AFTER 16 YEARS, NADIA COMANECI RECAPTURES SOME OF HER GOLDEN SHINE

DATE: Monday, July 27, 1992

SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
Section: SECTION: Living
Page: 1C

JOHN HUGHES, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

SHE was the first perfect gymnast, a little communist who could show the world balance. Nadia Comaneci beamed her way into our lives on 14-year-old tippy-toes, then walked all over us when she showed up 13 years later in a tryst with a Hallandale, Fla., roofer.

The klieg lights of freedom found Comaneci puffy and bleached out, like a Barbie doll fallen into the hands of a dime-store cosmetician. We saw her sitting next to Constantin Panait and assumed that the space between them closed when the media went home. Assumed that Comaneci paid a high price for her clandestine escape from Romania.

The vestal virgin of the 1976 Olympics became 1989's tabloid harlot, with liberty as her only explanation and without remorse. Or so it seemed.

Comaneci returned to Florida last week for the first time since leaving in February 1990. She lost 14 pounds and the weight of the world. Lost the blond streaks. Found a blond, gold-medal Olympian, Bart Conner.

Put distance between her and Panait (last heard, he's back in Romania). Put muscles where mush had been. Put her past behind her.

And put her, at age 30, back on balance, after losing style points, beginning with that infamous press conference in Florida.

Reporter: Did you know he was married?

Comaneci: So what?

''What I wanted to say was that I knew he was married, but you have to understand what it means when that was my only way out," Comaneci says now. "That part was cut off, and then . . ."

And then scandal-mongers greased the beam and Comaneci tumbled slutward.

''I was not prepared," Comaneci says. "I had only known (Panait) five days when I got here. I was not able to talk to the people to make them understand what I wanted to say."

The short history is that Panait was exposed as an opportunist who used Comaneci to make money off gutter media.

Good riddance, Constantin. Hellllloooo, Bart.

Conner says they're good friends. The sight of them side-by-side on a couch says they're very good friends.

(They met in 1976 at the Montreal Olympics. He tracked her down again when she came to the United States 13 years later.)

''The more I get to know her," Conner says, "and see that there's this really interesting person inside, and charming person, it just kills me because of all this stuff that she went through."

The gymnasts came back to the scene of Comaneci's ugly introduction to the United States on a promotional tour for Sports Step Inc., sponsors of something called Step Challenge '92, an aerobics competition.

''A lot of people ask me, 'Would you like to change your past?' " Nadia says. "I say no, you learn things."

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