Ring Exercises

Crawling through the mud and ice, owning nothing more valuable than the denim jacket on her back, Nadia Comaneci escaped across the Romanian border into Hungary on a winter night in 1989. If she ever returned home, those who knew of her plans to defect warned, soldiers would be waiting for her.

As she disembarked from an airplane a week ago in Bucharest, she indeed was met by a military escort. But the soldiers were not there to arrest her. In a country that again is experiencing Nadiamania, they were there to protect her from the media crush.

“I guess in this case the sword was mightier than the pen,” Bart Conner said.

Comaneci’s third visit to Romania since the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist dictatorship months after her defection is for a glorious occasion. She and Conner, gold-medal gymnasts, were married in a civil ceremony Friday. It is the first marriage for Comaneci, 34, and Conner, 38.

Today, their union will be blessed by the church. A second wedding in the Romanian Orthodox Monastery has been declared an official state ceremony and will be televised throughout the country. That will be followed by a reception in the Parliamentary Palace hosted by Romanian President Ion Iliescu. Among 1,500 invited were Juan Antonio Samaranch, Luciano Pavarotti and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For Comaneci, the last two decades mirror the unpredictability of life in Eastern Europe as she has gone from heroine to traitor to heroine.

“I have had three totally different lives,” she said by telephone two weeks ago from the home she shares with Conner in Norman, Okla. “This is definitely the happiest.”

She spoke excitedly about her wedding dress for today’s ceremony. Designed by Yumi Katsura of Japan, it has a 23-foot train that will be carried into the monastery by six members of the Romanian women’s gymnastics team. Comaneci contributed $100,000 last year to the team. It is among the world’s best, just as it was when she was its star in 1976.

Comaneci was introduced that year to most of the world, including Conner. Having won their competitions at New York’s Madison Square Garden in the American Cup, an event leading up to the Summer Olympics, they stood side by side on the podium when a newspaper photographer told Conner to kiss Comaneci on the cheek. Dutifully complying, it was a moment he never forgot.

“March 28, 1976--my 18th birthday,” he said.

To her, a kiss was just a kiss.

“I remember that it was a blond boy,” she said. “But there were four blond boys on the American team. They all looked the same to me.”

He would remain largely anonymous until the L.A. Summer Olympics in 1984, when he won two gold medals. In Montreal in 1976, he finished 46th in the all-around. She, however, became the sensation of those Games. Only 14, she won six medals, including three gold, and was awarded seven perfect scores of 10. No one had ever scored a 10 in the Olympics before.

“Her gift is a tremendous talent,” ABC’s Jim McKay said. “In the long run, is it a blessing or a curse?”

Initially, it was a blessing.

She was oblivious to her fame in the West. On the cover of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated during the Olympics, she was too busy shopping in Montreal for “hair clips and sparkly things” to notice. She did not hear “Nadia’s Theme” until months later.

But she realized when she saw the crowd waiting for her at the airport upon her return home that her life had changed forever.

Eager to take credit for her accomplishments, Ceausescu’s government named her a “Hero of Socialist Labor” and placed her picture on a postage stamp. She also was given an eight-room villa to share with her mother and brother, a staff of servants and the approval to shop at the stores for the privileged.

Around the world, however, Comaneci was considered a product of her coach, Bela Karolyi. Jealous gymnastics officials tried to discredit him, a campaign joined by Ceausescu and others in the government when they felt he embarrassed the country with his belligerent behavior in Moscow during the 1980 Summer Olympics.

Angry about the judging, he charged that it was biased toward the Soviets and against the Romanians--Comaneci in particular. She won two gold medals and a silver but did not repeat as the all-around champion. Four months later, fearing that he would be arrested on invented charges if he returned home, Karolyi defected to the United States.

Afterward, Comaneci’s relationship with the government deteriorated. Fearing that she would defect, officials tapped her phone and forbade her to leave the country after 1984. In retirement, she was given an insignificant job with the gymnastics federation.

