Written by Legendary gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi died on Friday. He leaves behind a complicated legacy of harsh, anachronistic coaching of very young girls and having revolutionized gymnastics, first in his native Romania and later to the U.S. to which he and his wife Martha defected in 1981, after his coaching made Romanian teen Nadia Comaneci an Olympic legend and worldwide phenom in 1976. Mary Lou Retton, Julianne McNamara, Kim Zemeskal, Dominique Moceanu, and Kerri Strug, heroes to multiple generations of gymnasts, followed in Comaneci’s footsteps as Karolyi coached stars.
My Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP colleague Michael Chapman, J.D., CPA who was one of the first staffers U.S. Center for SafeSport writing of Karolyi on Friday noted the challenge of holding these two divergent thoughts in mind.
But as someone who held the perhaps ironic title of “Athletics Integrity Officer,” for five years helping recover from another scandal with a person’s name- Sandusky, it is worth noting the fact that those who apologized for, whitewashed, and diverted attention from Karolyi’s coaching excesses because of his unquestioned record of Olympic success, helped allow now convicted sexual predator Dr. Larry Nassar to operate on Karolyi’s training ranch and inside of USA Gymnastics sexually abusing the same very young female athletes Karolyi was coaching.
We owe our athletes more, so much more.
No victory that comes at the price of Nassar’s predations is anywhere close to a fair deal. It is important to note that Karolyi was not charged in connection with, cooperated fully with law enforcement, and denied knowing about Nassar’s crimes. But still Karolyi’s ability to coach, cajole, harangue, perhaps starve, and bully gymnasts to Olympic greatness which was well-known needed to be covered-up by many otherwise smart, responsible people who saw Karolyi and his methods as the only path to the medal stand. And when Karolyi became too much of a public relations headache to be outfront, his wife Marta was put in his place.
My former Ohio University Sports Administration colleague Dr. B. David Ridpath has written about how dreams of sports success creates situational ethics. Wise, upstanding people citing the next game or new season or upcoming the Olympics are willing to look away from things that would horrify them in normal context. But connected with the glow of victory or the whiff of a championship they are too often rationalized or denied.
This in part, gave Nassar, space to ingratiate himself to dozens of his more than one hundred victims. With everyone looking away from Karolyi, for fear of what they might see, Nassar’s abuse was able to accelerate without detection.
Karolyi also was part of a generation of former Soviet bloc coaches who made their way to the West before or after the fall of the Iron Curtain and who remade Olympic sports with both advanced science and coaching techniques. The legacy of these coaches, like that of Karolyi, himself, is a mixed one. We don’t, fortunately, live in a world where sports successes need to be achieved at any cost, as it was in the old Soviet Union and its satellite countries.
As imperfect as our current safeguards may be- the 2018 creation of the U.S. Center for SafeSport and advancements in preventing coaching abuse and sexual exploitation in most sports contexts- we are farther along than we once were and that is a good thing. Yet, many blind spots remain, including among fans and sports bureaucracies who still see the ends as justifying the means when success is involved. Karolyi’s own fall- from hero status, from public veneration and from grace- tells us otherwise.