Category: 1990

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1990 Interviews & Profiles Romania WAG

1990: Ecaterina Szabó Looks Back on Her Career

This lengthy profile of Ecaterina Szabó, published in Képes Sport (Sport in Pictures) in May 1990, offers a detailed firsthand account of life in Romanian gymnastics during the late 1970s and 1980s. The article, based on interviews conducted by Levente Deák for Romániai Magyar Szó (The Hungarian Voice of Romania), traces Szabo’s journey from a small village in Transylvania to Olympic glory at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, where she won four gold medals.

Notably, the article confirms Szabo’s actual birth date as January 22, 1968—making her 16 years old at the time of her Olympic triumph, not the older age sometimes claimed in contemporary sources. The narrative provides extensive detail about the grueling training regime at the Karolyi gymnastics school: wake-up calls at 6 AM, training sessions lasting until 10 PM as punishment, mandatory afternoon naps, and a schedule that prioritized gymnastics over traditional schooling.

As you’ll see, compared to today’s top gymnasts, Szabó competed non-stop, traveling to a total of 70 countries. It’s no wonder that, by the time the World Championships in 1985 rolled around, she “was simply exhausted.”

As was often the case at that time, gymnasts’ biographies were woven together with Béla Károlyi’s story. Throughout the piece, the writer includes several parenthetical statements that paint Béla Károlyi in a remarkably positive light, characterizing him as a dedicated coach who made tactical decisions in the best interests of his gymnasts.

However, this generous portrayal omits crucial context that we know today: before the Károlyis were transferred to General School No. 7 in Deva, the Romanian government’s patience with the Károlyis was wearing dangerously thin. In March 1977, Teodora Ungureanu fled during training in Cluj, boarding a train to Onești. The Securitate intercepted her at the Târgu Mureș train station and escorted her to Bucharest. According to the Securitate report: “The gymnast gave as the reason for leaving the fact that she could no longer stand working with coach Béla Károlyi,” who “persecutes her baselessly.”

The situation continued to deteriorate during a tour of Spain in 1977. Securitate officer Ioan Popescu reported that Béla Károlyi “showed inappropriate conduct towards Nadia Comaneci and Teodora Ungureanu, consisting of swearwords, insults, even beating them, because their weight was unsuitable for the competition.” Ilie Istrate, a National Council for Physical Education and Sport (NCPES) instructor and Securitate informant, reported that “the girls were found weeping in their rooms because of hunger.” (See Olaru’s Nadia Comăneci and the Secret Police for more.)

Read against this historical background, Szabó’s account becomes all the more poignant—a testament to both her remarkable athletic achievements and the complex, often contradictory relationships that defined elite Romanian gymnastics in this era.

In many ways, this set of articles becomes Szabó’s way of reclaiming her story—from her erased Hungarian heritage to her falsified age, from the name she was given to the one she was born with (Katalin), and from the rewards she earned to those she never received.

Ecaterina Szabó, 1984
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1990 Age Romania WAG

1990: Ecaterina Szabó Admits Her Age Was Falsified

In the spring of 1990, just months after the Romanian Revolution, Ecaterina Szabó became one of the first Romanian gymnasts to publicly confirm what insiders had whispered about for years: the systematic age falsification of competitors by the Romanian Gymnastics Federation. Speaking to journalist Thomas Schreyer in Deva, Szabó revealed that she was born in 1968, not 1967 as her official gymnastics documents claimed—making her one year younger than the world had been told.

Despite the courage it took to come forward in a still-uncertain post-revolutionary Romania, Szabó’s confession was largely overlooked by the gymnastics community. Perhaps this was because the revelation didn’t retroactively change any of her competitive results. Even with her true birth year of 1968, Szabó would have been age-eligible for the 1983 World Championships in Budapest, where her international senior career began—she would have turned 15 that January, meeting the FIG’s minimum age requirement.

Ironically, this article would become a touchstone in gymnastics history not because of Szabó’s admission, but because of a single sentence about her close friend Daniela Silivaș. The article claimed Silivaș was “one year younger than previously stated,” and that news ricocheted around the globe. But the truth would prove even more dramatic: Silivaș was actually two years younger than her competitive age, making her age falsification far more consequential for the record books.

In this remarkable interview, Szabó discusses life after the Revolution, the mechanics of age falsification, and what it meant to be a gymnast in Ceaușescu’s Romania.

