Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police

A gripping account of the life and career of Nadia Comăneci, drawing for the first time on the surveillance archive of the Romanian secret police who monitored her.

Nadia Comăneci is the Romanian child prodigy and global gymnastics star who helped bring the sport to global popularity in the mid-1970s. One of the world’s best-known gymnasts, she won three gold medals and influenced the sport for decades to come. Behind the scenes, however, the communist authorities in Romania sought control over the country’s highest-profile athletes, subjecting Comăneci and her trainers to surveillance from the Romanian secret police. In 1989, she fled her homeland and the brutal oppression of a communist regime.

Drawing from previously unknown wiretap recordings, tens of thousands of secret police archive pages, and secret service intelligence documents, this book charts Comăneci’s legendary life, with little-known insights from the communist dictatorship that monitored her. The book delves into Comăneci’s complex, combustible relationship with her sometimes abusive coaches, Béla and Marta Károlyi—figures who would later be embroiled in the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal. It explores Comăneci’s eventual withdrawal from international activity and reflects on her heart-stopping, border-hopping defection to the United States in 1989. In a thrilling tale of endurance and escape, one of the world’s greatest gymnasts risked everything for freedom.

Stejărel Olaru is a Romanian historian, writer, researcher, and former broadcaster. He has published several books on the modern history of Romania and Romanian intelligence services. Alistair Ian Blyth is a prolific translator of the literature of Romania and Moldova.