A Foucauldian Analysis of the Romanian School of Gymnastics as a Superpower Between 1976-1981: What Securitatea Knew About Bela Karolyi’s Method

The Concept of Disciplinary Power in Foucault’s Approach to Sport

The poststructuralist analysis of sport served as research for a variety of purposes in order to push the boundaries of the domain. The scholars used Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power as a tool to improve our understanding of power used by coaches in correlation with different actors of the system such as athletes, sports federations or government officials. According to Foucault (1978, p. 94), power was not a possession that could be “acquired, seized, or shared”. Sports institutions such as federations, ministries or state organizations represented “only the terminal forms of power” (Foucault, 1978, p. 92). The dominant individuals who lead the teams, federations or organizations arrived in this position because they had a tactical usage of discourse. According to Foucault (1983, p. 223), this “made all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility” in order to understand possibilities and tactics for transforming the workings of power. Foucault (1983, p. 221) defined a relationship of power as an action of one person to help guide another’s conduct or direct “the possible field of action of others. This sporting example helped to reveal an important aspect of Foucault understands of power relations: ‘that power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free” (Foucault, 1983, p. 221). Also, “there is necessarily the possibility of resistance, for if there were no possibility of resistance – of violent resistance, of escape, of ruse, of strategies that reverse the situation – there would be no relations of power”.

Because they lived in Romania, a totalitarian country, athletes and coaches were not considered free people. They had to strictly obey the rules of the regime that controlled the citizens through the Securitatea. However, sport played a soft power role in East-West relations. The communist government was interested in it and supported and controlled its development even more than the capitalist one. Because of the great results, individuals such as Bela Karolyi were able to exist in the totalitarian communist system and continued to create and produce elite athletes, just as a free individual would have had the right to do so in a democratic system. Even if Michel Foucault's studies analyzed the evolution and transformation of power in relation to capitalism, our study intends to show that through contagion even communist sport could be analyzed from this perspective. In communism, the ruling class was called nomenklatura. They were considered the privileged people. Through the exceptional results, athletes also became privileged. Thus, sport made this transformation of power possible. This study analyzed how sport favored the creation of power relations, the way this power was maintained but also its limits.

The analysis of power at the micro-level of society revealed ruptures and unbalance in the relations between the actors, which shows that power has “a series of aims and objectives” (Foucault, 1978, p. 95). The main goal of power is to be productive. The main goal of sports is to get results. The results of the WAG national teams involved in competitions during the Cold War represented the result of the general discourse regarding the social context. It symbolized the capitalist-communism confrontation. The use of disciplinary power by the coaches was a form of power focused on control and discipline of the body. This was exercised fundamentally “by means of surveillance” (Foucault, 1991, p. 104) that produced docility and the docile bodies produced results. To become productive and efficient, “some essential techniques” of discipline were used: the art of distribution, control of activity, organization of genesis and the composition of forces (Foucault, 1991, p. 139). In this study all these techniques are identified as they are used by coaches as well as their characteristics as they were adapted to the communist system.

Different scholars analyzed WAG from a Foucauldian perspective (Barker-Ruchti, 2011; Barker-Ruchti & Tinning, 2010; Chisholm, 1999; Johns & Johns, 2000). These techniques “mapped very well onto sport, thus illustrating that the classificatory and controlling impulses of modern power were also central to high-performance sport” (Shogan, 1999, p. 19). Different studies analyzed Bela Karolyi’s coaching style as an authoritarian and abusive one (Kerr, 2014; Ryan, 1995). Foucault was less concerned with what is power, but rather interested in “how power is exercised” (Markula & Pringle, 2006, p. 35). This article focuses on the Foucauldian theory that conceptualized how Bela Karolyi exercised the power relations in an extremely controlled system like communist Romania in order to achieve his aims.

The Introduction of the Karolyi Family in the Romanian WAG Team: from Art of Distribution to Control of Activity and Organization of Genesis

In the world of WAG, Romania was known as being the country that introduced centralized training (Wood, 2010). The year 1969 represented the official birth of the project of constructing a Romanian artistic gymnastics school. The first results of this project were seen at the ’76 Montreal Olympic Games when Nadia Comaneci won the first place in individual compound, bar, and parallel bars. Even more, Nadia Comaneci was the first gymnast in the world whose evolution at Olympic Games was marked with a perfect 10. This was an important milestone in the history of sport. From a strategic point of view, from 1969 until 1976, there were several defining stages in the construction of the Romanian WAG School. These stages began with spatial distribution, continued with activity control, organization of genesis and combination of forces and had several characteristics.

