Got this from another board
John Roumimper
If it has already been posted - - oops =)
if not, EnJoY!
------
Maturing concerns
Moceanu, 17, struggles with changing body, split from parents for one
last shot
at Olympic glory
06/13/99
By Bruce Nichols / The Dallas Morning News
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - Day after day in a gym at the Olympic Training
Center. Flips, jumps, twists. Aches, pain and muttering. Racing against
time.
Alone.
Gymnast Dominique Moceanu, 17, works fiercely to return to the form that
helped
U.S. women's gymnastics win its first team gold medal at the Atlanta
Olympics
in 1996.
Old for a female gymnast, she doesn't need the clock on the training
center
lawn counting down to the 2000 games in Sydney, Australia. She feels the
passage of time in her wrists and knees.
She's fighting a four-month training layoff caused by a court battle
last fall
in which she won independence from the father she said exploited her and
wasted
her money - accusations he denied.
"It gets lonely," said the dark-haired athlete, a professional since age
10,
whom a judge declared an adult a year before her 18th birthday. But now,
she
said, "I have control."
She's defying several norms.
Seven inches taller and at least 30 pounds heavier (she wouldn't
disclose her
weight), she's no longer the 4-foot-6 Olympic pixie of 1996.
Gymnastics is the realm of bouncy, pre-pubescent girls who, like Moceanu
in
Atlanta at 14, do amazing things with boyish bodies.
She's a woman now and still growing. And her layoff from training, just
as her
body is maturing, could not have come at a worse time.
"This will be one of the hardest things she does in her life," said
friend Tom
Forster, who has coached other Olympians and owns Aerial Gymnastics in
Colorado
Springs.
The California-born star also is going against an East European
patrimony in
which family shares everything and the father makes all important
decisions.
Part of her split with her family was teenage rebellion against a
controlling
father, but she also was an American kid fighting Romanian family
tradition,
some observers say.
"Conflict . . . can be more severe where cultures are different," said
Russ
Curtis, a University of Houston sociologist who studies sports in
society.
Dumitru Moceanu and his wife, Camelia, who still live in the comfortable
north
Houston neighborhood in which their Olympian daughter grew up, met a
reporter
politely at the door but declined interviews.
So did Moceanu's former coach, Bela Karolyi, now retired from Olympic
competition. Found chain-sawing timber at his training camp north of
Houston,
he called the family's dispute a private matter.
With financial help from the U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Gymnastics,
the
sport's national governing body, Moceanu has been training in Colorado
since
late February.
The training center, a converted former military base, provides a secure
environment. Media access is controlled, and she can focus, amid
inspirational
plaques and sculpture.
It's a picturesque setting, with Pikes Peak visible from the grounds,
but
Moceanu says she hasn't had time for sightseeing.
She's climbing her own personal mountain.
Grueling schedule
Six days a week, about 9:30 a.m., Moceanu and her coach, Luminita
Miscenco,
leave the training center dormitory room they share and walk to the gym
for a
three-hour morning workout.
Some days it's the beam and uneven bars. Others it's the vault. There's
a a
floor routine to choreograph. They do things in segments, working and
reworking, fixing and polishing.
After a break for lunch, they return at midafternoon for three or four
hours
more.
It's grueling and tedious, partly because you're supposed to make it
look easy,
said John Macready, a member of the men's team that has had to make room
for
Moceanu.
"You're doing the same thing over and over again. . . . It's hard,"
Macready
said.
Doing it alone makes it harder, he said.
"When I come in here and I'm tired, I've got . . . [team members] to
pump me
up," he said. "It's really hard to come in on your own with no one but
your
coach to tell you to get going."
Huffing and puffing through exercises, Moceanu is silent as Miscenco
frowns at
this move, gestures at that one, nods and smiles at a third.
The two don't talk much. They don't have to.
When they do, it's mostly Romanian, though Miscenco is working on
English for
interviews at events. Their soft voices don't carry far in the huge gym
they
have mostly to themselves.
Moceanu winces sometimes when she hits the floor. Pain, in a joint or
muscle,
is a constant companion. Hands and wrists take a beating on the uneven
bars,
despite handgrips and tape.
The white chalk she uses to reduce friction is everywhere by the end of
a
workout.
The repetition is deadening: the swoosh of her sweat pants as she jogs
to warm
up, the creak of the bars as she swings through an exercise, the same
thwacks,
bumps and thuds over and over.
