Larry Nassar’s early years in the club gymnastics world came during a period of unprecedented popularity for the sport in America. The three years that followed the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles featured the largest recorded period of growth for USA Gymnastics since the organization started tracking membership numbers—from 40,542 in 1984 to 63,485 in 1987. That three-year stretch remains the largest percentage increase, year over year, in the sport’s history in the United States.
For decades gymnastics in America had been an afterthought. The sport was more art than science, not yet predicated on skills that required power and intensity. In the early to mid-1960s, not a single club or college on US soil owned a full Olympic-sized floor exercise mat. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, gymnastics was taught in schools, and roughly eight hundred thousand people were active in the sport.
Growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Romania, Bela Karolyi was a hulking hammer thrower and boxing champion. Born in 1942, he enrolled in the Romania College of Physical Education in Bucharest, where he struggled to pass a proficiency skills test in gymnastics. Stubborn from the start, Karolyi threw himself into the sport and ended up coaching the women’s collegiate team during his final year of college. He grew close to the team’s star, Marta Eross. They married shortly after graduation, in 1963, the same year Larry Nassar was born, and moved to a growing coal-mining town to teach elementary school.
Years later, while running a gymnastics program in the small mountain town of Oneşti, as Bela Karolyi would later detail in his book about that period of his life, he noticed a six-year-old gracefully flipping cartwheels at recess. He invited her to join his new training school, where he was pushing students beyond their limits in hopes of creating “a new kind of gymnast” that he would describe years later in a book he cowrote as “very athletic, aggressive and powerful, and doing difficult skills.”
Within a decade and with the help of the Karolyis’ coaching, that little girl, Nadia Comăneci, was ready to revolutionize the sport. Prior to 1976, no gymnast had recorded a perfect score of ten during Olympic competition. During the Montreal Olympic games that year, Comăneci recorded seven flawless “perfect 10” performances en route to three gold medals in a performance that propelled the Romanian team to dominance on the world stage. In a country of 21 million citizens that was accustomed to being a satellite state of the Soviet Union, Comăneci and Karolyi became instant celebrities. After Comăneci’s historic performance in Montreal, she was viewed as a national treasure, and Karolyi—a man who never had trouble attracting attention in a variety of ways—was watched closely by the country’s most powerful men.
Four years later at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, when Comăneci failed to win gold in the all-around competition, settling instead for silver behind Russia’s Elena Davydova, Karolyi’s protest caused a temporary disruption at the games. Karolyi’s embarrassing outbursts and criticism of the judges delayed the games for forty minutes. His behavior in Moscow caused him to fall out of favor with the Romanian Communist Party, and he was reprimanded upon his return home.
By then, Karolyi had already clashed with the Communist Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu over the way Ceauşescu had used Comăneci and his national team as propaganda tools. In 1981, with their status within Romania suddenly in question, the Karolyis and their longtime choreographer, Geza Pozsar, defected to the United States while on an international gymnastics tour.
The trio stayed up all night in a New York City hotel room weighing their decision hours before their team was due to fly back to Romania. In the morning, Karolyi said goodbye to Comăneci and told her, according to his book, “If you appreciate everything I did for you, you shut up and don’t say a word. Go, now please, and call the other girls down to the reception area.” Then the Karolyis and Pozsar slipped away to hide out in the apartment of one of Marta’s relatives who had emigrated years earlier.
The powerhouse program Bela and Marta Karolyi developed in Romania was forged with the pain and suffering of the young girls in their care. Pozsar, who worked with them from 1974 to 2002 and would go on to run his own club in California, considers some of the things he witnessed inside the couple’s Romanian training centers to be “atrocities.”
“Bela was an absolute Monarch,” Pozsar said. “He was like Louis XIV of France. He was a dictator. In Romania he had absolute power.”
Pozsar said he witnessed Karolyi verbally but never physically abusing his star gymnast. Comăneci has never accused Karolyi of being physically abusive and won’t speak about her time with the Karolyis. Other former Romanian gymnasts, however, have gone public in recent years, saying it was commonplace for the Karolyis to hit them, deny them food, and push them past the point of exhaustion while they lived and trained at the Karolyis’ gym. In the centralized system that existed in Romania at the time, gymnasts and their parents were given little choice about where and when athletes would train.