Foucault (1991, p. 141) first pointed out that discipline requires an enclosure that “is the protected place of disciplinary monotony”. In 1965, four years prior to the official start of the project we had the first spatial distribution: the coach of the national WAG team, Marcel Duncan left Bucharest and went to Onesti (Wood, 2010). This city is located 300 km away from Bucharest, the country's capital. The reason for his departure was the need to distance himself from the central political power represented by the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) and the Romanian Gymnastics Federation (RGF), which criticized him for the poor results obtained at the ’64 Tokyo Olympic Games. In Tokyo, the Romanian team ranked 6^th.

Romania's 1^st participation in the WAG competition at the Olympic Games took place in 1952, in Helsinki and the first results were obtained at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne when Romania won the bronze medal in teams’ competition. The same thing happened at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. No women's artistic gymnastics team had been sent to the 1968 Olympics, considering that the expenses were too high, and the medal chances were non-existent (Nauright & Parrish, 2012; Wood, 2010, pp. 331-332). In 1966, Maria and Gheorghe Simionescu joined Marcel Duncan in Onesti. They were federal coaches who came from Bucharest to work on the new team. ¹

According to Foucault (1991, p. 143), the principle of enclosure is not sufficient to create a disciplinary machine. In addition to the spatial distribution, Marcel Duncan introduced a new form of organizing the selection of gymnasts. The selected gymnasts were between 5 and 6 years old, unlike the gymnasts he worked with in Bucharest, who could not be controlled. Those were young women over the age of 20, amateur athletes employed at various companies in Bucharest. At that age, they were interested in building a family and not that much in sports training. Because of this, the RGF (Romanian Gymnastics Federation) repeatedly criticized the coaches.

The second characteristic of the spatial distribution consisted in the political support of the RGF and of the WAG. In 1967, the sports law was adopted. ² It stated that physical education and sports in the Romanian Socialist Republic were activities of national interest. In this context, the officials of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) asked RGF to devise a plan for the recovery of artistic gymnastics. Thus, in 1969, the first high school with a sports program in the world started operating in Onesti. It had the support of all state institutions (the Ministry of Education, the National Council of Physical Education and Sports, the Romanian Gymnastics Federation, the Petroleum Plant in Onesti and the local political authorities). The new training center that became a disciplinary space had an improvised infrastructure in the beginning. Until 1975, the high schools with gymnastics program were built in such a way that they included adequate sports infrastructure for training, appropriate classrooms for conducting lessons, and dorm rooms, where the selected athletes were accommodated, including a cafeteria. The director of the high school was Gheorghe Simionescu, the one who ensured the control of the entire institution while his wife, Maria Simionescu was responsible for the control of the sports activity. ³

Maria Simionescu managed a team of 11 coaches selected from different areas of the country who came to Onesti with the athletes trained by them and selected to form the experimental team. Marta Karolyi was selected among the 11 coaches. “The place one occupied in a classification” (Foucault, 1991, pp. 145–146) reinforced the discipline system. Her husband, Bela Karolyi, coached the handball team of the club. From 1969 to 1972, Marta together with Munteanu Valeriu coached the team taken over from Marcel Duncan. “Discipline is an art of rank”, Foucault (1991) asserted. The team selected by them in 1966 consisted of Nadia Comaneci and Teodora Ungureanu, who were the main pillars. In 1969, Marcel Duncan left Onesti for Galati to later emigrate legally from Romania to Israel with his family. ⁴

Until 1972, other coaches chose to leave Onesti as well. Some of them did so due to the team's location - a provincial town, without major prospects or because their gymnasts were not selected for the national team or abandoned gymnastics. Others were drawn back by the mirage of the big city. The Simionescu family returned in 1972 to Bucharest, Maria as an international referee with intense activity at RGF and her husband as a gymnastics teacher at a club in Bucharest. Munteanu Valeriu did the same. In 1972, he returned to Bucharest as a coach for the gymnastics team of the Dinamo club. Other coaches also chose to go to other big clubs in Bucharest or in the country. Marta Karolyi, however, chose to stay in Onesti. Coach Munteanu’s departure allowed the elements to become interchangeable (Foucault, 1991). The vacancy was occupied by Bela Karolyi as coach of the gymnastics team. ⁵ 1972 is the year that marked the Karolyi family’s control takeover by coordinating the team’s activity in Onesti. This was the first identified element of the tactics used by Bela Karolyi. Foucault concluded that “in organizing ‘cells’, ‘places’ and ‘ranks’ the disciplines create complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional, and hierarchical. It is spaces that provide fixed positions and permit circulation” (Foucault, 1991, p. 148).

