Changed Comaneci eager for visit home. , USA Today, 10-18-1994

At the Montreal Olympics in 1976, a lithe pixie from Romania
named Nadia Comaneci captured hearts all over the world.
At the tender age of 14, she won three gold medals and made
Olympic history with the first perfect scores of 10 in the uneven
bars and balance beam.
She was a fearless competitor who faltered in only one regard.
News conferences made the youngster uncomfortable. Those media
crushes were why, when asked what her greatest wish was, she said,
"I want to go home."
Now, Comaneci is a grown woman of 32. But her wish remains the
same. Nadia wants to go home.
That wish will come true in November when, for the first time
in five years, she returns to Romania.
While the Iron Curtain was falling and thousands were flooding
borders frozen shut throughout the Cold War, Comaneci became the
old Soviet Bloc's most famous defector.
There was a chance she never would be able to return to the
nation ruled by dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Instead, she will
return for a visit in late November a heroine.
In her hometown of Onesti, the street Comaneci walked from home
to the gymnasium will be renamed for her. So will Romania's Olympic
training center in Deva. And finally, in the capital city of
Bucharest, the nation's biggest sport hall also will bear her name.
"I'm excited, but I think I'm going to cry a lot," Comaneci says.
Pointing to her heart, she adds, "I think I'm going to get
little things here."
Comaneci has been visited in the USA by her mother, Stefania,
but hasn't seen her father, Gheorghe, in five years. Aside from her
relatives, there surprisingly wasn't much else Comaneci left behind
in Romania.
The common perception in the West was that material rewards were
heaped upon the Soviet Bloc's most successful Olympic athletes. But
that wasn't true for Comaneci. Her job was a modest one with the
Romanian gymnastics federation, where she says she never earned
more than the equivalent of $35 a month.
"In Romania, if you go twice a month to a restaurant, that's
your whole salary," Comaneci says. "In my career, I made only
between $5,000 and $10,000. I wasn't privileged."
In the USA, Comaneci has had endorsements that included an ad
with Jockey, which she refers to as "that underwear thing." She
also performs exhibitions with 1984 gold medalist Bart Conner, with
whom she has lived the last three years. They plan to marry within
two years.
Comaneci's hard times in Romania prepared her for another
enterprise she's undertaken with Conner, as co-hosts of the Food
and Fitness show on cable's Food Network.
"In Romania, if you had a piece of meat this big," Comaneci
says, forming a hamburger-sized circle with her fingers, "you cook
from that thing for six people. From one chicken, you can make a
meal for four people for three or four days."
Oddly, people today recognize Conner more easily than Comaneci,
though her face dominated television and magazine covers in the
summer of 1976.
"She's not that 14-year-old anymore," Conner says.
She also isn't the withdrawn little girl who took years to
realize how popular she was in the rest of the world.
"It took awhile to find out who she was, because she had become
a professional at not letting people find out who she was," Conner
says. "She came from a place where people were distrustful of
anybody who even said hello to them. They're poor and desperate."
But now, Comaneci's commercial ventures in the USA have been
successful enough to allow her to donate $120,000 to the Romanian
gymnastics team, essentially enough to see them through the 1996
Olympics in Atlanta.
"I'm very happy for that," Comaneci says. "Even if I live here,
I'm still Romanian."