Bela Karolyi, the coach who helped make Mary Lou Retton the first American woman to win the all-around Olympic gold medal in gymnastics and who became half of the sport’s ultimate power couple with his wife, Martha, but whose reputation was tainted by accusations of an abusive style and blindness to the sexual crimes of Dr. Larry Nassar, died on Friday. He was 82.
His death was announced by U.S.A. Gymnastics, the national governing body for the sport. The statement did not provide further details.
Karolyi first rose to international fame as the coach of the Romanian team at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, where his protégé Nadia Comaneci, who was then 14, became the first gymnast awarded a perfect score of 10.0 at an Olympic event. She did not reach the score just once: She earned six more perfect 10s, winning three gold medals in the process.
Five years later, Karolyi and his wife defected to the United States. They spoke little English, worked menial jobs and wondered if the dramatic move had been woefully naïve.
But another, even greater ascent in the gymnastics world awaited them. Though he was not coach of the U.S. women’s team in the 1984 Olympics, Karolyi was Retton’s personal coach, and he was widely seen as the force behind her triumph. He went on to play increasingly prominent roles in American gymnastics, mentoring other famous gymnasts, like Kerri Strug and Dominique Moceanu, and becoming national coordinator of the U.S. women’s team.
Ultimately, his wife became even more of an institutional force, taking over as team coordinator from Karolyi in 2001 and remaining in the position for 15 years. The couple ran the gym in Texas where the women’s team trained, and the U.S. program went on to stunning successes, winning dozens of medals and producing stars like Simone Biles.
There had been denunciations of the Karolyis’ approach to coaching, most notably from Moceanu, a gold winner at the 1996 Atlanta Games, who said that both Karolyis had physically and emotionally abused her. Still, no charge had really stuck, and Karolyi’s wife retired at the top of gymnastics after the 2016 Rio Olympics.
But a reckoning was already underway. Dr. Nassar had been a coach at the Karolyis’ training facility, and in August 2016 accounts emerged that he had molested athletes there for years. Before long gymnasts began discussing publicly how the Karolyis had forced them to train even when seriously injured and restricted them from eating more than small quantities of food.
After Biles and others said that they would not train at the Karolyis’ center any more, U.S.A. Gymnastics stopped using the facility and halted plans to buy it.
The Karolyis denied knowing about Dr. Nassar’s behavior and rejected the abuse accusations against them.
In a 2018 interview with “Dateline” on NBC, Karolyi responded to the revelations of Dr. Nassar’s abuse. “The whole thing,” he said, “is just like an explosion, like a bomb exploding.”
A full obituary will soon be published.
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