To “assure the quality of the time used” (Foucault, 1991, p. 150), the organization of genesis began with the modernization of sports training. The defining elements of the creation of the Romanian school of artistic gymnastics were centralized training and time selection. The change of the old training methods was the third characteristic. Bela and Marta Karolyi played a defining role in this stage, by applying these methods. Other coaches did the pioneering work as well. Thus, in the early 1950s, many specialists from various sports went to Moscow for specific trainings. In WAG, Petre Dungaciu, a graduate of the Institute of Physical Culture in Bucharest (1951) went to Moscow (1952-1956) where he attended the courses of the Central Institute of Physical Culture. ⁶ Upon his return to the country, he became the coach of the Romanian WAG team and lecturer at the Institute of Physical Culture in Bucharest. His published books were a testament for the concerns regarding the development activity of WAG carried out at that time (Dungaciu, 1967). ⁷ Following the Soviet model, the teams were coached by a couple of coaches - a woman and a man. The distribution of the intervention areas within the training was made according to gender. Thus, the technical and artistic parts were taken over by the female coach while the physical training and the help given to the gymnasts in the execution of the technical elements (lifting), were taken over by the male coach. Marta Karolyi’s intervention and role on the technical side was important because here, too, there were major changes in the learning methods that were used. The analytical method was replaced by the synthetic one because Soviet specialists considered that the final structure of the movement would be compromised if its elements were learned separately and isolated them from the global movement (Ukraine, 1950, apud. Wood, 2010, p. 95). The methods became a part of “a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is composed” (Foucault, 1991, p. 164). The synthetic method lead to learning without fragmentation. To succeed in learning new movements, this method required that the learning of exercises start from simple exercises to reach the complex ones and from the known ones to discover new ones (Podlaha, 1950 apud. Wood, 2010, p. 95). The general and specific physical training part belonged to Bela Karolyi. The main change in methods occurred when the heavy effort method was introduced (Wood, 2010). This method consisted in performing trainings with a longer duration and intensity than the one performed on the day of the competition. This method required an individualized approach for each athlete and increased attention from the coach (Dungaciu, 1955, apud Wood, 2010, p. 97). These were considered instruction “which makes possible a correct use of time, nothing must remain idle or useless: everything must be called upon to form the support of the act required. A well-disciplined body forms the operational context of the slightest gesture” (Foucault, 1991, p. 152).

The first tactical elements used by Bela Karolyi since the beginning of his career were represented by his penetration in the gymnastics team, the control of the gymnasts and the means of physical training used. Even if his specialization was handball and as an athlete, he practiced athletics, this was not an obstacle for him. The mixed construction of the coaching couple in women's gymnastics was an advantage that allowed him to enter the world of gymnastics. Even if the specialist was his wife, Bela Karolyi did not limit himself to physical training of the gymnasts. He became the leader of this team. Even though women's gymnastics brought the most medals for Romania throughout history, it always had male coaches. Women played the role of specialists, but men were always in charge of the sports teams. Communism promoted sport as a form of women’s emancipation. Women were sports champions or possibly specialists, as was the case Mariana Simionescu. However, they were almost never in the position of leaders of production of sports results. Men always occupied this place.

Between 1972 and 1976, the Karolyi couple organized and controlled the entire activity at Onesti. However, the Securitatea, in turn, controlled them. In 1975, Bela Karolyi was offered to become a Securitatea collaborator. ⁸ Even if he initially agreed, due to various circumstances, he showed lack of seriousness, not providing the required information, and denouncement. ⁹ Securitatea quickly understood that Bela Karolyi would not obey, and they changed tactics. From a collaborator, Bela Karolyi started being surveilled by the Securitatea.