Ceausescu’s son, Nicu, boasted that Comaneci was his girlfriend. Although she denied it, her mother said that she had a five-year relationship with him and that he abused Comaneci physically and emotionally. It was reported in the West that she attempted suicide. She denied that too.

But she was unhappy enough to make a perilous, six-hour trip on foot across the border in the winter of 1989 with six others even though she knew that defectors were shot if caught. Although greeted warmly in Hungary, she became concerned that authorities would send her back to Romania and fled for Vienna, where she was granted asylum by the U.S. embassy.

For engineering her defection, she paid $5,000 to a roofer from Orlando, Fla., Romanian expatriate Constantin Panait. She said that she had met him only a few weeks before. But he posed in the United States as her manager, and, although he had a wife and four children, as her lover. Again, there is a denial from Comaneci.

Overweight, she made appearances in tight dresses, stiletto heels and cheap makeup. It was a shocking contrast to the earnest innocence she portrayed as a 4-foot-11, 86-pound teenager in Montreal. A writer for Life magazine hinted that Comaneci was bulimic in an article under the headline, “The Fall From Grace of an Angel Named Nadia.”

Comaneci said that she no longer likes to talk about those days. “Why should I?” she said. “What’s past is past.” Conner told the New York Times recently that he does not ask her questions.

“It’s OK for me not to know everything about her, not to know all the things she had to do to get through her life,” he said. “I don’t know all the prices she paid. I can judge her on the standards of right now, of why I love her as she is.”

On Jan, 13, 1990, he read in the newspaper television listings while visiting Indianapolis that Comaneci would appear that night in Los Angeles on “The Pat Sajak Show.” He called the producer and asked to attend the taping. He was invited to appear with Comaneci.

Conner rushed to the airport, arrived by helicopter at the studio after Comaneci had gone on the air, was handed two dozen roses to present to her, hurriedly dusted with makeup and pushed onto the set, where he said, “Welcome to America.”

There was not much more conversation between them. Aware that Panait was hovering, Conner said, “I knew she needed help.”

So did Karolyi, who had been allowed no contact with Comaneci after she arrived in the United States. Refusing to believe media reports that Comaneci no longer wanted him as part of her life, he asked Alexandru Stefu, a former Romanian rugby coach who lived in Montreal, to check on her.

Devising a story that he had a business deal for them, Stefu invited Panait and Comaneci to Montreal. In a few private moments apart from Panait, Comaneci confided in Stefu that she felt like a prisoner. Stefu told her that she was now free.

When she accepted Stefu’s offer to live with him and his wife, Panait left her $1,000 and returned to his family in Florida. Comaneci said later that he stole $150,000 she had received for performances, appearances and interviews. Efforts to reach Panait for comment failed.

Back in shape after a few months, Comaneci was invited to appear in exhibitions with Conner by his coach and manager, Paul Ziert. She and Conner became friends, and after Stefu died in a scuba diving accident in 1991, she called the gymnast for help. Two years later, they were living together at his homes in Norman and Venice Beach. On Nov. 12, 1994, her birthday, he proposed.

“You know you can trust Bart just by looking at his face,” she said. “I tell people that it has ‘not guilty’ written on it. We come from such different places that you might not think that we match. But I give him things, and he gives me things. We are a family.”

On her first trip since her defection to Romania a short time later, she took her fiance with her.

“Usually, a woman takes a man home to meet her parents,” Conner said. “I met a whole country.”

When they return to the United States after the wedding, there will be little time for a honeymoon. Besides their work with the 1,000-student, 32-teacher Bart Conner Gymnastics Academy in Norman, they travel extensively for exhibitions and commercial appearances. He also does television commentary for gymnastics competitions, and they are part owners with Ziert of International Gymnast magazine.

She asked Ziert recently if he could foresee a time when her life with Conner would be less busy.

“Sure,” he said, “when you get pregnant.”