“Source Reports…” This Is What Nadia Comaneci’s Life Was Like Under Police Control

“Even though it seemed that people could freely crowd around the Olympic team, the Securitate was on high alert and had carefully filtered all the people entering the airport.” These words are part of the story of the return of the Romanian Olympic team from Montreal 1976, the Olympics in which Nadia Comaneci she got the first 10 in the history of artistic gymnastics. The Securitate, the secret police of Bucharest, had not only filtered people at the airport, but was controlling and would control more and more the gymnastics star who had not yet turned 15 at the time.

The historian and writer Stejarel Olaru tells of this control and the deprivation of freedom that pushed the gymnast to flee 13 years later. Precisely from that escape on foot towards Hungary on the night between 27 and 28 November 1989 Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police. The Story No One Has Ever Toldpublished by Piemme.

«Here and there, people were holding up placards distributed by the authorities to be visible on the news. The love and enthusiasm of the crowd were not a show, but the regime wanted to exploit them for propaganda purposes, and so there were slogans like: “Brava, Nadia! Sempre avanti!” an adaptation of the slogan of the Pioneers, while others were even more explicit: “We thank the party with all our hearts for the wonderful conditions it has provided for sports activities in our country!“».

The party that was thanked on those signs had made sure that all those who were close to Nadia Comaneci and the Onesti center where she trained were under surveillance by the secret police. «The champion was to be kept under complete but discreet surveillance.now that she had become one of the most famous personalities in the country…The secret services knew in real time what the relationships between those responsible for gymnastics were like and how they were evolving, they could anticipate events and intervene promptly to favor the interests of the regime».

The officially stated goal was to protect her, the reality was to control every step of her way. Everything is documented in the police reports that are the basis of this book that brings to mind an Oscar-winning film like **The Lives of Others **and that, even knowing the ending of the Romanian story of Comaneci that is told in the first chapter, increases from page to page the anxiety for a girl and her colleagues forced to undergo grueling training and devastating diets, constantly monitored in adolescence.

This is the tenor of the reports. «After the Olympics, the gymnast no longer wanted to work in conditions of total submission to her coach, in the sense that she no longer accepted being insulted in front of her older or younger teammates (“medal-winning cow“). She could no longer tolerate her parents being insulted. She no longer accepted the diet regime imposed by the coach, so much so that she would buy her own food (recommended or not recommended) or run away from home, and sometimes she would not show up for training.”

If Nadia Comaneci happened to wander off without permission, she was immediately sought out by Militia and Securitate officers. Around the women’s gymnastics team in Bucharest, “the Securitate had infiltrated a network of ninety-eight agents: forty-six informants, forty-five officers with operational missions and seven officers in charge of maintaining official relations. They were coordinated by three officers, who as usual acted undercover, posing as advisors or sports instructors.” This entire network was complicit in the violent methods and abuses he suffered from being forced to compete, and the blows to his physical and mental health. The Securitate investigation into the former gymnast concluded on December 19 or 20, 1989, after she had been in the U.S. for more than 20 days.