To ease the monotony, Moceanu tunes a radio to the music every kid
likes.
Occasionally, guided public tours wander through. The resident men's
team meets
at the other end of the gym before retiring to a workout room. They keep
their
distance.
Making progress
She seems to be making progress, said Ron Brant, the men's coach, who
has his
own team to train but observes Moceanu from afar.
"She definitely can help the women's team in the World Championships,"
he said.
But whether she can repeat the success she enjoyed in the 1998 Goodwill
Games
"depends on what happens over the next couple of months."
Moceanu understands the personal significance of the national meet in
August,
the World Championships in October and the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.
"It's my
last shot," she said.
A lot has changed since last October, when she ran away from home and
sued her
parents for "emancipation," legal language for an early declaration of
adulthood.
She had trained successfully the previous two years in a big, new gym
built in
north Houston by her father, taking a gold medal in the all-around last
year at
the Goodwill Games.
"It was the best gym. It had everything I needed," she said. "I miss
that gym
because I know that we won there."
Ironically, that gym, which reportedly cost $2 million but is valued by
tax
appraisers at $1 million, was a key reason she left home.
Friends told her it was a bad investment, but alarm bells already had
been
going off in her life. "I kind of felt like I was getting . . . kept in
the
dark a lot," she said.
She had reason to be suspicious that her assets were being wasted,
Forster, her
friend, said.
"Not many parents take [a fortune] . . . and blow it on a gym that's . .
. in a
bad location and has no chance of surviving," he said.
The gym is now closed, and sale of the building is pending.
Moceanu's lawyer, Ellen Yarrell, hopes to recover a big chunk of the
assets the
gymnast has earned since turning professional.
An undisclosed settlement early last month resolved Moceanu's financial
differences with her parents and freed her father from a protective
order to
stay away from her.
Family matters
She never lost touch with her mother and 9-year-old sister, Christina,
but she
reunited with her father for the first time over Orthodox Easter in
early
April.
Reconnecting with her dad "was a little weird and awkward," said
Moceanu,
sitting on a mat, toweling off and sipping water.
The biggest problem wasn't the money. It was the fact that her father
allegedly
stalked and harassed her and, police said, threatened to kill her coach
and
friend, Brian Huggins.
No charges were filed, but the damage was done.
"I can tell that he realizes some things," Moceanu said of her father.
"I don't
know if you can change a person totally, but you can make them try to
understand."
Her problems may be due in part to her parents' Romanian upbringing, she
said.
"But I don't blame it all on that," she said. Her father has been in the
United
States for 20 years.
Gymnastics involves "a very controlled environment because it's
necessary for
optimal performance," said Michael Meyers, an expert in sports
performance at
the University of Houston.
But Moceanu said her life was tougher than the lives of her gymnastic
peers.
"I used to see my friends, and I'd be like . . . 'This is not fair,' "
she
said. "Their parents weren't as hard on them or as tough on them or
controlling."
Forster discounts cultural stresses, arguing that Moceanu's father, a
former
used car salesman, was just misguided. "In my opinion, he was full of
it,"
Forster said.
Moceanu is a pioneer in another way.
She and her coach are the first women gymnasts to live at the Olympic
Training
Center in Colorado Springs, opened on an old Air Force base in 1977.
There's a good reason they're the first, Forster said.
Elite female gymnasts peak while they're children, still living at home.
Men
don't peak until their 20s, when they're out on their own. They need a
place to
stay, he said.
The center has almost everything she needs: meals in the cafeteria,
medical
care, counseling, haircuts.
But the gymnastics area was set up for the men's team, resulting in
occasional
schedule conflicts. When that happens, she hops in her convertible and
drives
to Forster's gym to work out.
She rests on Sunday and has tried to live a semblance of a normal life
outside
the gym, going to the mall or a movie. Sometimes she hangs out with
Forster's
family.
She bought a long black dress and went to her first high school prom
with
Forster's son, Tyler, at Air Academy High, near the Air Force Academy.
"It was fun," she said, but "overwhelming" because all the other kids
wanted to
meet her or get her autograph.
"She looked awesome," said Forster, whose son was the only boy at the
prom
whose date flew to New York the next day for a photo shoot with
Cosmopolitan.
But she doesn't always feel awesome, she said.
Sometimes the training seems too hard, the pressure too great, her
family and
friends too far away and her last chance too final.
"It gets hard lots of times," she said. She bucks herself up by
remembering
that "I've come so far; I don't want to give up."
