Word: karolyis
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...came down to Retton on the vault in the final event. As she waited her turn, her personal coach, Bela Karolyi, leaned across the photographers' barricade from his seat in the stands and showed her a piece of paper on which the arithmetic had been done: score a 9.95 to tie Szabo for the gold, score a 10 to stand alone as all-around champion. Anything less would mean the silver. He bent down to hold and shake her shoulders; she nodded intensely...
...tense silence that fell, one could hear her feet drumming the runway, then she leaped onto the springboard and pushed her handspring high toward the banner-draped rafters. She twisted, turned and landed without having to move so much as a toe to keep her balance. Neither Retton nor Karolyi nor the crowd needed a judge to tell them it was perfect. Without waiting for the 10 to flash, Retton ran to the barricades for a quick embrace with Karolyi, then, strutting the pigeon-toed linebacker's walk that more than anything else reveals her power, she hopped back...
Retton, in fact, is the exemplar of what Bela Karolyi calls "the new kind of gymnast." Says he: "She's strong and powerful and athletic; not a little flower, a little flyer." Karolyi, who discovered and trained Comaneci and presided over the early development of Retton's principal rivals from Rumania, Szabo and Agache, knows a trend when he sees one. In his 4-ft. 9-in., 92-lb. dynamo, he knows he has found a star...
Conveniently enough, Karolyi and his wife Marta had just defected from the Rumanian team during an American tour. They walked into the New York office of the Department of Immigration and Naturalization with no assets other than the suitcases in their hands and a world of gymnastics knowledge in their heads. They opened shop in Houston. A year later, having met Karolyi at a meet, Mary Lou and her parents packed her bags and drove 24 hours to Texas. "It was at Christmas time," Mary Lou recalls. "Leaving home was so hard...
...veered off to confer with him, and get encouraging hugs, before every step on the arena floor. They have even come to gesture alike, with Mary Lou pounding a fist into a palm when a routine goes well and summoning a Balkan shrug when it does not. Says Karolyi: "It's an excellent kid, Mary Lou. She's so powerful physically, and she's mentally powerful too. I was teaching gymnastics 25 years, and had many world and Olympic champions. But I never had somebody more positive and dedicated than this little girl...