| The Back Page: Camp Karolyi Karolyi's mission: Prepare gymnasts for title defense 04/09/2000 By Cathy Harasta / The Dallas Morning News NEW WAVERLY, Texas - Some of the world's best gymnasts pump iron, but Bela Karolyi would just as soon see them pump water. On a muggy March day, Karolyi stood working a water pump deep in the Sam Houston National Forest. Here on his 1,200-acre ranch, the man who coached 28 Olympic gymnasts runs boot camps for the women hopeful of making the U.S. Olympic Team this summer. Poor team showings in recent big meets mandated this unprecedented strategy. The camps, which began in January, focus on conditioning and building a more sophisticated performance demeanor. Karolyi's ranch - where he lives with his wife, Martha - had served mainly as the site of summer camps and clinics for young gymnasts. The facility caters to campers who want traditional outdoor recreation with their bars and beams. But for several days each month, the spread becomes the epicenter of the U.S. women's Olympic medal quest. Before the athletes reported for duty, Karolyi, 57, paused beside one of his property's two lakes and pointed out the new well and retro water pump. He had chainsawed his way into these forest depths, clearing land that he began buying in 1983. His handiwork seemed to amaze even himself as he worked the pump handle. His arm rose and fell. Water began to flow. A beatific grin creased Karolyi's face. His expression mirrored the one he wore the moment after he coached Nadia Comaneci to the first perfect "10" at an Olympics, in 1976. Or the instant he realized another of his golden girls, Mary Lou Retton, had stuck her vault landing to earn a 10 at the 1984 Olympics. Or the time that he carried wounded, little Kerri Strug to the medal stand after her valiant vault at the 1996 Olympics. But on this day, Karolyi took pride in pumping water, the old-fashioned way. "These are the things every child should experience," he said, pumping more vigorously. "My most exciting thing of my life as a child was going to a camp. Now, all the high-tech things . . . all the e-mailing . . . bah!" He shook his head and swept one arm in an arc of grandiose disgust. It is by invitation only that 10-15 senior national team members and their personal coaches enter Karolyi's extraordinary ecosystem. In Bela's biosphere, deer and antelope roam. Camels, llamas and swans upstage some of the more familiar pets, such as his beloved 25 dogs. In the common room near the cafeteria, a stuffed moose head with a 63-inch rack span testifies to Karolyi's 1987 hunting trip to Alaska. But the gymnasts find few ordinary distractions at the haven 70 miles north of Houston. Cell phones don't work once the dirt road gives way to Karolyi country. Away from their websites and cable TV, the teens prepare to defend the title won by the Karolyi-coached team in Atlanta in 1996. That is the aim of the camps, anyway. The ranch is Karolyi's work in progress, as are the gymnasts. The six who eventually will make the Sydney Olympics-bound squad, to be finalized in August, will spring from this environment. "You just want to do so good for Bela," Plano-based gymnast Vanessa Atler said before the three-hour afternoon workout. "It makes you work hard - which is good for the team." But she owned up to some butterflies before each camp. The gymnasts are not automatically invited to the next camp, though they could re-enter the mix if Karolyi determines they have made appropriate progress. "It's a good nervousness," said Atler, the nation's second-ranked gymnast. "It's a productive nervousness." The camps focus on conditioning and Olympic preparation for a squad that finished a disappointing sixth at the World Championships in China in October. In November, Karolyi came out of retirement at the behest of USA Gymnastics to coordinate its women's program. He immediately tied the athletes' frequent injuries to a lack of conditioning and, without blaming any individuals, criticized the lack of teamwork. Six months after the Worlds, mention of the USA showing caused Karolyi to grumble. His 1996 squad was the first from the United States to win a women's Olympic gymnastics team gold medal. "We deserve a better position in the world than sixth," said Karolyi, a native of Cluj, Romania, who defected to the United States during a 1981 tour. "Time is short, unfortunately." Time also is precious for coaches such as Mary Lee Tracy of Cincinnati, who trains several of the Olympic hopefuls participating in the camps. The forced marches to New Waverly, population 936, take coaches and athletes away from their usual settings for three to five consecutive days each month. That was part of the plan, said Karolyi, who pronounced the gymnasts talented but inexperienced in international meets. Over lunch at the ranch's cafeteria, Tracy said she appreciated that the camps were an innovation born of necessity and, to a degree, humiliation. "There was no need to do this before," said Tracy, a former assistant U.S. Olympic coach. "I was in China. It was a little bit embarrassing. We were not united." She endorsed the way the camps have made the athletes and coaches focus on training and performance details. "Having a place to go where there's none of the distractions of home is good," said Tracy, who coaches 1996 Olympic gold medalist Dominique Moceanu of Houston, Wichita Falls native Jennie Thompson, UCLA student Alyssa Beckerman and 1999 Pan Am Games champion Morgan White. "I step off the merry-go-round of life. I like that. I'm not even a camper. I'm not that type of a person. Here, I think Bela was able to combine his career passions with his personal passions. "It's very mind-soothing to walk around on the ranch." Two three-hour workout sessions each day leave the Olympic hopefuls with little desire to walk around on the ranch. They spend no time romping on the tennis courts. They never dance the evening away at the lakeside barbecue pavilion near the water pump. Atler, 18, said she knew Karolyi had camels, but she usually used downtime to sleep in the ranch's motel. It is closer to the gym than the