Building Romania's New Gymnastic Training Camp

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 21-22:

Taking inspiration from the methods of Soviet gymnastics, which at the time dominated the sport internationally, Maria Simionescu understood that a handful of trainers and just a few girls who loved gymnastics were not enough to win medals. What was needed was a new vision, as well as a team of devoted trainers, each of them specialising in a separate apparatus and willing constantly to better their achievements; a large number of gifted gymnasts, selected at an early age and enrolled in an intensive training programme; doctors; psychologists; physiotherapists; choreographers; musicians. In other words, an entire human infrastructure. But this was impossible to create without the physical infrastructure of a modern sports hall and a school to provide the young gymnasts with all the educational comfort they needed, without their parents feeling they had abandoned them far from home. It was a two-track enterprise. Trainers would be lured with the promise that the project would be up and running within the shortest possible time, while the investors would be eager to complete it in the shortest possible time given the great expectations of all those with a stake in its success.

With the support of Valerian Ghineţ, the town’s mayor, and Andrei Erdely, the director of the Oneşti Industrial Constructions Trust, work on the gymnastics facility was completed at the end of 1967 and it was inaugurated in 1968. A year later, in September 1969, the Physical Education Lycée opened its doors. The school’s first headmaster was Gheorghe Simionescu, Mrs Mili’s husband. Mayor Ghineţ, who was also head of the local branch of the Romanian Communist Party, continued to be generous and allocated twenty-six one-room flats for gymnasts and five flats for the trainers who had settled in the town. The town council also provided the trainers with medical services – the gym had been built in the centre of town, next to the hospital – and meal tickets at the town’s best restaurant, where they had a room set aside specially for them, as well as other perks significant for the time. In Oneşti [renamed Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej from 1965 to 1990], a small town which, at the beginning of the 1950s, had only one P.E. teacher, Romania’s first experimental gymnastics school began its work in earnest. The rudimentary huts located in the town’s industrial district where the young gymnasts had once practised were now a thing of the past.

In the meantime, changes had taken place in Bucharest which had a positive influence on the development of the new sports centre in Oneşti. In July 1967 a national sports conference was held. It was decided that the Union of Physical Education and Sport should be replaced by a newly founded National Council for Physical Education and Sport, which was the nationwide body supervising development in the sector. At the same time, general meetings of all the federations were held and they adopted new statutes and, above all, new managers. Elena Poparad was elected chairwoman of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation, and Nicolae Vieru secretary general.

The political context was also changing at the time, including the aberrant propagandistic discourse that had surrounded sport. In the 1950s, at the beginning of the Cold War, the drive to develop sport for the masses was extolled, as well as the exceptional merits and superiority of athletes from the Communist bloc. The new sport, which followed Soviet training methods, was treated as infallible, based as it was on Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and it was polyvalent, simultaneously constructing socialism and fighting for peace and friendship between nations – sport and peace were inseparable notions, since only if there was world peace could sports competitions be held. On the other side of the sporting Iron Curtain were ‘imperialist’ athletes, trained to become ‘cannon fodder’ for the West’s armies. In the eyes of the Communist bloc, Western athletes were either opportunists out for their own personal gain, or they were ruthlessly exploited by their countries’ capitalist régimes.

In Romania, Communist propaganda was to use sport as a weapon in the decades that followed, particularly after notable sporting achievements started to be made in the 1960s. But the discourse also become more nuanced. Taking advantage of sporting achievements, the régime was able to promote itself both domestically and internationally, claiming that such successes were based on a new type of thinking developed by Romania’s communist system. Soviet sport was now no longer a model to be copied, but part of the competition.

As part of this wave of changes, the Oneşti centre acquired greater importance, but continued to be viewed with reserve from Bucharest, sooner as a one-off experiment. The experiment might be a success, but what if it failed? Who would take the responsibility? Moreover, there were already other clubs – some of them with a long tradition – which laid claim to gymnastics, such as Dinamo Bucharest. Dinamo was Romania’s strongest club, since it was part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which meant its athletes had the privilege of being able to compete internationally. The heads of gymnastics in Bucharest therefore deemed a degree of caution appropriate, allowing the local authorities in Oneşti the satisfaction of providing the Flame club a large amount of support, as well as responsibility to match.