The U.S. Women’s Gymnastics Team Falls From Grace

Four years ago in Los Angeles, members of the United States women’s Olympic gymnastics team finally earned what had eluded them for nearly forty years. They made eight trips to the podium for medals, including Mary Lou Retton’s gold for best all-around gymnast. It was a dizzying arrival. Nobody expected them to stop winning.

Yet the team has since taken a gigantic tumble backward. Last year at the world championships, team members put on a display that made onlookers cringe. They fell off the balance beam, collided with parallel bars, and team leader Kristie Phillips managed to land one vault smack on her face. Well out of medal contention, the best finish by an American was a dismal nineteenth place.

The depressing performance is just one sign that things are terribly wrong in the gymnastics community. Federal prosecutors are examining the finances of the United States Gymnastics Federation (USGF), whose executive director has admitted that the federation underreported nearly $2 million of income to the Internal Revenue Service. Coaches and critics within the gymnastics community accuse the federation of being top-heavy with committees and of spending more money on the sport’s adult volunteers than on the athletes themselves. The most visible sign of trouble has been the bitter squabbling between the top personal coaches and the flammable Bela Karolyi, who coached Mary Lou Retton in 1984 and, before his defection to the West in 1981, Romanian gold medalist Nadia Comaneci. While everyone slugs it out, the athletes, distracted by the confusion around them, seemingly can do nothing but land on their faces.

There is a story in gymnastics circles that when Karolyi failed to board the plane in New York in 1981 after an American tour with the Romanian team, no one waited.

Years later, Karolyi still wasn’t making any friends. When Retton landed a perfect-10 vault to win the all-around title in 1984, television cameras quickly swung around to show the bearlike Bela Karolyi tripping over a barrier to embrace her. He mugged for the cameras – an unbridled display of affection, shown repeatedly in slow motion – and instantly became America’s most famous gymnastics coach.

What burned up Karolyi’s associates was that he wasn’t even supposed to be there. On the competition floor, crowded with apparatus, athletes, score runners and judges, only two coaches per country were allowed – the national coach and his assistant. As Retton’s private coach, Karolyi had no position with the Olympic delegation. He had finagled a maintenance man’s pass in order to stand close enough to the floor so he could speak to his athletes.

Karolyi’s antics annoyed the other private coaches and divided the girls on the team. He ignored the instructions of Don Peters, the national Olympic coach, and held special supplementary workouts for his two girls. At night, he slept in his rented car in the arena parking lot. All of this confirmed a suspicion held by the other private coaches that Karolyi placed his own and his athletes’ interests above the American national effort.

Resentment of Bela Karolyi has only grown since the 1984 Olympics. While other personal coaches continue to run modest operations, Karolyi’s Houston gym has thrived since Retton’s success. Karolyi received thousands from McDonald’s to wear the golden arches on his sleeves and bought a ranch in the Sam Houston National Forest, outside Houston.

With the private coaches hopelessly polarized after Los Angeles, USGF administrators were convinced that the next Olympic coach should be neutral, an outsider, someone with no private students and no financial interest in promoting one girl over another. For two years, the federation’s executive director, Mike Jacki, flew repeatedly to Salt Lake City, trying to persuade Greg Marsden, a well-respected college coach, to accept the job.

A serious and quiet man, Marsden pretty much owned the NCAA national gymnastics title. His women’s team at the University of Utah had won it six consecutive times, a collegiate record. Jacki had been given clearance by the USGF board of directors to hire Marsden, a change from the usual process, in which the International Women’s Program Committee – made up of four coaches (including Karolyi), one former athlete, three judges and an administrator – elect the Olympic coach. Marsden, who liked the autonomy of his job at the university and was well aware of the bickering among the top private coaches, felt no need to accept the hot seat offered him by the federation. “It was never my ambition to be the national coach,” he says. For two years Marsden bargained with the federation to keep his university job and run the national gymnastics program part time out of his office there. And he made it clear he would take orders from no one: “I said, ‘Hire me like you would hire a football coach. Give me a sufficient budget to be successful and a time frame. And like a football coach, as long as I don’t break the rules or steal money or something, you leave me alone to do the job.’ ”

In May 1987, Marsden was appointed Olympic coach. While previous coaches only had control of the team, Marsden was also supposed to assume control of the entire national effort – through the Olympics and afterward – in order to unify the various clubs scattered around the country. The new system was not unlike that of the Soviets, who have proved extraordinarily successful, turning our unbeatable teams or eight Olympics. Though Marsden’s experience was limited to the collegiate level, which is a flight down from international competition, the other coaches, without exception, welcomed him. His first international meet would be the Pan Am games in Indianapolis in July.

Marsden won detractors quickly by naming another neutral person his assistant coach – Sal Lake City resident Donna Cozzo. Karolyi, who was friends with Marsden and thought he would get the job in order to be on the floor with his girls, was understandably surprised and threatened to boycott the meet. “What Bela didn’t know,” explains Marsden,” was that I thought some of the concerns the other coaches had about him were legitimate.” Another complaint came from an American judge. “She said the international people didn’t know Donna and that that would hurt us politically,” says Marsden. With Mike Jacki negotiating, a deeply offended Bela Karolyi was dissuaded from skipping the Pan Am meet.