By Alex Traub, Hank Sanders and Carla Correa
Bela Karolyi, a charismatic taskmaster of a gymnastics coach who with his wife, Martha, developed generations of the sport’s leading athletes, but whose reputation was tainted by accusations of an abusive style and blindness to the sexual crimes of Dr. Larry Nassar, died Friday. He was 82.
His death was announced Saturday by USA Gymnastics, the national governing body for the sport. The statement did not provide further details.
Karolyi helped usher in an exciting and more challenging era of women’s gymnastics as the Romanian coach who turned Nadia Comaneci into an Olympic champion in 1976. Under his tutelage, Comaneci, then 14, also scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic competition.
In 1981, Karolyi and his wife defected from Romania and attempted to make a name for themselves in the United States. He took on a young gymnast named Mary Lou Retton as a pupil. In 1984, she became the first American woman to win a gold medal in gymnastics.
Girls everywhere aspired to be the next Comaneci or Retton, and Karolyi himself started to become a star of the sport. He leaned into the spotlight. He had a twitching gunslinger’s mustache, a habit of bear-hugging his gymnasts and a Transylvanian accent that charmed American journalists. Television broadcasters outfitted him with a microphone so that viewers at home could hear his every word.
As early as the 1980s, some said that Karolyi’s insatiable drive to win fostered a culture of abuse. Yet accusations about unhealthy diets, unsafe treatment of injuries and even physical attacks did not halt his rise. When, amid fighting with fellow coaches, he stepped down as national coordinator of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team, he was replaced by his wife, who ran the program for another 15 years. At the same time, the couple owned a Texas ranch that served as the team’s training headquarters.
American women came to dominate international gymnastics, winning dozens of Olympic medals and beating Russian and Chinese rivals by multiple-point margins in a sport in which the gap between winning and losing had often been just tenths.
Yet after 2016, the Karolyis found themselves in the news not for gymnastics triumphs but for their relationship with Nassar, who as a doctor at their ranch spent years sexually abusing young girls who were training with the couple. Around the same time, many gymnasts accused the Karolyis themselves of being abusive in their coaching.
That made some of his successes look different in hindsight. During the all-around team gymnastics event at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, gymnast Kerri Strug was struggling with a sprained left ankle. Karolyi encouraged her to do the vault anyway, shouting, “You can do it!”
She charged toward the vault, leaped, stuck the landing, turned to face the camera, smiled — and then collapsed in a heap.
Bela Karolyi was born Sept. 13, 1942, in Cluj, a regional capital of Transylvania that was then part of Hungary but became part of Romania after World War II. His father, Nandor, was a civil engineer, and his mother, Iren, worked as an accountant.
Bela was a successful boxer, and he competed in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics as a hammer thrower. He attended a college of physical education in Romania, where he began coaching gymnastics. One of his athletes was Martha Eross. They married in 1963.
When they defected to the United States, they spoke little English, worked menial jobs and wondered if their dramatic move had been woefully naive.
Even while coaching Retton, Karolyi had no official status with USA Gymnastics, so to enter the Games he had to get accreditation from an equipment supplier as a technician. He paced outside a fence near the blue padding where gymnasts vaulted.
Retton came up to the fence, needing a perfect 10 on her vault to win the gold medal. “I’m going to stick it,” she told him. She did.
“Mary Lou Retton is an American folk heroine now, an Olympian for the ages,” sports writer Dave Anderson wrote in the Times after her victory.
The next year, the Karolyis bought their 50-acre property in the Sam Houston National Forest of Texas. They soon began instructing their gymnasts to attend monthly training camps there.
In 2001, the couple unexpectedly changed their roles. Martha had always been the quiet background administrator, Bela the emotional lead coach. But now he faded into the background, being a dispenser of advice and overseeing the ranch, while Martha ran the U.S. women’s team.
The couple had a daughter, Andrea. Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.
Martha retired from her role as national coordinator of the U.S. women’s team after the 2016 Rio Olympics. It was the breakout year for Simone Biles; the Karolyis seemed to be going out at the top, having transcended criticisms of their coaching style.
In fact, a reckoning was already underway. That August, accounts emerged that Nassar had regularly molested young female athletes at the Karolyis’ ranch and at Michigan State University, where he worked as a faculty member and sports doctor. Gymnasts began discussing publicly how while training with the Karolyis they had practiced with fractured bones, suffered ridicule of their developing bodies, faced food restrictions and felt discouraged from complaining about hunger or pain.
Many former gymnasts said that they dreaded going to the Karolyis’ ranch. One testified that she once purposefully hit her head against a bathtub to avoid the abuse she endured on the property.
After Biles and others said that they would not train at the Karolyis’ center anymore, USA Gymnastics stopped using the facility and halted plans to buy it.
Nassar was convicted of criminal sexual conduct and child pornography charges in several trials, and he received multiple sentences of between 40 and 175 years in prison.
The Karolyis denied knowing about Nassar’s behavior and rejected the abuse accusations against them. A district attorney in Texas who brought charges against Nassar did not file charges against the Karolyis and said they had fully cooperated with the investigation.
In a 2018 interview with “Dateline” on NBC, Karolyi responded to the revelations of Nassar’s abuse. “The whole thing,” he said, “is just like an explosion, like a bomb exploding.”
Not every former gymnast has denounced Karolyi. He is described fondly in the autobiography on Strug’s website. Gymnast Dominique Moceanu publicly complained about the Karolyis’ coaching as early as 2008, when they were still the sport’s ultimate power couple. But after his death, she wrote a message on social media with words of praise.
“Bela Karolyi was a man whose influence on my life and the sport of elite gymnastics is undeniably significant,” she said. “He was a complex individual, embodying a mix of strengths and flaws that left a lasting impact on those around him.”
This article originally appeared in <a href=”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/obituaries/bela-karolyi-dead.html”>The New York Times</a>.
Comments