Word: szabo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...chances of the veteran Soviet Elena Shushunova, 19, scoffing, "She's used up like old battery." But her dry cells powered the Olympics with regular flashes of just slightly imperfect 10s, including a necessary one against Rumania's Daniela Silivas that brought back Mary Lou Retton and little Ecaterina Szabo from 1984. Puberty and Big Macs have reportedly ganged up on Szabo this year. Four years later, it is a rare Shirley Temple who doesn't come back as Shelley Winters...
...memory of the spectators develops into a composite of both images-the terrific and the terrible-much more touching as an entry than either could be individually. The happiest circumstance, of course, is when they take turns. First U.S. Gymnast Mary Lou Retton rejoiced as Rumania's Ecaterina Szabo sighed, then a couple of days later Ecaterina laughed and Mary Lou made a petulant face. The athletic world, like the real world, is seldom so equitable. Fairness is not really the essence of sport...
During the women's gymnastics, the crowd responded to the pyrotechnics of Ecaterina Szabo's team with a decibel level nearly as high as that accorded the U.S.'s own Mary Lou Retton. The spectators even booed marks they did not consider high enough for the East bloc visitors. Such evenhandedness was not lost on those Rumanians who had competed in 1980 in Moscow, where Soviet crowds applauded loudly for their own performers but were at best lukewarm to other competitors, even when they excelled...
...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...
...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...