ROMANIA'S STAR GYMNAST DEFECTS: NADIA COMANECI, WINNER OF OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALS, FINALLY FLEES HER GILDED CAGE
Author: By John Powers, Globe Staff
Date: Thursday, November 30, 1989
Page: 26
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
EAST BLOC UPHEAVAL

She may have made her escape yesterday, from a Hungarian hotel room, but Nadia Comaneci had been trying to leave Romania in one fashion or another for a dozen years.

The Hungarian news agency MTI said Comaneci told border guards she left her rigid communist country "for the sake of freedom."

Her whereabouts were not known.

Hungarian radio reported that she made a predawn crossing Tuesday into Hungary by car at the nearby border town of Kiszombor with six other Romanians, who were not identified.

The agency initially reported that she had applied for political asylum but later said she had been granted a temporary residence permit, valid for three days, in the town of Szeged, about 15 miles from the Romanian border.

Comaneci once gained 40 pounds, hoping it would free her from the sport that had become her prison. She drank liquid detergent in a botched attempt at suicide. She begged coach Bela Karolyi to take her along when he and his wife defected in New York in 1981. She considered it again when she went to Canada for the World University Games.

From the moment she scored a perfect 10 in the gymnastics competion in the Montreal Olympics in 1976 and was declared a "national treasure," Comaneci was a tormented soul, trapped by her celebrity and exploited by her government.

At a time when she still wanted to play with dolls, Nadia was turned into a sideshow curiosity, trotted out by Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian leader, and his cronies for ceremonial occasions.

Her keepers treated Comaneci like a wind-up toy, plunked on stage for a few somersaults and flips, then crammed back into a box. Her cage may have been gilded with the usual socialist accoutrements -- an apartment, a car, a stipend, trips abroad -- but within months Comaneci recognized it for what it was.

In the year after her triumph in Montreal, when she had not yet the maturity or the means to conjure a way out, Comaneci chose the crudest one, swallowing something she thought would end her life. When it did not, she ate herself into gymnastic oblivion. "I hate myself, I hate everyone, I want to die," she told once Karolyi.

Her old coach, who had not seen her in months, was shocked -- this deformed figure in the doorway could not be Nadia."She was desperate, totally confused," Karolyi said later. "She was a sorrow."

Karolyi took his pupil back from the abyss and Comaneci returned to Olympic glory at Moscow in 1980. But her renaissance merely sentenced Comaneci to a life term in the cage.

More international competitions, more tours, more luncheons, and press conferences and appearances, all under an unrelenting spotlight. Nadia was Romania's centerpiece, its most desired export.

Some of her socialist peers, like the Soviet Union's Lyudmila Turishcheva, had made an accommodation with their gilded cages. Comaneci could not. When Karolyi came to her Manhattan hotel room to tell her he was defecting she wept, then implored him to let her do the same.

It was out of the question, her coach said. She was still a young girl with no means to make a living in America. She would be leaving her family and friends forever. "There is no way, Nadia," Karolyi said.

Two years later, Comaneci contacted him again. She was back in North America, a grown women now, with another chance to defect.

Again, Karolyi talked her out of it. He and his wife, Martha, had lived hand-to-mouth for months after their defection. America was nothing like the paradise it seemed, not for an unskilled immigrant with broken English. Restrained as she was, Nadia still had a secure life back home.

So Comaneci returned again to America, and when she came to Los Angeles for the 1984 Games, she was a gymnastics judge formally turned out in blazer and heels. She gave a mass press conference, said that most of what had been reported about her problems were lies or exaggerations and gave every impression that she had accepted her destiny as national poster girl.

Yesterday, Comaneci was gone. The opportunity presented itself and she vanished. The girl who recognized the limits of her tether at age 15 could see what was happening all around her.

While the rest of Eastern Europe has been knocking down walls and removing barbed wire, Romania has stepped back four decades.

If anything, the fresh winds blowing through Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria have caused Ceausescu to throw up new barriers to freedom. If Comaneci did not leave now, life might not promise her another chance.

Karolyi guessed that Comaneci might wind up in the United States, where her name is marketable.

She might tour as Olga Korbut and Mary Lou Retton did this month. Karolyi would probably hire her to coach at his huge Houston gym. She may not be a national treasure here, but for the first time in her 28 years, Nadia Comaneci will be a bird uncaged.