Word: comanecis
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Born in Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a city of 60,000 in the Carpathian Mountains, Comaneci began her training with Béla Károlyi and his wife Marta, the gymnastic coaches at a special sports lycée in her home town. They had spotted her frolicking in a kindergarten playground and been impressed by her lack of fear. She was six years old. "At first it was like a game," said Nadia last week, showing no trace of nostalgia for those presumably more carefree days. "But by the age of eight," Coach Károlyi noted, "the students...
Whether or not it is the daily regimen of five hours' classroom study and three to four hours' gymnastics training that has made her so, Comaneci is an extraordinarily somber child. Although she struts about and fidgets on the sidelines during competitions as if she were trying to release an inexhaustible flow of energy, she is almost eerily still outside the arena. While waiting to take her daily medical checkup one morning, she watched Olympic swimming heats on TV, her dark, unblinking eyes fixed on the action, her pale face expressionless, her hands folded decorously...
...each flawless performance, Comaneci would flash an automatic smile across her face as if it were an electronic scoreboard and prance briefly around the platform. But the show of enthusiasm almost seemed rehearsed, and she would subside immediately into the deep reaches of her concentration and composure. The smile and quick little dance steps about the floor were the only concession she made to the audience's clear desire that she refashion herself in the image of that ponytailed starlet of the 1972 Olympics, Russia's Olga Korbut. She is not an Olga...
...individual gold medals and one silver at the '72 Olympics in Munich. Her hair unkempt, the red bows on her two pony tails askew, her face at moments haggard beyond middle age, she displayed an overwhelming desire for victory while faced with certain defeat. She ignored Comaneci, refused to watch her rival perform. At one point Korbut burst into tears, at another ostentatiously iced an ailing ankle ("Every athlete always has something that hurts. If you don't, that's when you should start to worry"). When the stadium rocked with applause after Comaneci received her fourth...
Before accepting her bronze in the all-around, she bestowed a queenly kiss on the two youngsters who had upstaged but not outclassed her, Comaneci and a bright new Russian face, Nelli Kim, 18. Daughter of a Korean, Kim won two 10s herself from the judges, one in her specialty, the vault, and one in the floor exercise. She took two individual gold medals and one silver, and firmly established herself as the personable, expressive new star of Russian gymnastics...