I’d like to add some thoughts to my earlier post about USA gymnastics and Bela Karolyi:
1. What Bela did, he did. He would agree that his actions were his responsibility.
2. Abusive relationships in USA gymnastics (and no doubt elsewhere) pre-existed Bela’s move to the USA and still exist today.
3. Harsh training existed and exists in all of the ‘artistic’ sports and dance-related forms - eg ballroom dancing, ballet, ice skating, circus. The training involved in most of these activities is founded on an assumption of the benefits of early specialisation. It revolves around ‘ideal’ forms, shapes and postures that are difficult to achieve without early years training - women especially.
4. Wherever prodigious early talent exists, there are predators whose main desire in life is to take advantage of that talent - music, entertainment, maths, sport. The boundaries very easily become confused. Who owns the talent? Who decides how many hours to work, at what level? FOR WHOSE BENEFIT is the effort and endeavour to reach the peak of performance?
5. We (individually and collectively) have a tendency to polarise good and evil and to ascribe the evil to something or someone else, the ‘other’ being in this case someone whose cultural, national and political backgrounds we don’t share. Yet there is good and bad everywhere.
6. What Karolyi shared with USA gymnastics was the desire for gold medals. Not the welfare of young gymnasts, but gold medals for the glory of the state, be it Romania or the United States, in this case. Karolyi was always quite clear about this and never tried to water it down. The training was about medals, not fulfilling young athletes’ talents and lives.
7. A few weeks ago, another great coach of gymnastics died. He was less well known than Karolyi, but nevertheless respected in his field - Vladimir Zaglada. Zaglada coached many Olympic champions, primarily in the Soviet Union. He migrated to the USA in the 1990s where he coached young gymnasts to a high (but not, I think, elite) level. He made a substantial contribution to many gold medals. His gymnasts respected him and some even liked him.
8. Zaglada always worked as part of a team of coaches in the USSR, and despite having a healthy ego, never made himself into the main attraction, as Karolyi did. I’ve read a lot of Zaglada’s work, discussed gymnastics with him for hours, and observed him interacting with his gymnasts. He never spoke as if there were a ‘one size fits all’ approach to coaching, nor did he often mention medals. What also came across to me was that his gymnasts owned their own work, they were who they were and not ‘Zaglada’s’.
9. His gymnasts still came to him for technical advice, decades after he had moved to the USA - in one particular case a former Soviet national team member, long retired from artistic gymnastics but then competing in sports acro, asking him via Facebook for some help with a skill - help that Vladimir gave freely and simply in a comment. The owner of this exchange and support was the gymnast. (It’s the difference between learning and teaching.)
10. I wonder if Karolyi could coach, ever coached, in this way? (See Boguinskaia’s Instagram tribute to him if you want an alternative response to the one that my nuance points towards. The gymnast’s personality counts, too,)
11. One of the last things Vladimir said to me (a long time before he died) was about Mukhina and the reality of win-at-all-costs training. He went on to say he would never work at the USA national camp because of the ethic that pervaded USA gymnastics training at that time, and the way the Karolyis made the coaches work. I got the feeling he found it disgusting.
12. USA gymnastics did not seem to possess the culture of pedagogy, open discussion and flat, non hierarchical structure that is needed to create and support good learning. You find that in the best universities - has it made its way into sport even today? The USA overinvested in Karolyi’s approach as if one size fits all, and created a monster.
I’d conclude by saying that there was something uniquely toxic about the relationship between King Karolyi (a dictator who could only see or allow things one way) and his work (which was paid for by USA Gymnastics and the parents of his gymnasts) to win medals at all costs for the USA.
Are things any better today?