What’s Wrong with Bela Karolyi Method? The Securitatea’s Point of View

The fact that the Karolyi family was often traveling abroad meant that there was always the danger of being contacted by foreign agencies, "disloyal" to Romania. ¹⁰ Thus, in November 1976, after the resounding success of Nadia Comaneci at the Montreal Olympics, an informative investigation file on Bela Karolyi was opened at the Securitatea of Bacau County under the name Katona. ¹¹ Securitatea stated that their purpose for following Bela Karolyi was to keep him and his wife at the helm of the national gymnastics team. The communists thus recognized their value and were prepared to support them further. For this, Securitatea undertook a plan of measures aimed at influencing the Karolyi family to act according to the established strategy. The reasons for keeping Bela Karolyi under surveillance were the following: suspect of staying abroad, unofficial relations with foreigners, negative comments, some with a tendentious character regarding the internal and foreign policy of the Romanian party and state. ¹² Also, the fact that the couple had Hungarian nationality represented a danger because they were registered several times with tendentious manifestations "towards the socialist order of the country". ¹³ Because the competition between East and West in WAG was also waged through judjing, supporting the sportswomen as representatives of the nations was very important. Thus, the referees from the communist countries allied and favored their representative sportswomen in the confrontation with those from the capitalist countries. But these power relations continued in the situation of competition between the athletes of the communist bloc, this giving rise to other possible alliances, betrayals or oppositions. Bela Karolyi knew how to use his skill to interact in these relations. Among others, at the Olympic Games in Montreal, Bela Karolyi was accused that he would have asked the Romanian referee Emilia Lita to use her alliances and to demand that the other referees from the unequal parallels to give a higher grade to a sportswoman from the Hungarian team in order to obtain the silver medal. Teodora Ungureanu also competed in the same apparatus. Bela Karolyi would have asked for this because he was friends with the coach of the Hungarian team and the gymnast was the coach’wife. But the Romanian referee refused, arguing that Teodora Ungureanu was much better than the Hungarian gymnast. ¹⁴ The file contained a summary note of the facts and actions of the Karolyi family reported by other informants. These facts can be divided into two categories: one related to the field of national security and one related to the field of gymnastics.

In terms of national security, actions such as having foreign currency in the house or plans undertaken to acquire it and interacting with various foreign nationals were enough to arouse the suspicions of the Securitatea. In addition, Marta Karolyi had relatives who lived abroad (an aunt who lived in New York). ¹⁵ These facts were constantly recorded in the file throughout the informative pursuit.

If other gymnastics coaches showed vigilance or obedience to rules, such as those who reported information to Securitatea, Bela Karolyi did not obey these rules. The refusal to collaborate and to become an informant of the Securitatea was also proof. But his teammate, the choreographer of the national group, Geza Pozsar was recruited as an information agent under the conspiratorial name of Nelu. ¹⁶ This is the most credible and reliable source in the file. Bela Karolyi was characterized as being greedy for money, especially currency, he was distant in his relationships with colleagues, he did not have the "comrade" spirit, and he was rather selfish. ¹⁷ Securitatea considered these features to be moral deficiencies of Bela Karolyi. ¹⁸ The harsh behavior adopted by the two coaches, reported by athletes and parents, doctors and colleagues was also reported by the informant. The techniques used to discipline gymnasts were diverse. In addition to insulting and humiliating the athletes, the coaches also used physical and corporal punishment. The sportswomen were hit on the head and were offended by various nicknames: "cow, stupid, fat, unwashed". ¹⁹ Through his behavior, Bela Karolyi was considered to have established a regime of terror. ²⁰ The gymnasts were not allowed to talk to anyone outside the group, they were not allowed to answer questions except in the presence of the coach and they were not allowed to say that they were injured. Any negligence on their part was punished with a beating. There were gymnasts who opposed the control of Bela Karolyi before Nadia Comaneci or Teodora Ungureanu started to do. Georgeta Gabor was one of them. She was a member of the 1976 Olympic team who was expelled from the team shortly after returning from Montreal on the grounds that she no longer provided moral guarantees in the event of a new trip abroad. But Bela Karolyi excluded her because the gymnast dared to refuse to execute the training plan and even more, she wrote down in a notebook all the trainings and the negative comments of the coaches regarding the athletes. ²¹

