Bela Karolyi, the charismatic if polarizing gymnastics coach who turned younger girls into champions and america into a global energy, has died. He was 82.
USA Gymnastics mentioned Karolyi died Friday. No explanation for demise was given.
Karolyi and spouse Martha skilled a number of Olympic gold medallists and world champions within the U.S. and Romania, together with Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton.
“A huge impact and affect on my life,” Comaneci, who was simply 14 when Karolyi coached her to gold for Romania on the 1976 Montreal Olympics, posted on Instagram.
The Karolyis defected to america in 1981 and over the subsequent 30-plus years grew to become a guiding drive in American gymnastics, although not with out controversy.
Bela Karolyi helped information Retton — all of 16 — to the Olympic all-around title on the 1984 Video games in Los Angeles and memorably helped an injured Kerri Strug off the ground on the 1996 Video games in Atlanta after Strug’s vault secured the workforce gold for the Individuals.
Karolyi briefly grew to become the nationwide workforce coordinator for USA Gymnastics girls’s elite program in 1999 and included a semi-centralized system that finally turned the Individuals into the game’s gold normal. It didn’t come with no value. He was pushed out after the 2000 Olympics after a number of athletes spoke out about his ways.
It will not be the final time Karolyi was accused of grandstanding and pushing his athletes too far bodily and mentally.
Throughout the peak of the Larry Nassar scandal within the late 2010s — when the disgraced former USA Gymnastics workforce physician was successfully given a life sentence after pleading responsible to sexually assaulting gymnasts and different athletes together with his arms underneath the guise of medical therapy — over a dozen former gymnasts got here ahead saying the Karolyis have been a part of a system that created an oppressive tradition that allowed Nassar’s conduct to run unchecked for years.
Nonetheless, a few of Karolyi’s most well-known college students have been at all times amongst his staunchest defenders. When Strug obtained married, she and Karolyi took a photograph recreating their well-known scene from the 1996 Olympics, when he carried her onto the medals podium after she vaulted on a badly sprained ankle.
