The Miasma of Winning

The news on Monday that Nadia Comanenci, one of the greatest, if not the greatest Olympic women’s gymnast, is reported to have suffered what is described as “horrorific abuse,” at the hands of her coach Bela Karolyi and his wife Marta, is less shocking than it is saddening. Reports that Comaneci confirmed in an interview for a new Romanian language book that the Karolyis starved, slapped, and denied medical treatment to Comaneci and her teammates are detailed in a new book culled from documents maintained by the nation’s repressive Communist-era regime’s secret police force, the Securitate. The book reports that even hardened Securitate officers were at times alarmed by the treatment these young women athletes received at the hands of their coaches.

The Karolyis’ sometimes harsh treatment of gymnasts in their charge after their defection from Romania in 1981 has been widely covered in more recent times and stands at sharp contrast to the hero’s welcome they first received in the U.S. after defecting and the sustained success of their Olympic gymnasts both in Romania and here in the States. The Karolyis have been hailed as the most brilliant and technically-advanced coaches in the world, especially after leading the U.S. women to the top of the Olympic podium. Was it a case that the Karolyis changed, becoming harsher over the years? Or that the times have changed, causing a different retrospective judgment on their coaching practices and methods?

The sad part is that neither is likely true. Coaches today do operate within more clearly defined standards regarding anger, language, and care, but examples from John Wooden to my first coach in the 1970s who never raised his voice in anger abounded then as now. But the Karolyis, more likely than not, are who they always been- harsh coaches who believed in their methods because they achieved success on the biggest stages. The failing then is ours, as adults who oversee athletics, that our vision could be clouded by the miasma of winning.

For decades, certainly from 1952, when the Soviet Union was readmitted to the Olympic movement to 1989’s fall of the Berlin Wall, we in the West believed Eastern bloc nations achieved victory through a range of tainted and questionable methods: false amateurism- often called “shamateurism,” where Soviet-aligned nations supported their athletes through State sponsorship or plum military assignments; engaged in widespread doping activities, and even resorted to gender manipulation of athletes. The Communist bloc undoubtedly looked to blend sport with statecraft, with success on the Olympic stage pointing to the superiority of the Soviet system. Soviet leaders believed so strongly that they exported their sports system and coaching expertise to their satellite nations. Not everything was wrong or immoral in this. But there was much that has proven to have been tainted in this era and remains so, even today, as Russian President Vladimir Putin often still operates from this Cold War-era playbook of using sport as statecraft.

It was gymnast Nadia Comaneci who humanized or perhaps more accurately obscured much of this tainted or misguided glory with her brilliant success as a 14 year-old in the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games. The Romanian regime Comaneci grew up under, led by Nicolae Ceaucescu, while not always aligned with Moscow was extremely repressive in its own right. But Comaneci became a darling in the West, because of her youth and the extraordinary blend of elegance and athleticism she possessed, helping humanize, in her own example, a repressive regime. Now it appears she was the product of repressive coaching, as well.

Yet, we in the West, who rejected most of the abuses of the Communist sports system, embraced the Karolyis along with a legion of other highly-skilled, technically excellent coaches, across all of the Olympic sports, displaced in the last days of Communism or after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Were we right to do this? The answer now appears to be a complicated one. This is not to suggest that every coach from a nation formerly in an Eastern bloc nation is corrupt or abusive. I am reminded of a friend from a long-ago regional sports festival here in the U.S. who said “I thought I knew everything I could know about throwing the hammer, but one session with the East German coach added 9 feet to my best throw. There was extraordinary coaching and coaches trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Just as we know now that sport has the ability to transcend man-made borders and that walls can be barriers to greater understanding and cooperation, we also know that not everything on the other side is intrinsically good either.

But the collective we- those of us in the West who care about and are charged with maintaining the integrity of sport believe that our athletes and coaches should reflect the values of sport we hold dear- had our vision fogged by the miasma of winning. We checked our values and held our tongues and didn’t demand that the Karolyis live up to or conform to our highest values. All we saw is that these coaches knew how to develop winning athletes.

This is why one of the fundamental questions we examine again and again here at Culture in Sports is that victory has the ability to obscure the pursuit of our values. Merriam-Webster defines the word “miasma” as “1. a vaporous exhalation formerly believed to cause disease,” or “2.an influence or atmosphere that tends to deplete or corrupt.” So while winning is an important outcome, it also has the ability to produce a miasma that fogs our way and corrupts our values. There is a winner in every contest, but not everyone achieves victory in concert with their best values and when that happens, winning can be corrupting and cause harm to all of sport.

There is no judgment in this article that the Karolyis are intrinsically evil people or that they were irredeemable when they came to the U.S. But rather than imprinting that we very much want to win but that victory must be achieved within certain standards of excellence, care, and treatment that represent who we are, on the Karolyis, too many of us marveled at the coaching expertise and were distracted from the corruption of our values in pursuit of that victory. Winning is not itself a beneficial or malevolent concept. The learning how to win is a positive value, but one that must always be balanced against the cost of how it is achieved.

https://nypost.com/2021/05/03/bela-karolyi-accused-of-horrific-abuse-of-nadia-comaneci-in-new-book/