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Home » Time (and the Olympics) marches on: Comaneci is 50

Time (and the Olympics) marches on: Comaneci is 50

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s Olympics time again. I used to be a big fan, but in recent decades I’ve hardly paid attention. The hype is too big, the athletes too interchangeable.

But I came across this clip of Nadia Comaneci, the star of the 1976 Olympics. She’s 50 now, which stunned me, although it shouldn’t have—surely I know that the fierce little girl who wowed the crowd back then would now be all grown up and then some.

I liked her in ’76 not just because of her formidable skills, but because of her stern, tough, no-nonsense demeanor, which I found somehow refreshing compared to the syrupy-sweet cuteness of so many gymnasts.

Here she is:

Nadia grew up to defect and then to marry fellow-gymnast Bart Conner, and to have a baby at the age of 44. Here’s a photo that’s a portent of things to come. It was taken in 1976, when she was a soon-to-be-famous 14-year old and he a well-known 18-year-old.

The kiss was hardly spontaneous; it was orchestrated by a prescient photographer, as this article written in 1995 (when they were engaged) makes clear:

Before the revolution in Romania, before the political defections, before the Olympics, before the perfect 10, before anything was possible. Madison Square Garden. March 28, 1976. The American Cup Gymnastics Competition.

The little girl from Romania is hoping to do well in the Olympics later that year. She wins the women’s trophy in the New York competition. She is 14. The towheaded boy from Chicago, on his way to the University of Oklahoma, wins the men’s trophy. It is his 18th birthday. The photographers pose the winners together.

“Give her a little kiss,” one of the photographers calls out, and the boy leans over, dutifully, and kisses the little girl on the cheek.

Years later, Conner will remind her about that moment. He remembers it all. But for Comaneci, it is part of a youth that was lost in training and competition and the painful search for a perfect score in an imperfect life.

“I just remember it was some little blond guy,” she teases.

Here’s another little blond boy:

Comments

Time (and the Olympics) marches on: Comaneci is 50 — 10 Comments

  1. Nadia grew up to defect

    so did MANY others…

    which this gives me the opportunity to draw attention to something that most may not notice.

    in any country, you have the successful, the fair to midlands, and the poor and unlucky

    its a spectrum… on a slope…
    even in soviet Russia that claimed to male the slope level, it never was. (rather than an analogue slope, it was a digital staircase of a few steps)

    but this is the key thing to notice.

    people leave mexico for a better life
    yes?
    people leave vietnam for a better live
    yes?

    but rarely if ever do the high up, well connected, those that benefit in the current system… choose to leave

    from mexico its mostly poor, and so on
    same with everywhere else.

    but from russia, the poor were locked down

    and it was so bad the best of the best who were supported by such a regime, and coddled compared to the rest of the population…

    Ran away and barely looked back…

    you don’t know the names of the Mexicans that cross the border, or the Chinese, and so on.

    but you do know the names of those that fled such oppression!!!!!!! scientists, mathematicians, ballet dancers, performers in other arts, musicians, physicists, engineers, generals, kgb/gru, and on and on it goes.

    this was a point that i showed a friend on the left…

    all one has to do is go to you tube, and to see the videos of when the German wall was put up, then beefed up and beefed up more.

    how bad would America have to get, that you would seize an opportunity to jump through a hole, and maybe get killed in the process..

    to leave your home, your friends, your language, your money, your accounts, your papers, your property, business. – and run to people who you were raised to believe would be worse than what your leaving

    reading it you will read of people who saw a open door, and ran… jumped from windows, constructed a hot air balloon.

    but the most common way, was to work hard, be trusted, and when your allowed to visit to show your stuff off, jump and dont look back. try to forget that they will torture your family to get you back… or just to make you miserable for leaving

    http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1069206/index.htm

    The land Comaneci, 28, fled is governed by a Communist dictator. President Nikolae Ceau?escu, who combines the brute oppression of Stalin’s U.S.S.R. with the maniacal terrorism of Papa Doc Duvalier’s Haiti. The border she crossed is among the last in Eastern Europe still barricaded with barbed wire and manned by guards who shoot to kill. Indeed, the very thought of her defection presented an enormous risk. Comaneci had once been the lover of Nicu Ceau?escu, the president’s bully of a son, and she was still a favored member of the Ceau?escu court; the slightest whisper that she might be thinking of fleeing would have been embarrassing to the regime, which presumably might have used the country’s ubiquitous secret police to keep her in line.

    now, would you sleep with kim jon ils son, have sex with him, and hang out with kim jong il to be trusted to the point where you could find a hole in the fence?

