The Price of Gold: Dominique Moceanu

From Vogue Magazine, 13 June 2012, "The Price of Gold: Dominique Moceanu’s New Book Sheds Light on the Secret World of a Former Gymnast," by by Antonina Jedrzejczak

“I had Olympic gold at age fourteen, left home and became emancipated from my parents in a very public ordeal at seventeen, and I didn’t think anything else could shock me in my life, but boy was I wrong,” says Dominique Moceanu on the eve of the publication of her rousing, intimate memoir Off Balance, out today from Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. The secret that rocked the already turbulent life of the former gymnast in her late 20s—that a younger handicapped sister was given up for adoption by her parents without her knowledge—is revealed on the first page, a fitting opening to the relentlessly candid and oftentimes painful story of the life and career of the youngest American gymnast to win an Olympic gold medal.

Born in California to Romanian parents, both ex-gymnasts who escaped the brutal Ceauşescu regime in the 1980s, Moceanu began training at age three (as the story goes, her parents let her hang from a clothing line as a toddler to test her strength). A move from Florida to Houston in 1991 at ten years old landed her a spot as one of the last two gymnasts to be trained by the legendary and controversial Romanian power couple Béla and Marta Károlyi (of Nadia Comăneci and Mary Lou Retton coaching fame). In the four years that followed, the wins came surely and steadily—a U.S. National Team spot in 1992, gold and silver at the Junior Pan American Games that same year, and U.S. Junior National Champion in 1994 and Senior National Champion in 1995—and swiftly made the spunky, brown-eyed youth a fan favorite. But speaking of that period, Moceanu is quick to point out, “A lot of the time in an elite athlete’s career, people don’t know what goes on behind closed doors because much of what you see is just one or two competitions a year from that person’s life.”

Behind her own closed door, it was the adults who loomed large, and much of the book takes the Károlyis head on. “They broke me down so much emotionally during my training,” explains Moceanu, whose voice still sounds as earnest as it did in childhood interviews. Enforcing public weigh-ins and causing her to miss the opening and closing Olympic ceremonies due to grueling, last-minute practices, Marta and Béla she adds “really drove the childhood love that I had for gymnastics right out of me.” Both the catalyst behind her commitment to the sport and a source of pervading trepidation, Moceanu’s father upheld the Károlyis’ authority and her relationship with him was, she admits, “the most difficult chapter to write.” As for her mother, Moceanu speaks protectively. “We both grew up in a household with a lot of fear. If she tried to raise her voice there would be violence against her.” Two decades later, it was Moceanu who reintroduced her mother to the middle daughter she was forced by her husband to give up at birth. “Out of all three of us she looks the most like my father,” Moceanu says of the sister she now sees regularly, adding, “Sometimes when I look at her I can’t believe how it’s all come full circle.”

It’s a sense of forgiveness and acceptance that largely coincided with becoming a mother herself. “You don’t get a handbook to guiding your child to Olympic gold,” she says, when reflecting on the long-ago decision to sue her parents for emancipation and regain control of her earnings, often squandered by her father. “Looking back, I realize he wanted what was best for me.” Now 30 and based in Cleveland, Moceanu remains immersed in her sport through public speaking, and most recently, a four-part children’s book series, The Go-for-Gold Gymnasts. She and her husband, former gymnast Michael Canales, M.D., whom she met when she was twelve, and their three- and four-year-old kids, remain fervent followers of the summer games. “We get Olympic fever like everyone else! We love track and field and swimming, and obviously, gymnastics is number one.”

Seven years in the making, Off Balance is as much a telling of Moceanu’s story as it is an effort to protect gymnasts in the future. “We can’t be treating our adolescent women in this way; who’s protecting these athletes?” asks Moceanu of the ends-justify-the-means practices that contributed to her athletic success at the expense of her personal well-being. “It’s not easy to go against the governing body and be so outspoken. For a lot of gymnasts, if they do that the door shuts very quickly on their opportunities. Well, now I have nothing to lose.” (source: Vogue Magazine)