasts so young.

Bela and Marta had trained us to be professional regardless of the level of competition. We were so used to our busy routine during meets—stretching, visualizing each event, performing, and helping teammates prepare by measuring the location of the springboard for vaults—that we didn't have time to get nervous about the more experienced competitors. In the end, I won the all-around gold at the Friendship Cup. The team won the silver. We had done the unthinkable, beating the best international gymnasts in the world.

For me, winning has never been about standing up on a podium and having a medal draped around my neck. I used to look out at the audience and see all the people clapping; I watched Bela and Marta's smiles; I kissed the cheeks of my fellow competitors . . . but the drums inside me thrummed to a different beat. Standing up there, watching my country's flag rise, I felt pride, but even at a young age, my mind always replayed my performance and looked for holes, mistakes, opportunities to do better.

My friend, you think it is all about glory, but you are wrong. Winning is intensely personal in a way that might not make sense to you. What did I know about glory when I was ten? To me, competing was about the next time and the next and then the one after that. It was about improving my body and mind—overcoming frustrations, anger, and jealousy so that, in one shining moment, my body became a tool driven by unwavering concentration and desire.

After the Friendship Cup, my goal was simply to improve as a gymnast. For the next three years, there was nothing I wouldn't try, and I grew stronger, more focused, and more powerful with each day, month, and year. That is not to say that I didn't have setbacks or difficulties learning new skills or that I won every competition. But there was nothing I didn't want to learn, and that set me free to accomplish my goal. The power of a youngster is a thousand times stronger than that of an adult because there are no perceived boundaries for the child. I will tell you the story of the 1975 European Championships in Norway and let you see for yourself.

Originally, the Romanian Gymnastics Federation did not plan to send any of the Onesti gymnasts to the European Championships in Norway. There was another gymnastics club in Romania called Club Dinamo, which had a lot of money behind it and, consequently, a great program and very talented gymnasts. The federation usually chose Dinamo's gymnasts (because they had a history of good results) for important competitions, even after our school's girls began to shine brighter than theirs. When it was announced that three gymnasts would compete in Norway, all three came from Club Dinamo.

Bela refused to accept the federation's initial decision: The championship was too important. Only one year before the Olympics, it was an opportunity to attract international attention, which is vital if a gymnast wants to be scored to her fullest potential. Only gymnasts who make names for themselves garner enough attention to impress upon the judges that they are worthy of watching and of receiving high scores and even medals. Think about Olympic figure skating. I imagine that you recognize the names of the top three women in that sport. Medal-winning athletes just don't appear out of thin air; they are written and read about and watched. That is not to say that the athletes who receive the most attention aren't the best in their sports, but being a great athlete will not bring medals unless you are also noticed by the world.

In 1975, Bela turned to officials at the Ministry of Education (which funded our school), and together, they figured out a way to get one of the gymnasts from our team to Norway—they created an alternate position. That meant three girls from Dinamo and one of us would be sent. But who was going to go? This is where frustration and jealousy and the power of a child to master her emotions come into play. In 1975, Dorina was the best gymnast on our team. She had joined our school months earlier, and I immediately knew that she was good, very good. We became friends, but we were also rivals. Bela purposefully put Dorina and me together during practices, trips, and meets because he realized we both liked the competition and that it fueled us.

The day Bela announced that we'd have an interclub meet to decide which of his gymnasts would attend the European Championships, I knew the choice was between
Dorina and me. All I can say is that on that day, I truly began to fly as a gymnast. Despite the fact that Bela was almost certain Dorina would win and consequently be the one attending the competition, I was in great form that day. The result was that I was chosen to attend the championships.

Many people have criticized Bela Karolyi and his style over the past decades. But I have never known a coach who fought harder—or more loudly—for his gymnasts' rights. There have been times when he has tap-danced along the gray line between right and wrong, fairness and injustice, but to know as a child that he is in your corner and to feel the warmth of his smile and praise is unlike anything else I have ever experienced.

Bela was in rare form at the European Championships. When Club Dinamo decided they'd only use two of their three gymnasts for the competition, Bela attained the unfilled third spot for me. I went on to win four gold medals, including the all-around European title. Lyudmila Turischeva, the current world and Olympic champion, was beaten by a little girl who had put aside every negative emotion and simply concentrated on being her best. I was not lucky. No one can be that lucky in gymnastics. You have skills that you're capable of doing, and you always know what you can and cannot deliver. If Marta were to say to me that I should do something a different way and I couldn't do it in practice, then I wouldn't be able to do it in a competition. Nothing fell out of the sky and touched me like magic as I swung from the bars or vault. Just as in life, everyone has things they can accomplish, and you put your skills in your bag and pull them out when needed. If they're not in your bag, you can't pull them out because you simply don't
have them. The only pressure comes from losing concentration and slipping, not from performing skills you know you can deliver.

I've always been tough on myself about mistakes. As a child, I used to take chances and risks, but I won't anymore. I play the safe side of things now. Maybe that just comes with age. I think mistakes are a waste of time, but when I was younger, I believed that I had to learn by knocking my nose against the wall so I could tell the difference between good and bad by myself: I had a lot of bloody noses back then. But I digress and will tell you more about those mistakes later, if you are interested. First, let me get back to Ludmila.

I will never forget Ludmila's poise in defeat when she walked over to me at the championships and kissed me on the cheek. I still have the photograph of that moment because she was my idol. We couldn't communicate—we didn't speak the same language—but in that instant, I knew that she was a true champion and that I wanted to take some of her grace and make it my own. I believe you can take the attributes you admire in others and incorporate them into your own life. You can't copy someone else's gymnastics style and come out on top, but you can make yourself a better person by learning from another's actions.

In retrospect, I realize just how terribly disappointed Lyudmila must have been because the European Championships only happen every two years and she had won in 1971 and 1973. If she won in 1975, she would have been given the Challenge Cup for winning three times in a row. Later, I would be the first gymnast in the world to accomplish that feat—in 1975, 1977, and 1979—and to receive the Challenge Cup. But back then, I knew
only that I was happy and that I hoped the Romanian people could share in my achievements. Still, I thought the European Championships were something important but small, like getting a 10 on a mathematics test at school (a perfect score in the Romanian grading system). There was no media attention on me until 1976, when the walls of my tiny world were blown apart and spotlights and camera flashes left me stunned like a deer in the road.