    Except for the lack of freedom, her life in Bucharest was actually not that bad. As the winner of 21 gold medals in Olympic and world championship competitions between 1976 and ’84, and as the recipient of the first perfect 10’s in Olympic gymnastics, Comaneci was placed on a pedestal that allowed her to live like a rock star. As one Romanian expatriate in the U.S. put it, “She is the most famous of all Romanians–probably not even Dracula was as famous.”

    Comaneci lived in an eight-room villa in Bucharest with her mother, her brother and several servants. She owned a dacha, wore expensive jewelry and drove a Dacia (a Romanian-made Renault). The Dacia carried a license plate with just three digits–a status symbol in Romania that allows top party officials, diplomats and secret police to park anywhere, drive at any speed and drink all they want before getting behind the wheel.

    as i said..
    imagine a place so bad the biggest best winners want to run or die trying and took years to do it.

    how bad? well, she went out with the prince…
    she broke up with him to love another athelete.

    at the engagement party the prince came, and like Caligula, with thugs, proceeded to rape her… (the idea is to make her unwanted by the new love – spoiled goods)

    As far back as 1977, her original coach, Bela Karolyi, had told her, “Nadia, you have to think maybe sometime you will want to change your place and situation. Always will not be the same as you think it is now.” Karolyi himself defected in New York in 1981 during a Romanian team tour, and Comaneci had talked for several years about getting out, too. Jackie Fie, an American judge for international competitions and a trusted acquaintance of Comaneci’s said last week, “She used to say to me in the early 1980s, ‘Oh, I want to hide in your suitcase and stay.’ “

    there is more
    there is always more…

  2. One thing I could not abide about women’s gymnastics was it being dominated by teenagers — not women. Should have called it ‘girl’s’ gymnastics events.

    A cursory look at the ages of the gold medal winning team members in the Olympics just before and after the WW II, 1936 — German team — 8 members, 1948 Czech team — 8 members showed only 1 teenager (18 year old Anita Bé¤rwirth) all other competitors in their early to mid twenties. Even as late as the ’60 Olympics in Rome, Soviet Gold Medal team, 6 members — 24, 25, 26, and 31! (two competitor’s ages not given)

    In the 2008 Beijing Games, China’s gold medal team had one 20 year old and five 16-17 year olds. That’s not women.

    Now there’s nothing I can abide about the Olympics, least of all the opening ceremonies global extravaganzas that look like they’ve been produced by a contingent of gay dictators.

  3. The Olympics games are upon us yet again. It would be a wonderful event to watch IF the TV people would just SHUT UP and let watch the amazing athletes. NO sob stories, please. Is that too much to hope for?

  6. George Pal: Now there’s nothing I can abide about the Olympics, least of all the opening ceremonies global extravaganzas that look like they’ve been produced by a contingent of gay dictators.

    funny you should say that…
    even funnier that you mention the 1936 Olympics

    Nazi Olympics, Berlin 1936:
    Inauguration of the Olympic Torch Relay

    http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007451

    The 1936 Games were the first to employ the torch run. Each of 3,422 torch bearers ran one kilometer (0.6 miles) along the route of the torch relay from the site of the ancient Olympics in Olympia, Greece, to Berlin. Former German Olympian Carl Diem modeled the relay after one that had been run in Athens in 80 B.C. It perfectly suited Nazi propagandists, who used torch-lit parades and rallies to attract Germans, especially youth, to the Nazi movement. The torch itself was made in 1936 by Krupp, a German company better known for its production of steel and armaments.

    and now coffee machines…

    Not only did we keep that, but we even kept the philosophy and so forth.. which makes that a triumph… or shall i say “triumph of the will”

    Fritz Schilgen was a German athlete and the final torchbearer of the first Olympic torch relay at the 1936 Summer Games.

    He was chosen by the organizers of the relay as a “symbol of German sporting youth” and for his beautiful and graceful running style, as determined by the aesthetics commission. Schilgen’s dramatic lighting of the flame in the Olympic Stadium is captured in Olympia, a Nazi propaganda film about the Games by Leni Riefenstahl, who also helped devise the torch relay and select Schilgen as final torchbearer.

    Schilgen himself did not compete in the Olympics.

