Chapter Six

 

From his small apartment in Deva, Evgeny Popescu sat by the window and watched the sun set over the Citadel on the hill. He placed the finished bottle of beer on the floor and retrieved a fresh Timisoreana, his favorite beer. When he first returned home from the gym, he’d turned on the television, but the sound quickly grew annoying, and as it happened most nights, he eventually found himself alone in the dark, shutting out the sounds of the modern world with a drink in his hand.

More often than not, Evgeny arrived at his apartment with a massive headache. Today was no exception. He popped four aspirins and a Vicodin and closed his eyes, resting a cool cloth on his forehead. After about an hour, the pain receded.

The sun was gone and a deep blue had settled over the city when there was a knock at the door. Most of Evgeny wanted to ignore the sound, but it could be his girlfriend Fides, and he hadn’t made up his mind as to whether or not he really wanted to be alone, so he answered the door.

Most people in the Romanian gymnastics world would have been thrilled to find Andrei Tatarescu at their front door. As the head of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation, a personal relationship with Andrei meant more than sponsorship and promotion. His friendship meant you were assured a spot in the great pantheon of Romanian gymnastics, and a decent living as a coach or administrator was guaranteed.

Evgeny had known Tatarescu since he was eight-years-old. The promise he’d showed as a young gymnast in Bucharest was unprecedented. By the time he was eleven, he was more ready for elite international competitions than most sixteen-year-olds. There was talk among Tatarescu and his colleagues of falsifying records and advancing Evgeny’s age a couple years overnight. They came very close to doing it, but Romania was not as secretive as China or as disorganized as some Latin countries where thirty-year-old baseball players joined the Major Leagues as twenty-three-year-olds. No one was willing to risk Evgeny’s entire career for the chance to put him into intense competition a couple years early.

The RGF had opted to keep a close eye on Evgeny’s development and wait. Then, at sixteen, he became the World Champion. Though it was a competition where many athletes were conspicuously absent due to injuries, it was a confidence booster for the young man and he had proved to the gymnastics world he was as good as advertised.

A year later, he competed in his first Olympic games. Until Evgeny came along, the Romanian men’s team was not competitive with the likes of China, Korea, Japan, Russia, or even the less touted United States. When he joined the team, he raised their profile.

But then it all went wrong. In his first Olympics, not only did Romania fall short, nabbing the silver instead of the expected gold, Evgeny stepped out of bounds on the floor exercise, lost his balance on the pommel horse, and overshot the vault, landing on his heels and dropping his bottom to the ground. His performance was so bad he didn’t qualify for the all-around competition. He ended up with a silver medal in the team event, a bronze on the still rings, and another silver on the parallel bars. For anyone else, that would have been a respectable finish. But not for him.

Returning home with three medals, Evgeny Popescu did not show his face in public until the next World Championships, where he repeated his title-winning performance from two years earlier.

When he was twenty-one, he got another shot at Olympic glory. This time, he did not choke, yet neither was he perfect. Again, Romania lost the team gold, this time to Russia instead of Japan, and he was edged out of the all-around gold by Galya Prokhor, who was contending in what would probably be his last competition.

None of that would have been so terrible if he had managed to grab the gold in any of the individual events. Three bronzes and two silvers later, the four-time World Champion again failed to earn the one prize every gymnast dreams of.

Most athletes had an Achilles heel in the form of a certain stadium, competition, tournament, match, or meet that never seemed to go well for them. Hall of Fame quarterbacks who always played poorly in certain cities, lights-out pitchers who consistently had two-digit ERAs against specific teams, golfers who couldn’t find anything but sand and water on particular courses. It happened in every sport. Curses and superstitions were a natural and often beloved part of playing the game, whatever the game might be.

However, there was nothing funny or redeeming about crashing and burning in the Olympics. It was sickening.

But brushing himself off, again Evgeny began preparing for a third go at the Olympics, and this time, it seemed he had his best shot. His career had remained remarkably injury-free, and he was stronger and more polished than he had ever been. Following the last Olympics, his chief rival Galya Prokhor retired. Though there were a couple of young Japanese, Chinese, and Russian gymnasts, not to mention one pesky American, who were a threat to steal the title, Evgeny felt ready. More than any other time in his life, he was confident and of clear mind.

His third shot was never to be. As a ritual, on the morning of a meet, he liked to go for a quick run to get his blood pumping and his muscles loose. The day of the Eastern European Invitational, Evgeny was struck by a car, fracturing his back in three places and shattering his left femur.