In order to maintain an optimal weight, he gave the gymnasts a wrong diet, without considering the doctor's indications, this leading to injuries and going to competitions with gymnasts below their potential. ²² The instructions given by the team doctor were never followed, the gymnasts being forced to train with fever, sprains, injuries, etc. Within four years (1972-1976), a number of 7 doctors were changed in the national team until the surgeon Lazar Gheorghe arrived in the group, the only one who, before giving a medical opinion, consulted coach Karolyi in advance. ²³ Having native talented athletes such as Nadia Comaneci, Teodora Ungureanu, etc. as well as the work of other coaches (Simionescu Maria, Albu Anastasia, Bibire Marioara, etc.), Bela Karolyi made the gymnastics team a personal property. He advertised himself abroad by showing in any way that he was the only author of the success of the gymnastics team. ²⁴ In interviews given abroad, he sought to explain that the results of Romanian gymnastics was the result of their own work and the discovery of new training methods. He never specified that these results were also due to the conditions created in the country to obtain these results. He claimed the discovery of Nadia Comaneci, without mentioning Marcel Duncan. ²⁵ The teaching materials sent for study by RGF were taken over by the Karolyi family and he refused under various pretexts to make them available to his other colleagues. When he returned home, he refused to share his experience with his colleagues.

After having analyzed all this data, two action plans were mentioned in the file. One elaborated at the opening of the information tracking file (November 1976) and another, one year later (December 1977). There was also an intermediate plan (April 1977), but it only adjusted the measures of the first plan. There were some differences between the two plans.

The first plan focused on three tasks that strictly targeted the field of gymnastics, which became an objective of the actions of protection of the Securitatea. ²⁶ The first task was to check whether Bela Karolyi was recruited by other foreign agencies during his travels abroad in order to be involved in "hostile activities against our country." Some of the “activities” listed were: collection and transfer of data and information that constituted state secrets, nationalist-irredentist actions, compromising Romanian gymnastics, etc. The second task was to establish whether the coach was behaving inappropriately within the team in order to diminish the team's ability to train. The third task was to identify foreign and Romanian citizens interested in cultivating relationships with Bela Karolyi in order to create favorable conditions for obtaining knowledge of the training methodology and data to recruit and possibly compromise athletes. In order to accomplish these tasks, a plan of 7 measures was established. Each task had a deadline, an executor, and a person in charge who was a Securitatea officer. The first measure was to instruct the informant "Dan" (member of the sports school from Onesti) to verify the nature of the relationship between Bela Karolyi and the team athletes and the one with the coaches. More precisely, he had to find out whether during the professional activities he used methods of compromising the gymnasts and the teachers. He also had to investigate whether the relations with the coaches of the national team did not have as purpose the establishment of nationalist-Soviet actions. The second measure required the recruitment of a new agent from the national gymnastics team or Marta Karolyi herself to effectively establish the nature of the relationship between Bela Karolyi and the female athletes. The recruit had to investigate whether Karolyi was determining gymnasts to stay abroad and to double-check the source “Dan”. The Karolyi family’s home was bugged with microphones to continue the operative listening measures in order to verify the information obtained and to find out the content of the discussions on suspicious connections abroad. They also wanted to find out whether the family made any plans for remaining abroad after the next trip there. Another topic was how they talked and behaved with the athletes and the nature of the relation with citizens of Hungarian nationality. There were also visits: secret home searches, wiretapping, checking all connections identified so far and subsequent ones and checking correspondence. In this plan, gymnastics became an area of ​​national security, and the coaches were the main suspects of betrayal. Training plans became secret plans and if the coaches disclosed these plans, they were considered spies.

The second action plan, drawn up one year after the start of the Katona target, outlined four major tasks and ten measures to achieve them. ²⁷ The first task was to know the concepts, attitudes and behavior towards the country, patriotism and worries and intentions for the future. The second task consisted in identifying and verifying all foreign citizens with whom he had informal relations, with an emphasis on the nature and content of these relations. The third measure consisted in establishing all close ties in the country, including those of Hungarian nationality. Depending on their nature, actions were requested to remove those considered inappropriate and to appropriate the ones to be used in operative interest. The last task aimed for the continuous knowledge of how to achieve the main objectives of the national gymnastics team to participate at the Moscow Olympics in 1980. The proposed measures, in addition to the counter-information processing of Bela Karolyi, had the purpose of framing and supervising the people in his entourage (people from sports, people with management positions, parents and relatives and people outside the professional sphere). In addition, the installation of listening devices both at the family home and in the locations where the camps and trips took place became an important measure that had to be done as soon as possible. For each trip abroad, Bela Karolyi was expected to be accompanied by a Securitatea Officer with priority tasks to prevent him from staying abroad. For each task, there was a person in charge, a Securitatea officer, and a term for its fulfillment.

