ESPN 30 for 30 podcast Heavy Medals details many horrors from Karolyi’s gymnastics empire

ESPN 30 for 30 podcast Heavy Medals takes a deep and very unpleasant dive into the Karolyi gymnastics empire.

If you want to be disturbed about how USA gymnastics was able to climb the mountain to gold medals in gymnastics check out ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcast Heavy Medals: Inside the Karolyi Gymnastics Empire.

ESPN journalists Bonnie Ford and Alyssa Roegnik do a phenomenal, detailed job showing just how corrupt, and at times violent, Bela Karolyi was while being enabled by his wife Martha. The strategies on how the Karoyi’s cultivated their public image were both brilliant and also disturbing dating all the way back to their time in Romania before defecting to the United Staes.

The Karolyi gymnastics empire began to grow after the 1984 Olympics

Roegnik explained why they wanted to tell the early part of the Karolyi story before the Karolyi’s had all the power and influence they obtained controlling USA gymnastics.

“The rationale for disclosing so much, especially about the abuse in Romania, was that when they came here many people in the industry were aware the kind of coaches they were, were scared of the kind of coaches they were, were sure that we would never fall prey to that type of program here in the United States,” Roegnik said. “Very quickly a lot of winning happened and suddenly everyone forgot.”

That winning started with Mary Lou Retton at the 1984 Olympics. Bela recruited Retton who was immensely talented but also needed some fine-tuning to become a champion. That partnership launched the Karolyi empire to another stratosphere of power and control after the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

“People forget that the Karolyis were not embraced by the gymnastics community in this country. There was a lot of skepticism and even hostility towards these communist, soviet, systems of training athletes,” Ford said. “The combination of this very adorable talented athlete (Retton) winning at home and the bear hug she gets from Bela, it was a marketers’ dream. It set their business up, set their reputation up.”

Heavy Medals was a one year project. The seven-part series contains interviews from gold medal gymnasts Simon Biles, Jordyn Wieber and Kerri Strug. Roegnik and Ford deserve a ton of credit for the amount of information they uncovered and how they tell the story of Bela and Martha Karolyi.

It is a stark reminder of how much everyone loves a winner and sometimes the enormous cost that comes with it.