What Bela stresses instead is how seeking asylum separated him and Martha for years from their daughter, Andrea, who was then only 7. "Looking back, it was a stupid decision we made," Bela says, even though Ceausescu ran a brutal regime and would later be executed by firing squad following the '89 Romanian revolution for crimes including genocide. So Bela, Martha and a team choreographer walked out of their Lexington Avenue hotel in Manhattan with nothing but a single gym bag of clothes and $360 among them. They heard rumors during their last stop in New York that they might be detained when they returned home. tour with Comaneci and the Romanian national team that the Karolyis' worries darkened. Bela objected to how the Communist rulers would interfere or trot out their pride-and-joy gymnastics team for cash and propaganda purposes before "sheiks, visiting politicians, you name it," Bela says. The Karolyis might have never landed in America if Bela hadn't been clashing with Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his sons following Comaneci's sensational victory and perfect 10s at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. program's national team coordinator since 1999, after they stopped being private coaches who churned out America's first Olympic and world all-around champions: Mary Lou Retton (1984) and Kim Zmeskal ('91) Kerri Strug, the '96 hero of America's first Olympic team gold medal win and a half-dozen other stars.īefore that, the Karolyis developed 1976 Olympic all-around champion Nadia Comaneci in their native Romania. program first went from international also-ran to the preeminent world power, eclipsing China, Russia and the crumbling programs of traditional powers such as Romania and the Ukraine along the way, traces back to a vision the Karolyis had for developing the women's team into a perennial champion.Įither Bela or Martha have served as the U.S. The big-picture creation story of how the overhauled U.S. It could be a rout.Įach member of the five-woman squad - extraordinary three-time world champ Simone Biles returning Olympic gold medalists Gabby Douglas and Aly Raisman electric 16-year-old newcomer Laurie Hernandez and reigning world uneven bars champion Madison Kocian - is a legitimate threat to medal in at least one event, maybe more. Olympic women's team, which convened there for nine days of fine-tuning just before departing for the Summer Games in Rio, is a prohibitive favorite to win America's second straight team gold medal when the competition begins Sunday.
Thirty-four years after their arrival, a whiff of mystery still surrounds exactly what happens once elite gymnasts disappear into training on the Karolyi Ranch. "I says, 'Martha, I know it's the boonies, but it's beautiful boonies! It's our boonies. "When we first came here from Houston in 1982 and '83, Martha says to me, 'Why do you bring me out here to the boonies?'" says 73-year-old Bela, who often tears around their spread on a dusty, four-wheel cart with a roll bar. Then, somewhere in the distance, a few goats begin to bleat. Next, some startled peacocks unexpectedly come high-stepping across the lawn of the Karolyis' log cabin home with their tail feathers fanned out. Little hurricanes of dust swirl up behind your car as you drive down the lane passing nothing but acre after acre of trees until, finally, some rustic wood cabins, two large blockish gyms, a dining hall and a sprawl of low-slung bunkhouses bearing signs such as "The Beijing Motel" to evoke past Summer Olympics all pop into view. A staffer often meets visitors at the nearest interstate exit about 20 minutes away, because neither GPS nor cellphones reliably help much way out here. — - NEW WAVERLY, Texas - The finishing school for world-beating female gymnasts that America has been churning out for two decades now, bucking all precedent and prevailing skepticism that Bela and Martha Karolyi encountered when they first arrived in the U.S., sits on their isolated Texas ranch that lies three miles down a single-lane gravel road running deep into Sam Houston National Forest.
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