Comparing the two action plans, one can see that in the first plan, gymnastics was placed in the center of the action and was seen as an area of major interest by Securitatea. The interest came from understanding the role and importance that the Romanian WAG could play in the Cold War. The proposed measures mainly targeted coaches Bela and Marta Karolyi and expressed the Securitatea's suspicion that the Karolyi family had been recruited by foreign agencies. Thus, the gymnastics team could become a place of manifestation of anti-patriotism and the trainers were seen as possible traitors. The training plans were considered state secrets and the suspicion that the coaches through their actions undermined the work potential and performance of the athletes was present. In the second plan of measures, the tasks outlined were identified with the general tasks of the Securitatea. The tasks were no longer aimed at overseeing the tactics and techniques of training and competition but at the patriotism of the Karolyi family. The documents stated that these actions were taken due to the international value that Bela Karolyi acquired, his personality, behavior, character, vices and passions in order to defend, protect and influence him.

The Composition and Recomposition of Forces

According to Foucault (1991, p. 164), “discipline became the art of composing forces to obtain an efficient machine”. After the results obtained in Montreal in '76, one could believe that Bela Karolyi benefited from a privileged situation in order to lead the Romanian WAG team as an efficient machine. But in Onesti the reality was different. Besides the problems with Nadia Comaneci, Bela Karolyi had problems with everyone in Onesti - from the highest level represented by the party leadership of Bacau County, to the leadership of the Combine, the director of the school where the gymnasts were students, to the parents of the athletes and work colleagues. At school there was a picture showing padlocks on the gym equipment (bar and horse). His colleagues accused him of not letting them use the equipment. But he denied everything, saying that they put the chains on and took the picture. ²⁸ In Bela Karolyi’s vision, in Onesti the actions against them had an organized character, starting with the colleagues from their department who refused to work additionally with the students from the group, up to the management of the high school who wanted the sportswomen, students at the highschool, to be transferred to junior college. In their apartment, their phone and electricity were cut off. The grocery store no longer took their orders, and their little girl was no longer received in kindergarten. ²⁹ In their absence, Securitatea searched their house in such a way that they ransacked everything. Not one thing was in its place. The hardwood floor was peeled off and glued back with a bad-smelling solution. ³⁰

At this point, Karolyi started to recompose his tactics. Tactics are “the art of constructing, with located bodies, coded activities and trained aptitudes” (Foucault, 1991, p. 167). They are “mechanisms in which the product of the various forces is increased by their calculated combination” and consequently, they are “no doubt the highest form of disciplinary practice” (Foucault, 1991, p. 167). In this situation, to solve it, Bela Karolyi appealed directly to the highest peak of communist power, superior to any power in sports (CNEFS or RGF). Because “the individual body becomes an element that may be placed, moved, articulated on others” (Foucault, 1991), Karolyi started to use this element of tactics. The political person who helped him was Ilie Verdet, an important figure in the communist government. He served as secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (1974-1978), first vice-president of the Council of Ministers (1978-1979) and prime minister of the government of the Socialist Republic of Romania (1979-1982). Ilie Verdet was born in Bacau County, Comanesti commune, which explained his closeness to the national group of women's artistic gymnastics and the support of its coaches.

