DOMINIQUE MOCEANU — -“MONEY AND MEDALS ARE ALWAYS PLACED AHEAD OF [AN] ATHLETE’S WELL-BEING”
What a full life Dominique Helena Moceanu Canales has packed into a little more than thirty-five years. Being a 1996 USA Olympic Gold-Medal Women’s Gymnastics Team member (one of the “Magnificent Seven”) is perhaps the most probable place to start.
The “Magnificent Seven” is the stick-like-flypaper moniker bestowed upon the 1996 United States Olympics Women’s Gymnastics Team which won the first gold medal ever for the US in women’s team competition at the Summer Games in Atlanta. The team was comprised of Shannon Miller, Moceanu, Dominique Dawes, Kerri Strug, Amy Chow, Amanda Borden (captain) and Jaycie Phelps.
They set the table for US Olympic women’s gymnastics in the way Mia Hamm and company did for US women’s soccer in the World Cup (1999). Each young woman has a compelling tale of her own as do all of those hard-working athletes who didn’t quite attain their lofty level. Then — and certainly now in large measure because of them — there were scores of women who learned to enjoy and embrace their respective sports in whatever way(s) they chose.
The elite athlete formerly known as Dominique Moceanu — the youngest Olympic Gold Medalist in U.S. Gymnastics history at age 14 — is one whose story is unique and sadly, somewhat checkered.
What (kind of) parents steal from their children? How unsettling, uncomfortable and downright egregious does questionable behavior have to be for children to identify it and be forced to actively address it — to figure out for example how to bring a lawsuit against their parents? And then do it?
(If you can’t trust your own parents, then whom can you trust? Who’s to say the lawyers or other authority figures won’t somehow take advantage of you?)
When you reduce it to its simplest and finest form, who is in the right? Parents give everything to their kids. The good ones certainly do. And the kids end up knowing it as they go along.
It takes a little while for the youngsters to see that something may have gone awry in the face of the enormous sacrifices parents make every day and over time. No little kid is wired to understand what their parents do for them. That’s not really part of being a little kid.
But when a host of actions careen so far off the grid of normalcy…well kids aren’t stupid. They’re actually pretty smart and keenly aware. And all things equal, the older they get the greater, broader and wider their understanding of life in general becomes.
Following the ground-breaking glory of 1996, Moceanu’s life — once so incredibly regimented as in to the hour and maybe even to the minute — began to spin out of control.
At 17, she sued for emancipation from her parents claiming that they squandered her financial earnings in the wake of the “Magnificent Seven” historic Olympic triumph which, as noted, catalyzed the rise of the US as an international women’s gymnastic power.
She also sought and was granted a temporary order of protection against her father whom she accused of stalking and harassing her after she was legally emancipated. “I’m scared,” Moceanu admitted at the time. “You just don’t know what’s possible. This has been tough on my mental and physical health. He’s trying to control me and my life. He’s been following me and knows my every move.”
Katherine Scardino, representing Dumitru Moceanu, attempted to paint the picture differently when she asserted that, “she’s [Dominique] still 17 years old and running around with people who obviously messed her up so bad. It’s difficult for a parent to back off and let her make these mistakes.” Scardino continued, describing the prospect of Dumitru harming his daughter as “…beyond the realm of realism” and saying that she had grown weary of Dominique Moceanu’s “whining” about an abusive childhood.
She then castigated the gymnast for being unappreciative of the sacrifices her parents had made for her and her career. Dominique’s response? “It’s sad that money does this to people. I was hoping to get back together with them. I guess it’s not possible.”
To Dominique, the Karolyis — Bela and Marta — were no bargain either. She cites, according to David Greene of NPR in a 2016 broadcast interview, “…psychological and mental abuses that went on on a daily basis…[back then] we had the Karolyis who set the precedent of yelling and demeaning the athletes and embarrassing them. And those methods were what were getting results…”
She added that her dad “was physically and emotionally abusive, and her coaches, [the Karolyis], encouraged that,” recalls Greene, recounting the bullet points of their sit-down.
Dominique herself says, “You’re training every single day with the threat that you’re going to get physical punishment from your father if they think you’re overweight, if they think you’re not training hard enough and they think you’ve gained weight and they think that you’re not trying hard enough but maybe you’re having a bad day. And I could never have a bad day.”
And a very bad day it was when Dumitru slapped Dominique hard across the face in front of the Karolyis — one of his many acts of public humiliation according to his daughter — for hiding some candy at the Karolyi ranch during the summer of the Olympic Games. Explains Dominique, “I stashed away some Mentos and Twizzlers that my aunt had given me. And I was abruptly woken up from a nap, and my father’s pulling me by my ear and dragging me to Karolyi’s house. And I was, you know, slapped in front of them, and it was — that was mortifying.”
And no doubt traumatizing. (As was expectable, sometime after the interview aired NPR received a statement from Bela and Marta Karolyi denying Dominique’s claims. They countered by saying that “neither of us witnessed Dominique being physically abused by her father. As her coaches, we trained Dominique to take maximum advantage of her talent and skills and to help her achieve success on the world and Olympic stage, which she did.”).
Who’s zooming who here?
Moceanu acknowledges that twenty-some years later, elite training methods are a bit different, thankfully. The relationship between the celebrated 2016 US women’s gymnasts and the Karolyis bears little resemblance to the treatment Dominique and her trailblazing teammates experienced.
“Obviously, I was, you know, one of their last gymnasts they coached on a day-to-day basis. And Bela’s been completely out of the gym for 20 years. Marta has been there as a national team coordinator, which is very, very different than having them as your personal coaches. So the psychological and mental abuses that went on on a daily basis are not necessarily as prominent on the monthly basis where these young ladies go to the national team training camp…it’s definitely better than it used to be in some respects.”
Dominique Moceanu has come out on the other side in a most admirable fashion. She is a wife, mother, college graduate, coach, private instructor and best-selling author (her memoir entitled, “Off Balance”) who seemingly has found and made peace.
She is an older sister — of not one girl, Christina, but two. Jen Bricker (birthname Moceanu) was born the day after Dominique’s sixth birthday to a then poor and struggling family. When doctors advised her parents that the baby would require expensive medical care, they decided to give her up for adoption.
Two weeks before giving birth to her first child Dominique received a package containing a letter and photographs of a young woman who was the spitting image of Christina. The twenty-year- old woman, Bricker, had been adopted and had recently learned her birth name.
Confronting her parents, the story was confirmed. A bombshell. And Bricker told a stunned Dominique, “…oh by the way, I have no legs. But people forget that within minutes of meeting me.”
WOW!!!
The women have developed a friendship and a bond which define sisterhood.
Bricker herself is an athlete — an acrobat and aerialist — having competed in the Junior Olympics, but there are other notable similarities, some striking actually.
“The tones in our voices, our handwriting, the way we laugh and chuckle… It’s mind-blowing,” Dominique Moceanu marveled with awe.
Equally astounding is that Bricker idolized Moceanu long before she knew they were sisters.
You gotta give some to get some. Dominique Moceanu gave plenty and understands plenty.
She’s 35.
Now she is most deservedly getting back.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in March 2017.]