Trudi Kollar remembers taking the train through the night in 1976 as a twelve-year-old. She and her mother traveled the 260 miles from their hometown of Arad, Romania, to Oneşti, Comăneci’s hometown and the place where Romania’s elite gymnasts were sent to train with the Karolyis. Back then, Kollar went by the name Emilia Eberle. She says she recalls she and her mother were greeted by a smiling Bela Karolyi the morning after their train ride at the training center and how Karolyi showed them to her new dorm room. Concerned her daughter hadn’t eaten enough on the long train ride, Eberle’s mother took a roll of bread from her bag in front of Karolyi and left it in a drawer for her to eat later. After her mother left (parents were not allowed to be with their children during training), Eberle said Karolyi returned to her room, took the bread, and struck her so hard with an open hand that he knocked her off her feet onto the bed.
“If I ever see anything like this again, I’m going to beat you to death,” she said he hollered at her. That was her first encounter with the man who would train her for the next six years.
Pozsar remembers Karolyi hitting Eberle so hard during practices with his large and powerful hands in her back and on her sides that the sound of the blows echoed through the gym. The Karolyis demanded perfection, and if the gymnasts failed to achieve it during their routines, they would often be slapped in the face or on the backs of their heads or have their hair pulled. Eberle recalls an almost daily routine of physical and emotional abuse.
“It was mostly Marta who would hit us,” Eberle said, recalling how the ring on Marta’s finger and her fingernails frequently left marks and scratches and caused bleeding.
Gymnasts were weighed twice daily, once before the 8:00 a.m. practice and again prior to the afternoon practice. “We were always called fat pigs and cows,” said Eberle, who weighed sixty-six pounds as a fourteen-year-old.
During one training session on the uneven bars, the blisters on Eberle’s hands started to bleed so badly she fell and hit her head.
“Oh look, Bela, she is fat as a pig—maybe she should go on a diet,” Eberle recalls Marta Karolyi saying to her husband at the time.
Pozsar, the choreographer, said he once saw Bela Karolyi strike another gymnast so hard with his open hand after she failed to execute a vault that the girl collapsed to the floor and urinated in her leotard. When Karolyi saw that the young gymnast had soiled the floor, he kicked her, Pozsar said.
In 1978, Gabriela Geiculescu was a national champion gymnast in Romania. She trained with a physically abusive coach in Bucharest who once struck her so hard in the back during a practice she remembers struggling to breathe. As violent as her situation was, she had heard horror stories from other gymnasts who were sent to train with the Karolyis and was terrified when she found out she was being sent to their training center, which by then had moved to the Transylvanian city of Deva.
Geiculescu said she was never physically abused by the Karolyis, but she remembers being so deprived of food she would occasionally eat toothpaste just to have the sensation of flavor in her mouth. She plucked apples from the trash cans on the streets of Deva and would sneak food into her dorm room in a jar, submerging it in the water tank of a toilet in order to hide it from Bela Karolyi’s random searches of her room.
Until recent years, a thin, prepubescent body had long been considered the ideal form for a gymnast to impress the judges at competitions and to execute physically demanding routines. The Karolyis, however, took it to extremes, Pozsar said, going so far as to deny gymnasts food to stave off the onset of puberty.
“[When] they start to get into puberty, they begin to think and to become more conservative,” Karolyi wrote in his book years later. “‘Wait,’ the teenage girl tells herself. ‘I am cute. What for I am falling on my face and bending my nose?’ But until that point they are going freely.… We discovered that you cannot overwork young children.”
Breakfast for the gymnasts consisted of a few crackers with jam, lunch a piece of chicken with greens, and dinner a small sandwich, not even close to enough nourishment to sustain gymnasts, who routinely trained eight hours or more a day.
The gymnasts were also given handfuls of what they were told were “vitamins,” pills that often left Geiculescu so disoriented she struggled to execute routines. She remembers the gnawing hunger and being so “out of her body” from the pills that at one practice she sprinted full speed into the horse during a failed vault attempt and collapsed on the mat.
“I was twelve or thirteen and thinking God doesn’t exist,” she said. “Because if God existed, he wouldn’t let this happen to children.”
Pozsar would sneak gymnasts chocolate and said he has “huge remorse” he was “part of a system so brutal.” The Karolyis, through their attorney, declined to comment for this book, but, in April 2018, the couple addressed past allegations of physical abuse in an interview with NBC News correspondent Savannah Guthrie:
GUTHRIE: “Did you ever hit a gymnast?”
MARTA KAROLYI: “No.”
BELA KAROLYI: “Probably, over fifty years ago in Romania when even slapping or spanking was a common procedure, yes.”
The Karolyis denied ever hitting gymnasts during their time as coaches in the United States, with Bela saying “if anybody comes up with that one, that’s a dirty lie.”
