The long delayed Coronavirus Tokyo
XXXII Olympiad are already underway—competition in futbol/football/soccer,
baseball and softball, rowing, and archery are
already underway. While I am writing
this the opening ceremony will begin in a stadium devoid of fans
and far fewer athletes participating in the march of nations. You can see it tonight in prime time in
the U.S. on NBC. Organizer
promise the usual spectacle although the artistic director who designed
the program was fired yesterday when a decades old bad joke about the Holocaust
surfaced. The whole affair seems snake
bit.
Yesterday 110 new positive cases
linked to the Games as those arriving in Tokyo undergo a rigorous testing
program. Besides athletes, coaches,
officials, and the press well over 1000 individuals linked to the
games have been identified.
Several athletes have been forced to withdraw including at least
9 Americans. Others have opted not to
compete citing health concerns as infection rates in the Japanese
capitol soar.
But most athletes who can are taking
their chances—a once-in-a-lifetime shot for 80% of the contestants. They come without parents and families
to root them on. They will be confined
to the Olympic Village or their alternative housing and their completion
venues. Mingling with others even in the
Village is heavily discouraged.
They will dine at tables divided by plastic shields and
will sleep on cardboard beds in single Spartan cubicles to
discourage the lively sexual adventures that have marked the last
several Olympiads. But with nothing much
else to do, some forecast that coupling might even exceed the
usual. Just in case over 100,000 condoms
will be available.
As usual, Americans are
obsessed with their own contestants. One
potential track star Sha’Carri Richardson was booted from the U.S.
Team for testing positive for cannabis stirring up a hornets’
nest of protest. The heavily favored U.S. Women’s Soccer Team
led by fierce feminist icon Megan Rapinoe has already suffered an
embarrassing loss to Sweden in their first preliminary round. The supposed new Dream Team Men’s
Basketball Squad preformed badly in pre-Olympic matches and Chicago
Bulls star Zach LaVine has so far not been able to join the team in
Tokyo out of the usual “abundance of caution” because he was infected with
Covid 19 last fall.
American Olympic fans are
counting on returning heroes including 5 time Olympic Gold Medal winning
swimmer Katie Ledecky. But the undisputed
star if the extraordinary Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast
in history who is still regularly unveiling never-before-seen jaw
droppers.
Biles brings to mind another Olympic
gymnast.
I admit I am hooked on the Olympics, even obscure sports I don’t
understand—maybe especially those sports where stadiums were empty and Americans perplexed. The athletes in
those events can never hope to really profit,
even if they take home the Gold.
A lot of that passion started 41 years ago.
Like most Americans I had a passing interest in the 1976 Montreal Olympics as a kind of quadrennial
spectacle but knew next to nothing about the fine points of most of
the events. Women’s gymnastics was as foreign
to me as water polo. But I followed the Games on television
anyhow.
On July 18 I saw something that got my attention. A diminutive
dark haired 14 year old from Romania
with big brown eyes and a shy
smile mounted the uneven parallel bars and performed a routine so extraordinary even I knew that something special had occurred. Nadia
Comaneci had earned the first
perfect score of 10 from notoriously
picky and sometimes suspiciously
political Olympic judges. The automatic
scoreboard was not even programmed
to show such a score. It flashed
1.0.
Comaneci would go on to be awarded
six more perfect scores during the competition and win Gold for All around performance
and for the parallel bars and balance beam; a Bronze Medal in floor
exercises; and single handedly propelled the Rumanian team to a Silver behind the mighty and traditionally
dominant USSR team. It was one of the most commanding athletic performances in any sport in history.
She was an instant worldwide celebrity and inspired
countless young girls from Portland
to Prague to take up the sport. Gymnastics, which had received a boost four
years earlier with the performance of another teenage phenom—Olga Korbut,
was elevated to a place as the central
glamour event of subsequent Olympiads.
