Béla Karolyi, the coach of Nadia Comaneci, who became a controversial symbol also of the successes of US gymnastics, however, overwhelmed by the largest scandal of abuse (Nasser case) ever seen in western sport, He died on November 14 and it is time for the International Federation of Gymnastics and with it the federations that are national joints, starting with ours, deal with the cumbersome shadow of his myth and his methods.
Processes in Italy and new scandals in the world
The news of the last few weeks imposes it: An order from the investigating judge of Monza ordered the forced charge for Emanuela Maccarani, technical director of the “butterflies” of rhythmic gymnastics at the Technical Center of Desio, on charges of mistreatment.
Mariana Vasileva, a former coach of the Rhythmic Gymnastics team of Azerbaijan and current deputy minister of the country’s sport, was condemned to an eight -year -old international disqualification for verbal and physical violence against the athletes conducted by the Gymnastics Ethics Foundation.
In Germany last December the Elite Gymnast Tabea Alt used his Instagram account to make public the abuses he said he had undergone at the National Gymnastics Center of Stuttgart and “in German women’s gymnastics in general”. «It is not an isolated case: eating disorders, punitive training, pain relievers, threats and humiliations were on the agenda. Today I know that it was systematic physical and mental abuses, “he wrote. In the past, similar situations had been the subject of independent relationships and reports, in Great Britain, Brazil, Switzerland.
The more or less formal complaints are too widespread to be random and not to make one think of a model to be rethought even if winning. The fact that we speak of situations exploded at the apical levels of federations that express the best of world gymnastics (now it is rhythmic, now it is artistic, but changes the order of the factors the product does not change), cannot be traced back to isolated cases.
Usa case, from Karolyi to Nassar
Béla Karolyi was the expression of Romania beyond the iron curtain that brought gymnastics to the homes of TV spectators around the world through the child of Nadia Comaneci, 14 years old, in Montral 1976: too beautiful to ask for the price. Before her it was Olga Korbut in Monaco 1972 who made the world fall in love. Thus began the era of girls girls, more suitable for the most daring evolutions, but also more manipulable and more at risk of mistreatment. What happened in the sport of the Soviet bloc has become in the public domain long after with the opening of the archives of the Stasi in DDR.
But in the meantime, the Korbut model, Comaneci, and then Silivas, Omelianchik etc. made school, in the USA, in China. The winning model is always replicated, whatever it is to keep up. For years we have not wondered what was the cost of what we saw. The sport of sport in general does not like to feel the distortions that are behind us.
When Béla (and his wife Martha with him), exiles in the USA, became the architects of the dream of American artistic, up to team gold in Los Angeles 1984, the curtain still standing, nobody went to scratch under the sequins glued to the bady of the stars and stripes dream. He wanted to open his eyes the different and even more serious case of the federal doctor who perpetrated an infinite number of sexual abuse on the US gymnasts, while no one saw and felt, including families, who did not believe in his daughters, as the dramatic trial showed, of which Simone Biles was witnessed, who ended up with a sentence of an avalanche of years in prison. At least an unavoidable reflector was turned on on the risk of that type of abuse, that no one is anymore – hopefully – willing to cover, also because the sensitivity in terms of gender crimes has changed (hopefully without regressing).
Does the iron sergeant model still win?
On the other hand, they still have to deal with the winning model of the “Gentuchical Gentle” Training Stile of Iron Sergeant, which Béla and Martha Karolyi have symbolically represented for decades in the eyes of the world and which in some way as a ghost still hovers on so much rhetoric of sports sacrifice not only in gymnastics.
The ordinance of the investigating judge of Monza read carefully brings out a macroscopic problem: The risk connected to structures, as are often the federal centers of disciplines that require long or very long periods of common life for athletes at least initially minors, whose control is removed from families and is entrusted to coaches managers who are too often plenipotentiary (The case of the Karolyi Ranch was an example at maximum power).
If the needs of the very high level discipline make sure that very young athletes (and even more young athletes) are far from home, from families, by a regular ordinary school frequency that is recovered in other ways, by the real life of their peers; If it is true that there are disciplines (those of gymnastics are part of it) that require rigor and concentration, because without it can be done very badly; If it is true that the competition at the highest world levels asks for a commitment and a physical and mental estate outside the ordinary to emerge, All the more reason it is essential that these structures and people who direct them and who manage everything or almost are not alone in doing so and do not have the power to choose the control figures.
At least we separate controllers and controlled
Otherwise, it is risked that what is reconstructed in the order of the Monza court to the point where it reads: «The investigations have allowed us to accept The absolute lack of independence of the nutritionist and the psychologist introduced into the staff of the technical director and who were linked to her by constraints side of the sensu family or friendly “.
If elements that do a job at risk are inherent in the sport of vertex, especially when they arrive at the top are very young or minors athletes, it cannot fail, for the moral code and for the criminal code, the duty to safeguard and protection towards them who are in charge of the people they are entrusted and the federations that control them.
And if it is true that changing the culture of an entire movement (technicians, judges, athletes, spectators, journalists …) requires time, the rigorous separation between controllers and controlled must be done immediately.
And the closed structures must have windows and doors metaphorically open, otherwise it does not come out of it. Because you also risk in good faith to perpetuate a model to update thinking that it is the right one or the only one as possible and to make it think of those who grow in it.
