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not allowed to go
anywhere alone. Everything was scheduled for us—breakfast at 7:00 A.M., training, rest time, lunch, and so on. We had a doctor traveling with the team, and he made sure we didn’t try any food other than what we knew—meat, salad, nothing fancy. I saw, for the first time in my life, pizza, cottage cheese, peanut butter, and breakfast cereal. The smells of the cafeteria were overwhelming.
    The Olympic Village, after my initial awe, became like anywhere else the team had traveled. We were just in another venue to have another competition. We did not march in the opening ceremony because Bela didn’t feel comfortable having us stand on our feet for six hours with competition beginning the next day. I must admit that I agreed with his decision about the ceremony and virtually everything else during the Games. I didn’t want anything—not food or late nights or catching a cold—to interfere with my ability to perform. Later, as I grew older and more independent, I would clash with the Karolyis’ total control over my life, but I will never argue that in the early days, their style worked for me and helped me become a great gymnast.
    You ask what my dreams were, going into the Olympics. When the media asked me the same question, I said the obvious, “I hope I’m going to win a medal.” It was a reasonable dream in my mind, not an unbelievably audacious statement. I wanted to compete and do my job well, and I would have been happy with whatever color medal I received. I was not at the Olympics to be in a frenzy of grabbing gold medals. Everybody thinks of gold only, but if you win a bronze by moving from sixth place to third, that’s success. I have always appreciated every medal I have won in that way. If I do my job and
receive silver, then that’s what I deserved. If I want more than that, then I should be better.
    Of course, Bela and Marta’s dreams were different from mine going into the Games. As adults, seeing their gymnasts with so many abilities, they wanted us to live up to our potential and to reflect their own talent. Show me fifty kids in a gym, and I can pick out the one or two with talent, which means they have incredible flexibility, balance, desire, and something magic that is indefinable and very rare. The Karolyis did that with thousands of kids and winnowed them down to the team from Onesti at the 1976 Games. They had a lot riding on their choices and decisions. The government had been generous and at times supportive of their experimental school. It was time for Bela and Marta to show their worth if they were to garner continued support. That meant we had to perform to our potential.
    For me, I guess, my personal goal for 1976, which I did not share with anyone, was to create my own dream. I had no one to follow—my parents were not athletes, so I wasn’t walking in their footsteps. My dream was to discover myself, to know what I could do, to push myself, and to be better than anybody else. You probably want to know why. But I don’t have a good answer to what created my desires. It’s just the way I am.
    My first goal at the Olympics was to perform my podium workout well (this is the workout held in front of judges before the competition), so that I didn’t bring any training mistakes into the real competition. When I was younger, Bela always used to tell me to pay attention to specific things during each routine, such as hand movements, certain skills, or inflections in the music. By 1976, he had stopped doing this because he finally
realized that when he told me to pay attention to one thing, I’d make a mistake on something else. What I needed to pay attention to was vastly different from what he imagined. He was just creating more problems for me. But, to give Bela his due, at the 1976 Olympics he also created an environment in which I could shine. As I’ve tried to explain, the media, fans, and judges must