Remembering Béla Károlyi or about competitive gymnastics and the understanding of self-transcendence

In the late autumn of 1977, during a national gymnastics competition, the coach of Romania's Olympic Gymnastics Team, none other than Béla Károlyi, the trainer of Nadia Comăneci, noticed me during the floor routine competition. Forgetting the choreography, I improvised the entire performance. I was even more surprised to learn that only two gymnasts were selected from the competition to join the Olympic team in Onești, and one of them was me. I was 9 years old.

The two-week training camp in Oradea in January 1978 with the Olympic team, from which Nadia Comăneci had since departed, was followed by a trip to Bucharest, a training stint in Onești, and the team’s transition to the new specialized training center in Deva, Transylvania. These were my first encounters with elite performance.

We had two training sessions daily: 8–11 a.m. and 5–8 p.m. In between, we had lunch and school. I believe there were no more than 10 of us gymnasts training with Béla Károlyi, his wife Márta Károlyi, and the dance instructor, Geza Pozsar. We also had a specialized doctor and a governess. My friend was Lelia Cristina Itu, a gymnast older than me, also from Cluj.

For those outside competitive sports, training six hours a day, weighing yourself weekly, and dedicating all your time to what you believe in might seem like sacrifice. For me, as a child, it was passion and joy—a state of mind I was fortunate to experience later as an adult.

Of course, there weren’t only happy moments. One afternoon, I was supposed to execute a complicated beam jump—Márta Károlyi’s favorite apparatus—and admitted I was afraid. She told me to do squats instead of the exercise. I did. I reached 1,000 repetitions before she allowed me to stop. Strangely, I didn’t have any muscle soreness afterward. It was only during a phone call with my parents, when I told them this news casually, that they both panicked. They still saw me as fragile. I suspected something might have been slightly exaggerated, but I wasn’t sure if it was for better or worse.

I chose to believe it was for the better. I thought the experience would serve me someday. I eagerly awaited the future.

My journey with the Olympic team ended before the Olympics. Besides my parents' concern about my fragility, there was another reason tied to their belief that general education should take precedence in a child’s upbringing. From their perspective, things weren’t quite right. In the Olympic team, we ranged from fourth to twelfth grade, and classes were held in the same space, at the same time, with the same teachers. It was clear that gymnastics performance took precedence over intellectual performance. The prospect of having a daughter who was more or less illiterate did not fit into the Noja family’s plans.

Was it for the better? Was it for the worse?

I was 10 years old. After a quarantine due to measles, during which my maternal grandmother came from Mănăstireni to Deva’s dormitory to care for me, my fate was sealed. At the beginning of the summer of 1978, I was withdrawn from the Olympic gymnastics team with my tacit agreement. Yet deep down, I felt that any chance of becoming famous—after all, I wanted to be the next Nadia Comăneci—was gone. If I wouldn’t achieve fame in gymnastics, where would destiny take me?

Perhaps that’s when the idea of becoming a librarian was born. As a 10-year-old who loved to read, I viewed librarians as the privileged ones, close to wisdom… able to touch it anytime. To meditate in the quiet of a library, live near books, far from the world’s chaos, freely choose inspiring texts, and ignore "unfriendly" ones were then, and remain to this day, profound desires.

My contact with the Olympic team was my first step toward extreme performance. Experiencing firsthand the wonders of the human body, in a stimulating environment with competent coaches and doctors, alongside other gymnasts with dreams like mine, I understood that anything was possible.

There and then, I learned that through hard work, any obstacle can be overcome.

The fact that all three coaches (Béla, Márta, and Geza) were in the gym every day for six hours, without a trace of fatigue or boredom, and that the team doctor chose to operate on hospital patients in his free time to save lives, became benchmarks of high moral and educational standards. These distant memories came vividly to mind when I became a teacher and mentor myself. They became guiding lights as I theorized my own experiences. Even though being a ballerina differs from being a gymnast, the human pedagogical models I had in childhood profoundly influenced me. Decades later, I am deeply grateful to all the sports coaches who, consciously or not, shaped my character and my passion for movement.

Through sports, I came to understand Protagoras' dictum: "Man is the measure of all things."

Gymnastics gave me physical endurance, benefiting my career as a ballerina, and reinforced my belief that performance begins when you compete with yourself, and that life's obstacles are merely official measures of a continuous competition with oneself.

Time proved me right. Nine years later, in 1987, during my debut as "Kitri" in the ballet Don Quixote, the tempo of the fouettés in the third act was so slow that, instead of 32, I had to perform 64 fouettés. With the experience of doing 1,000 uninterrupted squats, spinning on one leg 64 times was merely an unfriendly challenge. My choice nine years earlier not to play the victim had been inspired.

Performance begins the moment you accept your destiny and decide—without knowing exactly what will come next.

This belief was confirmed during the same performance when the conductor made clumsy decisions. In the third act, after my variation was poorly conducted, the most spectacular part, the fouetté coda, was grandly botched. My second coda, meant to be the apotheosis of a fiery pas de deux, started as an adagio instead of an allegro. I was 19, debuting in a demanding role I had prepared for months, in a packed National Opera House in Cluj-Napoca. I had already furiously launched into a series of pique turns…

There are moments in life where everything is decided on a single card. As Bainbridge Cohen, founder of Body-Mind Centering, said, the difference between being and not being is as thin as a membrane. Space becomes an open field, weightless; time breaks free from rhythm, becoming timeless.

It is the moment when reason exhausts itself, and the present becomes pure emotion—a timeless, spaceless field.

At that moment, I like to think my movement became a word. A word freed from matter, a word that bore its meaning outward (Ion Noja). From the depths of my soul, in the middle of my performance, I shouted: TEMPO! It was entirely unexpected. The conductor heard it, the orchestra heard it, the entire audience heard it, and they erupted into applause. I finished the performance enthusiastically… freed from prejudice, seeking truth, and beginning to understand my artistic purpose. Movement, too, could become a word. Was it a beginning? An end? Was it for the better? Or the worse?

Amintindu-mi-l pe Béla Karoly sau despre gimnastica de performanță și înțelegerea depășirii de sine