According to Foucault (1991, p. 164), “the various chronological series that discipline must combine to form a composite time are also a piece of machinery”. In the fall of 1977, he managed to move the team from Onesti to Deva, a city located in Hunedoara County, far from Bucharest. Through this move, Bela Karolyi proves that he mastered the technologies of power and could reinstall the system in another location, with other actors and where his tactics could unfold better. Thus, Bela Karolyi recreated the system, starting from the first stage, spatial distribution. On February 17, 1977, the file recorded Bela Karolyi’s meeting at the Ministry of Education, where he went to ask for help in transferring to Cluj Napoca. ³¹ Eventually he arrived in Deva. The city was tied to the professional beginnings of the Karolyi family. At the end of their higher education, they were assigned as physical education teachers in two different cities in Hunedoara County. ³² Here they laid the foundations of the first gymnastics teams with which they participated in the national championships of the '60s. Based on these results, they were noticed by RGF and were offered the position of coach in Onesti. The same results obtained at the beginning of their career, doubled by the success and reputation created after Montreal ’76, alongside with the political support, made it possible to move the team to Deva. It was also the new starting point for favorable conditions for performance. Bela Karolyi was able to relocate the team with political and institutional support from various institutions in Hunedoara County but also from the Ministry of Education. In an informative note, the Nelu source characterized Bela Karolyi as a “very hardworking man, with an immense work force. He had an impulsive nature, always prone to anger. When it came to pursuing a personal interest, he could be very appealing, courteous”. ³³

The new system implemented by Bela Karolyi in Deva compared to the one in Onesti had several improvements because “this carefully measured combination of forces requires a precise system of command” (Foucault, 1991, p. 166). The high school benefited from all the endowments specific to centralized training, the grid was fully ensured from the beginning. Bela Karolyi knew how to collaborate better, having permanent local support, both at the level of political leadership of Hunedoara County, from the vice-president of CJEFS Hunedoara and from the director of High School no.7, where the gymnasts from the Romanian national group were students. Moreover, Bela Karolyi was aware of the close surveillance of the Securitatea and seemed to understand the game very well. From a story by the Nelu source about Geza Pozsar’ then-fiancée, a French citizen, Bela Karolyi explained to Pozsar the stakes of her pursuit in Romania. The Securitatea assumed that the fiancée was carrying out cultural-sports espionage and the capture of such a spy could bring direct benefits to the officer in charge of pursuing her, respectively advancing in rank. ³⁴ Karolyi also knew who the officer directly in charge of his pursuit was (Lieutenant Colonel Mirita Vasile), stating that he sometimes gave him information directly to make his job easier.

If the spatial distribution was conductive to performance, the control of the activity created the biggest problems because of Nadia Comaneci's refusal to submit to discipline. The presence or absence of Nadia Comaneci in the team entailed the participation or refusal of the other teammates to submit to the training program. In addition, there was the issue of Nadia's monthly salary that she received, whether or not she participated in training while the other gymnasts were threatened with salary cuts. In addition, the model of refusal of hierarchical obedience was followed by coaches from other sports clubs in the country, including Onesti, the place where the national junior team remained to train. They refused to send any more athletes to the national team, not ensuring continuity to the national team, given that all clubs were subsidized by the state. ³⁵ Regarding the organization of the genesis, Bela Karolyi had to be receptive to Nadia Comaneci's returns to his trainings in Deva and had to organize the activity so that in the shortest time (3 months for the Moscow Olympics) Nadia Comaneci would lose weight and get back in shape. Under all these circumstances, the remaining tactic was to turn to Ilie Verdet every time. But after the 1980 Moscow Olympics, he could no longer support him. Bela Karolyi’s reaction and manifestation to the pro-Soviet judging of the URSS’gymnasts and against Nadia Comaneci on soviet ground led to sanctions coming from the highest political level.

The Communists considered the Moscow Olympics to be the first Olympics held in a communist country. This situation came after previously, in 1977, at the European Championships in Prague, Nicolae Ceausescu ordered the withdrawal of the Romanian team from the competition. In both situations, Bela Karolyi developed a competitive tactic in which contesting the referees’ decision, alliances or opposing the strategy of other nations were part of the game. If in Prague Nicolae Ceausescu intervened hierarchically over Bela Karolyi’s decisions, after Moscow, his decisions attracted direct political sanctions. Ilie Verdet could not intervene in any of the situations.

Even if there is the possibility to start all over again in another city in Romania, the coaches were aware that the road to great performance was blocked for them. The city of Timisoara was waiting for them and offered them a house. They did not receive the same courtesy in Onesti or Deva. The only condition was that Nadia became a student at the Faculty of Physical Education and Sports in Timisoara. ³⁶ Either way, RGF's plan was to wait for the lack of results to dismiss them. But the results continued to appear, even in those conditions. It was the political struggles that made them understand that their future could be elsewhere. Thus, at the end of the tour in Venezuela and the United States in March 1981, Bela and Marta Karolyi, and the choreographer Geza Pozsar, did not return to Romania and requested political asylum in the United States.