Word: karolyis
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While excellence was evident on the U.S. women's team, a sense of unity was not. Certainly it didn't help that the six competitors and one alternate were thrown together only one month earlier. It helped even less that head coach Bela Karolyi and the other U.S. coaches bickered all the way to Barcelona. "The coaches hate each other," said someone close to the team. "Sometimes the girls feel as if they can't talk to each other because their coach will get upset." Word leaked out of the Olympic Village that the gymnasts were under strict regulations...
...team fair and square, was dropped from the squad by the American coaches to make room for another athlete they felt had greater potential. Kelly considered filing suit, then opted instead to show up in Barcelona, her presence a quiet rebuke of a selection process that even Karolyi denounces as "ugly...
...husband-and-wife coaching team of Bela and Martha Karolyi have produced several Olympic champions, among them Nadia Comaneci (1976) and Mary Lou Retton (1984). Zmeskal was among the first 200 students to sign on when the Karolyis opened their Houston gym in 1982, and they fully expect her to bring home the all-around gold. Bela says that of the more than 4,000 girls he has coached in Romania and the U.S., not one of them can touch the competitive drive of the one whom he early on dubbed the Little Pumpkin, and now calls Kimbo...
...part, Zmeskal describes herself as stubborn (her mom says she gets this from coach Karolyi) and perfectionist (this from her dad). She is mildly irritated when people mistake her silence during competition for shyness. "I'm not quiet," she says. "I like laughing and being with my friends." Away from practice and performances, there is a teenager who has graduated from New Kids on the Block to Boyz II Men, likes to hang out in malls and thinks it would be fun to act in a soap opera. As down-to-earth as she is, though, Zmeskal is just superstitious...
...triumph rekindled speculation about her age. The controversy began at the Stuttgart world championships, where she listed her birth date as Feb. 15, 1975, which met by 46 days the competitive minimum of 15. "Nonsense," insists Bela Karolyi, the U.S. trainer, who admits to faking birth dates in his native Romania to allow underage gymnasts to perform. As evidence, Karolyi points out the missing front tooth in Kim's engaging smile. "I lost it when I hit the bar in practice," explains Kim. "But she was missing two in Stuttgart," replies Karolyi. "One grew in." Whatever her age, her maturity...