Coach Bela Karolyi

This paper examines what is needed to coach an Olympic champion by looking at the career of one of the most successful coaches of all time, Bela Karolyi. Under Karolyi, athletes from Nadia Comaneci to Mary Lou Retton and Kerri Strug captured gold medals in women's gymnastics. Karolyi's skill at training and developing the talents of the athletes he coached is unquestioned, but it has also been severely criticized. His own attitude toward his students has stimulated much of this criticism. "These girls are like little scorpions," he has claimed. "You put them all in a bottle and one scorpion will come out alive. That scorpion will be champion" (Putnam 43). Coaching scorpions requires a delicate hand and a strong will. Karolyi has demonstrated both.

Karolyi first rose to international prominence in 1976 when the Romanian gymnast he was coaching became the first ever to score a perfect 10 in gymnastics. Nadia Comaneci's gold medal turned her and her coach into stars and helped focus wider interest in women's gymnastics in general as a sport.

Karolyi's mastery was confirmed in 1984 and again in 1988 when the Romanian women's team achieved gold under his guidance. When he defected to the United States, American athletes flocked to him, hoping to have him continue to apply his magic touch to their careers. Yet Paula Gray Hunker points out the fact that even a coach of Karolyi's stature cannot work magic in every case. She writes, "Karolyi is well known for his winn

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so many of the competitions, have an artificial feel about them" (7). Knott writes from the outside, however, and, while Karolyi's hugs may appear impersonal, the results they produce are often spectacularly effective. Karolyi's work with the 1996 women's gymnastics team may be the most dramatic demonstration of his coaching style, as well as the most controversial. As the competition got underway, Karolyi was quoted as saying, "I don't remember having such a talented group of gymnasts on the floor at one time. We never have had this much maturity, confidence" (Goldberg 1). The team included three gymnasts who had been part of the bronze medal-winning team in Barcelona - Shannon Miller, Dominique Dawes and Kerri Strug. Strug's performance turned out to test Karolyi's skills to their limit. Strug fell on her first vault, spraining her left ankle and appearing to end her chances of achieving an Olympic medal. With that fall, all her work with Karolyi and all her struggles to make it to the competition seemed to be over. Nevertheless, she was determined to try again. She looked to her coach for reassurance, and he provided it, though the final decision was hers to make. Gina Daddario writes that, until that moment, "Str

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