Final bow for Martha Karolyi, the woman who lifted U.S. gymnastics

By Juliet Macur, New York Times News Service

Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2016 | 1:02 a.m.

RIO DE JANEIRO — In her 11 Olympics as a coach or leader of a gymnastics team, Martha Karolyi, the often stone-faced and certainly serious coordinator of the U.S. women’s gymnastics national team, has cried only twice.

Once was at her first games, in 1976, when she and her husband, Bela, led Nadia Comaneci to a gold medal in the all-around.

The second time was Tuesday, at these Rio Games.

From her seat in the Rio Olympic Arena, just above the balance beam, Karolyi’s eyes grew wet behind her glasses as she watched her squad dominate and win the team gold medal. The U.S. team was dazzling — the best team ever, Karolyi acknowledged afterward — as it won in a landslide over Russia, finishing ahead by 8.2 points, a grand canyon of a gap in a sport that calculates margins by thousandths of a point.

Just before the medal ceremony, the U.S. team ran over to Karolyi to celebrate and shared some news: They finally had come up with a nickname for themselves.

At the 2012 London Games, where her U.S. team also won gold, it called itself the Fierce Five. This time, the gymnasts told Karolyi, the team wants to be known as the Final Five.

Final Five, partly because this is the last Olympics where five women will be on each team. The next Olympics will have only four per team.

But Final Five mainly because this is Karolyi’s final Olympics. She is 73 and, after about 40 years in the sport, she is retiring when the Rio Games end.

Hearing that the team wanted to honor her, Karolyi began to weep. She gathered the gymnasts for a group hug of sparkly red, white and blue leotards and told them she loved them.

“From my nature, I’m really not a sentimental person, honestly,” Karolyi said afterward. “I’m known for being very tough. So I felt, ‘Oh, what’s happening to me? What is this?'”

She paused.

“It’s just, Final Five,” she said, before trailing off as she teared up again. “It’s crushing.”

Crushing because, within about a week’s time, a lifetime of successful elite gymnastics will come to an end. It can’t last forever, after all. Karolyi, who wears a bejeweled Team USA necklace, said it’s time for her to be “a normal person” again. Her plan, Bela said, is to visit her family back in her native Romania, maybe spend four or five months there out of the year.

Her career was so good while it lasted.

In the mid-'70s, she and Bela began coaching together in Romania and became a power couple in the sport. He was the boisterous cheerleader, the emotional one. She was the quiet technician who knew exactly how to tweak a gymnast to make her great.

And through the years, they trained so many greats.

In Romania, it was Comaneci. Then, after they moved to the United States, it was Mary Lou Retton, who won an Olympic gold medal in the all-around in 1984. Next came Kim Zmeskal, the world champion in the all-around in 1991, and Kerri Strug, the sweetheart of the 1996 Atlanta Games.

It wasn’t until 2001 that Martha Karolyi took over as national team coordinator for the women, replacing Bela, who retired after a disappointing 2000 Olympics, in which the U.S. team was fourth. That is when the U.S. team officially began its semi-centralized training system, which was the system the Karolyis had been pushing for.

In that system, gymnasts train with their personal coaches, but attend monthly, weeklong national team training camps to be evaluated by national team staff.

“I think the training camps are key,” said Aly Raisman, the team captain who on Tuesday won her third Olympic gold medal. “It’s where we are evaluated and compared to each other, in a healthy way. We wouldn’t be here without that system.”

The camp is held at the Karolyis’ 2,000-acre ranch in the middle of Sam Houston National Forest, north of Houston. It’s where the Karolyis live. It’s also where Martha Karolyi focuses her deep brown eyes on each gymnast, finding both big and minuscule ways for that gymnast to improve. Athletes start going to camp when they are 9 or 10, so the potential superstars can be identified and groomed into champions early.

At camp, gymnasts stay in cabins together, eat meals together, hang out together. Coaches also socialize, which they rarely did in the past, and share training tips.

“Once you install a system and unite the gymnasts and the coaches, you will be improving every year, and we have improved every year under this,” Karolyi said. “I think at this moment, that’s why we can say that United States dominates the world of gymnastics.”

The U.S. women have now won the last five major competitions. They have also won the past three Olympic all-around titles. The United States is poised to win a fourth all-around gold, too, when Simone Biles takes to the floor Thursday.

This U.S. team is anchored by Biles, a three-time world champion in the all-around who might just be the best female gymnast ever.

But even when Biles was performing her floor routine Tuesday, Karolyi couldn’t relax. It was the team’s final routine of the afternoon, and Biles — world champion on floor — was nailing it. Her landings were so solid that her soles seemed coated in super glue. Later, Karolyi said she had never seen a woman tumble so well, so “sky-high.”

Yet there she was during the routine, on the edge of her seat and gripping the railing in front of her, as if her life depended on it. The gymnasts could feel her presence. They even searched for her, and often, so they could lock eyes and get a shot of confidence from her.

“We always look for her, always,” Gabby Douglas, the 2012 Olympic champion in the all-around, said on Tuesday after winning yet another gold. “Because we couldn’t do any of this without her.”

Yet future teams will have to.

Biles said that she didn’t believe Karolyi was really retiring and that if Karolyi heard “the team cracking,” Karolyi would be back to fix it.

Karolyi, though, says her decision is final. Her and Bela’s ranch and its training camps will live on, though.

USA Gymnastics will still use the ranch as a training center, though Bela and Martha won’t be in charge of managing it. From time to time, Martha admits, she might walk down her dirt driveway to check out the gymnasts in the gym, “just to see if they are going in the right direction.” She said that she was proud to leave such a successful system behind, so generations of future gymnasts could benefit from it.

“I will probably enjoy to take a peek here and there,” she said.

Until then, she must focus on gymnastics for a few more days. Still to come are the all-around and event finals. But for a national team, the team final is the biggest day. And to succeed on that day is what counts.

In the minutes after the medal ceremony, as the U.S. women posed for photos and examined their gold medals, Bela gave Martha one of his signature bearhugs. He told her he was proud of her.

“Fantastic closing,” he said.

She answered, with tears, “Yes, I feel the same way.”