Ecaterina Szabó, 1984
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1990 Doping Interviews & Profiles USSR

1990: A Conversation with Olga Karaseva – “Imagine Yourself a Creator”

Olga Karaseva won Olympic gold in 1968, became world champion in 1970, and won medals on every event at the 1969 European Championships—taking silver in the all-around and gold on floor. Her career blazed briefly but brilliantly, embodying the elegance that made Soviet gymnastics compulsory viewing in those years. But by twenty-three, she was finished competing and felt, as she puts it, that “no one needed me anymore.”

In this 1990 conversation with sports writer Gennady Semar, Karaseva examines what the Soviet system did to athletes: how it created champions and then abandoned them, how it corroded the moral foundations that once made sport meaningful. She speaks with unusual candor about the collapse of purpose after competition ends, the loss of expertise as former athletes drift into bureaucratic roles, and the absence of any social safety net once the applause stops. Yet she’s not bitter. She counts herself fortunate—her coaches were “people of high human qualities,” and she escaped both the coercive “stick” of brutal training and what she calls the “chemicalization” of sport, a process she describes as “the destruction of the soul” that ruins both health and integrity.

For Karaseva, the crisis isn’t only institutional or pharmacological—it’s spiritual. Athletes, she insists, must be understood not as expendable performers but as whole people whose cultural development, imagination, and artistry are inseparable from their physical achievements. To save sport, she argues, means recognizing athletes as creators, not gladiators.

Note: Olga Karaseva passed away at the end of October at the age of 77.

Olga Karaseva, 1968
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1990 Canada FIG Leadership Interviews & Profiles USSR World Cup

1990: An Interview with Yuri Titov – “Life in a Tie”

In this 1990 interview, Yuri Titov — the long-serving president of the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) — speaks not of glamour or privilege but of long hours in meeting rooms, piles of documents, and the constant struggle to keep the sport fair. Early injustices in his own career, he recalls, convinced him that “athletes must be led by athletes.” As FIG president, he turned that conviction into policy: revising the federation’s statutes to curb presidential power, creating twelve commissions to share decision-making, and championing more objective judging through mathematical analysis and a standardized six-judge system. He even proposed sanctioning entire federations for corruption on the competition floor. Balancing the competing demands of his country, the FIG, and its member organizations was never easy — especially in a political culture where, as Titov recalls with wry humor, a senior Soviet sports official once warned him that if he didn’t “work for the benefit of the Soviet Union,” he might “fall ill for a long time.” Yet Titov managed to navigate those pressures and the politics of world gymnastics for two decades.

Yuri Titov, February 1958, Moscow, USSR
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1990 Interviews & Profiles USSR WAG

1990: An Interview with Larisa Latynina – “Stars Don’t Have Easy Characters”

Larisa Latynina has never been content to rest on her legend. The nine-time Olympic champion—whose name still defines an era of Soviet gymnastics—has lived many lives: prodigy, national icon, iron-willed head coach, and, later, the quiet architect behind Moscow’s next generation of stars. When Nadia Comăneci enchanted the world in 1976, it was Latynina who paid the price at home—forced to step down as head coach despite the fact that the Soviet women’s team had never lost a single Olympic or World Championship title under her leadership. In this interview from 1990, she reflects on the complexities of leadership, the stubbornness of talent, and the moral weight of guiding the sport she once ruled. Latynina speaks candidly about the fierce personalities she nurtured—Korbut, Tourischeva, Kim—and about one of her later instincts that proved prophetic: championing a young Svetlana Boginskaya when few others saw what she did. Her story is one of brilliance tempered by conviction—and of a woman who, even after the spotlight dimmed, never stopped shaping the stage.

Natalia Kuchinskaya, Larisa Latynina, 1966
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1990 Interviews & Profiles USSR WAG

1990: An Interview Zinaida Voronina – “A Withered Flower Comes Back to Life in Spring”

She once carried the Soviet women’s team to Olympic gold in Mexico City, winning three individual medals, including silver in the all-around. Two years later, as a young mother, she returned to capture four more at the 1970 World Championships in Ljubljana. But after missing the 1972 Olympics, she slipped from public view—spoken of through whispers and cruel clichés about wasted talent. By 1990, Zinaida Voronina was no longer a star on the podium but a worker at a foundry, battling the weight of her past and the fog of alcoholism. And yet, the letter of a fan from Estonia—and her own unyielding resilience—brought her back into the light. In this rare and deeply personal conversation, Voronina speaks with candor about triumph, shame, survival, and the fragile hope of finding her way again.

Zinaida Voronina, 1970 World Championships
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