The doctors said he was extremely lucky not to be dead or have a severed spinal cord.

Evgeny Popescu saw it differently. His gymnastics career was over. Though he would walk again, and indeed make a miraculously speedy recovery, he would never walk without a limp, and even a modest amount of physical activity sent his back into spasms.

Tatarescu had set him up as a coach for the pre-elite female gymnasts at the Deva Fortress, one of the premier clubs in the country, second only to the gold medal factory in Bucharest. Everyone in the community wanted Evgeny to head the women’s elite team eventually, but he had to learn to coach first. By all accounts, he was a tough but effective teacher. Every gymnast under his tutelage had improved in the past five months since he had taken the helm for the Fortress women under twelve.

The death of Ileana Dalca was a setback. She was far and away the most talented junior gymnast in the country.

“Come in,” Evgeny said to Andrei Tatarescu. “Would you like a drink?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Evgeny himself did not enjoy hard liquor, but he kept a bottle of malt whiskey in the cabinet for when his boss stopped by, which wasn’t often but neither was it ever a surprise.

“How are the girls?”

“They’re confused,” he replied. “They miss their friend. When they get down, I remind them how much Ileana loved gymnastics, how hard she worked, and that gets them back on track.”

“Do they speak of her often?”

“Not so much that I can’t redirect it.”

Tatarescu nodded, sipped his whiskey, and began to pace. “And you? How are you doing?”

He didn’t lie. “I think about her. I see Beatrix on television, replays and such, interviews, news footage. They look so much alike, and Ileana could have been even greater. I feel like it’s my fault.”

“Were you training her?”

“Yes.”

“Did you want her to be hurt?”

“No.”

“Coaches, athletes, fans, reporters, everyone knows these terrible accidents happen sometimes. Yes, it’s worse when it happens to a child, but there’s no one to blame. Children in America die playing baseball. They get hit in the chest with a pitch, and it kills them. Teenagers collapse unexpectedly when playing basketball or football. Their hearts stop, they overheat, they die.”

“I suppose,” Evgeny said. He wished Tatarescu would stop talking and get to the point of why he was there. There was no way he came simply to give him a pep talk.

“I wanted to tell you that Beatrix Dalca has petitioned for a spot on the Olympic team without competing in the trials.”

Evgeny took a long, slow sip of his beer, nodding thoughtfully. “That’s not so unexpected.”

“No, it’s not. What do you think?”

“She’s the best gymnast in the country, one of the top three in the world, and her little sister just died. If she chokes at the trials and word gets out she didn’t want to compete, the RGF will look heartless and cruel.”

“And if she does well, word will still get out that she petitioned for an automatic spot on the team, and people will say her success was a foregone conclusion,” Tatarescu said.

“And again the RGF will look heartless and cruel,” Evgeny finished.

“I tend to agree that nothing good will come of Dalca competing at the trials. It’ll be a distraction if not a disaster. The only potential is negative.”

“I know her,” Evgeny said, referring to Beatrix Dalca. “If she thought she was ready, she would not have made the petition. If you deny it, she might not go to the trials anyway and simply choose not to compete in the Olympics this year.”

“That would be a catastrophe.” Tatarescu finished his whiskey and set the glass down on the coffee table. “I think you’re right. We’ll grant her request and hope she pulls herself together by the Olympics. She has lost so much.”

“People have lost more,” Evgeny muttered under his breath.

“I’ve also come to tell you that considering what has happened, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be an assistant coach for the Olympic team. With Dalca as the leader, it’s possible you will become part of the story, and that would be bad.”

“What about for the men’s team?”

“It hasn’t been long enough. They think of you as a teammate, not a coach. In another four or five years it might be possible, but by then you will hopefully be heading the women’s national team.”

“Hopefully,” Evgeny agreed.

Tatarescu stood, and Evgeny followed him to the door. He patted the young man’s shoulder and said, “Eventually, this will pass.”

He was relieved when the man left. The anger he felt was so intense by the time the meeting was over he was physically shaking. Because of Ileana, because of her failure, he would miss this year’s Olympics completely. Because of her sister, he was going to be nothing more than a shadow at the biggest gymnastics competition in the world, one that only came around every four years.

Evgeny Popescu, Romania’s most celebrated male gymnast in history, whose competitive career ended due to a horrible accident, because of a second tragedy, was slowly but surely being edged out of the sport completely. He vowed not to let it happen.

But what could he do to stop it?