    (but he does have 35 patents)

    Leni had a weird thing for torches…
    skiers with torches…
    and the end of triumph of the will is a torch scene.

    so its funny you should say that…

  7. That they still do – in memory of what?
    But give memory to the Israeli athletes that were murdered on this 40th anniversary … nope…

    The Munich massacre is an informal name for an attack that occurred during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Bavaria in southern West Germany, when members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage and eventually killed by the Palestinian group Black September

    German newspaper Der Spiegel wrote in a front-page story in 2012 that the German authorities had a tip-off from a Palestinian informant in Beirut three weeks before the massacre. The informant told Germany that Palestinians were planning an “incident” at the Olympic Games, and the Foreign Ministry in Bonn viewed the tip-off seriously enough to pass it on to the secret service in Munich and urge that “all possible security measures” be taken.,

    at this point, i draw your attention to another interesting defector. Pacepa..

    Wall Street Journal, Saturday, January 12, 2002
    The Arafat I Knew
    http://www.weizmann.ac.il/home/comartin/israel/pacepa-wsj.html

    In 1972, the Kremlin established a “socialist division of labor” for supporting international terrorism. Romania’s main clients in this new market were Libya and the PLO. A year later, a Romanian intelligence adviser assigned to the PLO headquarters in Beirut reported that Arafat and his KGB handlers were preparing a PLO commando team headed by Arafat’s top deputy, Abu Jihad, to take American diplomats hostage in Khartoum, Sudan, and demand the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of Robert Kennedy.

    “St-stop th-them!” Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu yelled in his nervous stutter, when I reported the news. He had turned as white as a sheet. Just six months earlier Arafat’s liaison officer for Romania, Ali Hassan Salameh, had led the PLO commando team that took the Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympic Games, and Ceausescu had become deathly afraid that his name might be implicated in that awful crime.

    interesting.. but here is the punchline

    In January 1978, the PLO representative in London was assassinated at his office. Soon after that, convincing pieces of evidence started to come to light showing that the crime was committed by the infamous terrorist Abu Nidal, who had recently broken with Arafat and built his own organization. “That wasn’t a Nidal operation. It was ours,” Ali Hassan Salameh, Arafat’s liaison officer for Romania, told me.

    and from another wiki

    in 1969 alone, 82 planes were hijacked worldwide by the KGB-financed PLO.
    -=-=-=-=-=-
    “Killing one Jew far away from the field of battle is more effective than killing a hundred Jews on the field of battle, because it attracts more attention.”
    George Habash leading member of the Palestine Liberation Organization until 1967

    So if you were ever confused by the left here and in England and so forth backing the PLO and disliking Israel, and so on… your a lot less confused now…

    would you believe there is actually more from others that fill in other blanks. but for the most part the left is supporting the international left…

  8. Artfldgr, you do go on, but there’s a lot of good stuff in it.

    I just read today that out flag carrier at the opening will be Mariel Zagunis, our 2x Olympic Gold Medalist in Women’s Sabre.

  9. I was really rather disappointed in this… virtually no actual footage of her routines.

    I found 2 of them:

    Uneven Bars
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m2YT-PIkEc

    Balance Beam
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Kaf3fdxGo

    Another thing missing from this was the envy/jealousy of Olga Korbut, who had been such a sensation at the 72 Olympics, and who expected to be lionized again (and this was expected by others, too), as she was upstaged by this “impertinent” little girl.

    Korbut did just as well as expected, but Comaneci just did so much better that it was like “Olga? Olga who?”

    And, to end on a sexist note:
    Wow, she got breasts….

    😀

    Hey, I’m a guy, what can I say. That’s not all she is, but it’s still something guys notice.

  10. One of the great tragedies of our time is that the institutional left in this country has censored and whitewashed the entire history of the Cold War. It should not have to be explained to anyone what people were fleeing or why.

    Can you believe that one of the most evil empires in history fell in our lifetimes and Hollywood did not make a single movie about it or about what life was like for the people there? We get new movies about the Nazis nearly every year but no one can seem to find anything dramatic in the plight of those behind the Iron Curtain.

    Leftism is the great sickness of our age. Its practitioners have encouraged everything from Communism, to Terrorism, to Islamism (of all things) so great is their hate for liberty. And we have ceded entire portions of our social space to these people just hoping to get them out of the way enough to keep things running. But now they are in the White House and there is no way to ignore them any longer.

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