Two years after skipping their New York City flight and defecting from Romania, the Karolyis had settled in Houston, Texas, and were running a small training center for budding American gymnasts. One day, Karolyi received a phone call from a man named John Traetta, whom he had met in the late 1970s shortly after Comăneci’s dazzling performance in Montreal.
Traetta had come off a remarkable run of success coaching boys’ gymnastics for a decade at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, winning ten straight New York City championships. He had stopped coaching and turned to producing made-for-television gymnastics events in the 1980s for broadcast networks and cable outlets such as HBO and USA Network.
Traetta was organizing a gymnastics invitational to be broadcast the following spring from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. On the phone, he told Karolyi he was in search of up-and-coming stars to add to the program. Traetta was offering $2,000 college scholarships to each gymnast who attended.
“You’re going to want to invite one of my athletes,” Karolyi told him. “She’s the best athlete I’ve ever coached in the United States.” Traetta asked for her name. “Mary Lou Retton,” Karolyi responded.
A four-foot-nine, ninety-four-pound dynamo from West Virginia with a million-watt smile, Retton first approached Karolyi about training with him in the summer of 1982. She was compact and explosive, a great fit for the more powerful brand of gymnastics Karolyi brought to the sport. As the only elite gymnast in her home state, though, she needed better competition and better coaching to push her to greater heights. Karolyi told Retton’s parents their daughter had the potential to be an Olympic medalist, but time to perfect her skills was running short. She arrived in Houston on New Year’s Day 1983 and immediately got to work with her new coach. Her goal wasn’t just to make the Olympics when the summer games returned to American soil the following year but to make an impact when they did. Karolyi’s job was to help her get there.
Retton’s performance at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics catapulted her to stardom and further cemented the reputation of Karolyi as the coach who molded Olympic champions. Retton was the first American woman to ever win gold in gymnastics and instantly became the most popular athlete to emerge from the summer games.
The games themselves were a huge financial success. The Olympic organizing committee, headed by successful travel executive Peter Ueberroth, sold the television rights to ABC for $225 million. Unlike other Olympic hosts that went into massive debt building stadiums and infrastructure, Los Angeles turned the event into a financial windfall. The first city to host a privately financed Olympics was able to manage costs largely by using existing structures such as the LA Coliseum, which played host to the opening and closing ceremonies, and by selling corporate sponsorships. The 1984 summer games ended with a $232 million surplus. Ueberroth was named Time’s Man of the Year, and of all the athletes who cashed in after the games, none had the earning potential of Retton.
Three weeks after the Olympic games, Traetta met with Retton and her parents in Houston to sign a one-page agreement allowing him to serve as Retton’s agent. Along with her brother and Karolyi, Traetta managed Retton’s career for the better part of the next six years. He brokered a book deal and endorsement contracts with Wheaties (Retton was the first woman to appear on the front of the brand’s cereal boxes), McDonald’s, Energizer batteries, and other sponsors. During his time as her agent, from 1984 to 1989, Traetta says Retton made more than $6 million, “an astronomical amount at that time for an athlete.”
Retton’s enduring popularity brought hordes of new athletes to gymnastics in the aftermath of the Los Angeles games, and the sport continued to grow for decades to come. In 1980, more than 30,500 athletes were registered with USA Gymnastics. That number more than doubled by 1994, and by 2019, the organization boasted more than two hundred thousand members (athletes, coaches, and instructors) competing and working out of more than thirty-four hundred registered gyms. An estimated total of 4.8 million children and teens participated in gymnastics in the United States in 2018, with the vast majority of them not sanctioned by the sport’s national governing body, USA Gymnastics.
By 1989, the time Traetta’s contract ended with Retton, others in the gymnastics hierarchy had taken notice of her star power and its financial implications. Mike Jacki, the former president of USA Gymnastics’ precursor, the United States Gymnastics Federation, made it clear at the time to Traetta that he wanted to assert more control over the production of future gymnastics television events. Elite gymnasts were no longer just athletes to be lauded during international competitions. They were valuable commodities as famous as any Hollywood celebrities and professional athletes. In a 1993 poll of more than fourteen hundred Americans, nearly a decade removed from her Olympic moment, Retton was named the most popular athlete in the country, ahead of NBA star Michael Jordan, NFL quarterback Joe Montana, and NHL superstar Wayne Gretzky.
Fueled by Retton’s success in the immediate aftermath of her 1984 Olympic performance, Bela Karolyi boasted at the time that membership at his Houston gym swelled to twelve hundred. The Romanian miracle worker was now doing the same in his new home. He and his wife made plans to expand.