gymnasticscoaching brought attention to this today:
Remember Adriana Giurca (1982-1993)
From a 1995 article:
[quote]Over and again Adriana had tried to complete the complicated beam routine under the unforgiving gaze of her trainer, Florin Gheorghe. But each time she was less than perfect.
Gheorghe, 25, couldn't tolerate failure. Adriana, 11 by this time, was his favorite pupil and he demanded success. When the weary youngster faltered again, he snapped.
He grabbed this fragile wisp of a girl and smashed her head against the beam, lashing out with his fists and feet. She begged for mercy. "Please stop, you will kill me!" she screamed. But his attack was relentless. Finally he picked her up and threw her to the floor.
She landed on the padded mats with such force that her spine was pushed into her brain, leaving her in a coma. Two days later she died.
Today the small girl with big dreams lies under a simple white marble cross near her family home in Bucharest, while her mother lights candles and weeps.
Florin Gheorghe was jailed last month for eight years for the savage attack 15 months ago.
Afterwards, one of Adriana's classmates, 12-year-old Marioara Chidris, confirmed that it was not the first time he had hit them. "Florin Gheorghe told us it was the best way to reach the height of performance," she said. "It was normal, but we didn't tell our parents or anyone else. We wanted to be gymnasts and we accepted it."
Astonishingly, Dinamo president Gheorghe Novac dismissed the fatal attack on Adriana as merely "an excess of zeal."
"Maybe this girl wasn't performing to the high level expected by her trainer and he was determined to make her do her best," he said.
"It is not acceptable to hit a child under any circumstances and our coaches know this. Nor is it common practice in any club in Romania. I have a young daughter myself and I understand the pain of the parents, but it was an isolated case. It happens; it is fate."
In the seventies the world saw a generation of waif-like girls from the Eastern Bloc snatch medal after medal in international competitions. We were enthralled by their poise and strength, their pouts and struts. At the time we had little idea what a punishing price these young gymnasts had paid for their success, designed to prove the triumph of communism.
Today we know that they were puppets of ruthless regimes, their young bodies and minds manipulated beyond the limits of endurance.
Their discipline was admirable, but we will probably never discover how many were irreparably broken -- or even died -- in the process.
Such draconian sporting methods were assumed to have softened after the fall of communism. But Adriana's death has resurrected fears that in some Eastern European countries nothing very much has changed.[/quote]
[quote]"Maria and I stayed at her bedside talking to her until she died on Monday morning. She never regained consciousness or made any movement, but just before she died tears fell from her eyes."
"By then I had noticed bruises on her face, but we were too upset and confused to question what had happened."
"Afterwards one of the girls said Gheorghe beat Adriana like an animal, and that the others were frozen with fear. They said he had hit other girls in the past."
Gheorghe was immediately dismissed from the club. But it was three months before the local prosecutor questioned him, and then only after pressure from the Giurcas.
"For weeks we asked them what had happened to the case. They said they couldn't find the file. It eventually turned up in a pile of traffic violation papers," says Emile. "We kept on at them, but they did not arrest the coach until February of last year. He was only charged with beating her to death, which has a maximum sentence of ten years, instead of murder, which is a minimum of 20. He said he wanted Adriana to be afraid of him so she would perform better."
The Giurcas are appealing for a more severe charge and sentence and are taking civil proceedings against the Dinamo Club, which they say did not even write to offer condolences. At the club and other gymnastic halls in Bucharest last week, scores of twig-thin young girls -- one only four years old -- performed the same grueling exercises over and over again.[/quote]
[quote]"Every coach wants to train a champion, and these girls want to be champions because it is a way of escaping the poverty of this country. To produce an excellent performance you have to have strict discipline."
Leading Romanian sports journalist Radu Timofte said the coaches were often a 'third parent' to their pupils and smacking them when they failed was accepted practice at many clubs.
"It will be done not to hurt them but to push them on to reach their physical and mental limit and -- when they have reached it -- to push them further. When you are seeking excellence you must try seemingly impossible things to force them to think."
"It is something that is accepted by both the coaches and the girls who want to be another Nadia. That was the secret of sporting success in former socialist countries."
National gymnastics coach Octavian Belu agreed. After Romania's women gymnasts won the world championships in November, he said: "Bulgaria and Russia lost their place in world gymnastics when they lost their iron discipline."[/quote]
[quote]In Romania there has long been the suggestion that the 1989 revolution simply put the hardline Old Guard in new uniforms. Brutal communist regimes may have disappeared in name, but their legacy remains to claim victims like Adriana.
"This is a tragedy for the family and for all of Romania," said sports writer Radu Timofte. "But the real crime is our society's attitude to it."[/quote]
http://www.gymn-forum.net/Articles/Misc-Giurca.html
Beating children is insanity.
Pose for the cameras:
"They pose proudly for the camera, six seemingly happy little girls carrying the hopes of a nation on their frail shoulders."
and then:
[quote]But now that girl, Adriana Giurca, is dead -- a victim of the same merciless system which turned Comaneci into probably the greatest gymnast of all time, but which makes no allowance for human frailty in its obsessive drive for perfection.
Adriana was beaten to death by her coach...because she failed.
It wasn't a huge failure. Just a loss of concentration and balance which sent her tumbling from the wooden beam at the elite Dinamo Club in Bucharest, where she trained.
Since the tragedy, which has only now come to light, Romanian officials have vehemently denied suggestions that the country is resorting to the same ruthless techniques used under communism to produce Olympic stars like Comaneci.[/quote]
Comaneci's coaches: Bela and Marta Karolyi. Bela should do some kind of clinic on proper coaching techniques if he has changed his attitudes. It will help the coaches who try to copy his old ways to get coaching fame.
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