lakeside cabins. "This is a very intense camp," said Valeri Liukin, a former Russian national team member and Olympic gold medalist who coaches Atler at the World Olympic Gymnastics Academy in Plano. "The camp helps me to know what I have to do. It's good for the girls because they see what shape everybody is in. They get closer, more like a family." Between workouts, the campers ate a lunch served by a benign-looking man in a large white apron. Mr. B. has become a camp fixture. He surveyed the cafeteria as the gymnasts sat at long tables, chatting and nibbling. Mr. B. - whose real name is Doug Bertling - has been catering meals for Karolyi's campers for 15 years. It did not seem to bother Mr. B., who owns the Hitchin' Post truck stop on Interstate 45, to see the gymnasts stick mostly with salads. A few coaches sampled his chicken sandwiches, but the 80-pound athletes appeared to be saving their appetites for the hard workout to come. Summer is Mr. B.'s busiest season at the ranch. "It's a blast," he said, nodding toward Karolyi. "He's a dedicated man, and he knows what he wants. My job is to feed 300 campers three meals a day. You see them running through the woods, making s'mores." Atler said she likes to eat and even occasionally indulges in some ice cream. She is working her way back from two ankle surgeries in November. The April camp will serve as a selection for the USA team to compete in the Senior Pacific Alliance Championships, April 20-25 in Christchurch, New Zealand. Atler, trying for her first Olympic team, said she has planned to make the Pacific Alliance meet her first full competition since her surgery. "When I go up to the [uneven] bars," she said, "I don't dread it at all anymore." The two words came in a sharp staccato: "Good, Vanessa." Martha (pronounced MART-a) Karolyi had materialized in the gym and stood leaning against the balance beam. Her words to Atler came after Bela had conducted a warm-up session to open the 4:15-7:15 p.m. workout. One by one, the 10 gymnasts had lunged and hopped and skipped through drills as Karolyi called out instructions. At his invitation, the personal coaches stepped in to assist their athletes as they performed handstands. "He is coordinating our efforts, not coaching against us," said Tracy, who coached 1996 Olympic gold medalists Amanda Borden and Jaycie Phelps. "He is not trying to change our coaching styles. Now he has a whole different agenda." Martha's eyes moved from one gymnast to the next. As they worked on individual muscle groups, Martha observed push-ups and pull-ups. While her husband rarely stopped moving his hands, Martha's shifting gaze appeared to miss nothing. Then the gymnasts split into groups to work on the vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise. Liukin helped Atler on the beam. After her dismount, Martha spoke with Atler. "Martha is 50 percent of the effort here," Tracy said. "She doesn't like to be interviewed; she lets Bela handle that. But she is a detail person. She'll say, 'Bela, we're 15 minutes over.' " Kristen Maloney, the reigning U.S. champion from Pen Argyl, Pa., said Bela Karolyi is a motivator more than anything else. "He's just very upbeat about everything, saying, 'Come on, girls. You can do it,' " Maloney said. "He's just egging you on, making you feel like you can do it. It's working, so far. We're looking better than we did in October." Maloney said the ranch's atmosphere induced teamwork. Martha, also a coach, met her husband when both were students at a physical education college in Romania. He had participated in track and field before trying boxing and eventually excelling at team handball. Gymnastics did not come easily to him, he said, so he put in extra practice in the evenings. That was when the women's gymnastics team, including Martha, trained. "I had more appreciation for this sport than for any other sport I had practiced," he said. "I realized this is the ultimate sport. I had thought I was a macho man, the keeper of the mountain." He and Martha married and moved to the small, mining settlement in the Carpathian Mountains in which Bela's grandfather had been the sole school teacher. As a physical education instructor, Bela taught the children gymnastics during the cold Transylvanian winters. "All those little pale faces, always sad, always concerned," he said. "But how fast they learned, the cartwheels and flips. The parents grew amazed. It brought the people out of their regular, dull lives." Karolyi, now a U.S. citizen, returned to the present. He looked at his gym, its walls festooned with flags of the world, Old Glory larger than the rest. His eyes locked on Elise Ray, of Columbia, Md., as she performed parts of a floor exercise. He nodded once, twice, three times. Atler taped her wrists as Marie Fjordholm of Frisco, who also trains at WOGA, put on wristbands. "It's a nice bunch of kids," Karolyi said. "It's very, very promising." Dinner was steak. Mr. B.'s staff did not get much of a workout serving meat to the gymnasts, however. Most of them opted for salad and a baked potato. Some skipped the meal entirely and went directly to their rooms. At night, in the common room, the trophy moose presiding, Bela talked of his past and his goals. He did not need to name the goal of having the U.S. women win a medal in Sydney. But beyond that, he said he wanted to add a gazebo near the lakeside water pump. "I always have something I want to do," he said. "I want to see the campers frying the marshmallows and all the corn frying." The camp that he attended as a boy never left him, he said, because of the way it enlightened his impoverished childhood. "It's been feeding me for a long time," he said. "It became an obsession. Three days after the night-time pillow fights, we were like different people. I fell in deep love." So camps can be transforming experiences, in Karolyi's conception of life. By the time they get to Sydney, the gymnasts will know how much the ranch's setting and its owner helped their confidence. Bela Karolyi, the keeper of the mountain, will be put to the test. Again.
TEAM MEDALS ALL-AROUND MEDALS |