Comaneci was born November 12, 1961
in Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (now Oneşti), Romania. The country was one of the grimmest
of the Eastern European states where
dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, attempted a North Korean style overhaul of the culture. The result was an impoverished nation, the abandonment of huge number
of children to state orphanages, and the dislocation of the
traditional Romanian rural culture
with demolition of
villages and forced relocation to numbingly identical urban apartment
complexes.
Comaneci’s
natural ability and agility were spotted early and she was enrolled in
gymnastics by the time she was six when she was chosen to attend Béla Károlyi's experimental gymnastics
school. Her early success as a gymnast shielded
her and her family from the worst of the Ceauşescu regime. Because her
parents lived in the same town as Károlyi's school she was even allowed to live at
home with her parents most of the time instead of being confined to barracks-like dormitories.
By 1970 won the
Romanian Nationals and was successfully competing internationally by
1972 at the age of 11. She nearly swept the 1975 European Championships in Skien, Norway, winning the all-around
and gold medals on every event but the floor
exercise, in which she placed second.
By the run-up to the ’76 Olympics it was clear that she would be a major
challenge to the USSR team that included Korbut and a rising young star, Nellie Kim.
In March she
earned her first perfect 10 at the American
Cup at Madison Square Garden in New York, games that were televised in
the U.S. and Europe. She followed with
perfect scores in meets in Japan and
elsewhere. So her Olympic triumph was
not unexpected among followers of the sport.
She returned
from Montreal to Romania as a national
heroine. She was personally greeted
by President Ceauşescu and became the
youngest person every named Hero
of Socialist Labor.
But the
government began to interfere in her career. As she was
successfully defending her European
Championship Ceauşescu abruptly
ordered the Romanian team to leave the competition over a scoring
controversy. Back home she was
ordered to leave her long-time coach Béla Karolyi and his wife Marta and placed with a politically
reliable coach in Bucharest. Miserable and lonely, Comaneci began gaining
weight and slacking at practice causing her to place 4th in
the 1978 World Championships. After that she was allowed to return to
the Károlyis.
In 1979,
slimmed down and disciplined, she won an unprecedented third consecutive
European championship despite competing with an infected hand. At the 1980 Moscow Games, unseen by most Americans because of the President Jimmy Carter’s boycott, she
placed second, by a small margin, to Soviet
Yelena Davydova in the all around, defended her Olympic title in the
balance beam, and tied with Nellie
Kim for the gold medal in the floor exercise.
After a 1981 exhibition
tour of the United States during which the Károlyis defected, Comaneci officially retired from competition. Although allowed to accompany the
Romanian team to the 1984 Olympics in Los
Angeles under heavy surveillance,
she was banned from most international travel except to Moscow
and Cuba.
She was given prestigious positions with the Romanian Gymnastics Federation and took
up coaching, but later said her life
in the ‘80’s as “took on a new bleakness.”
In 1989, shortly before the revolution that deposed and executed
Ceauşescu, she made a daring escape
with a group of other young Romanians and eventually came to the United States
in the company of Constantin Panait, a shady character and married
father of four. She shocked
Americans who remembered her as a young girl by wearing highly revealing
clothing over a curvaceous figure and slathered in thick, gaudy make-up. She
was trashed in the press for “looking like a whore.”
She fled to Montreal, the city of her greatest triumph, where she
took up coaching gymnastics and doing occasional modeling.
Former American Olympian Bart Conner invited her to join the staff of his
gym in Oklahoma City and the two became engaged in
1994. The couple wed in Bucharest in
1996 on Comaneci’s first visit to her homeland since fleeing. In 2010 she became a naturalized American Citizen, while retaining dual Romanian citizenship.
Comaneci now
acts as her homeland’s Honorary Consul
General to the United States. She
and Connor continue to operate their gym as well as a string of athletic
stores. She is active in numerous
charitable causes including Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the International
Special Olympics and Vice President of the Board of
Directors of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. She has also personally funded the
construction and operation of the Children’s
Clinic in Bucharest to provide medical
care and social services to
Romanian children.
In 2006 at the
age of 45 she gave birth to a son.
The little Romanian waif is all grown up now and doing very well, thank you.
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