In the run-up to the 1996 Olympics, the world seemed to be Alexandra Marinescu's oyster. After winning the European junior title twice and helping her team to the gold medal at the 1995 World Championships in Sabae, Japan, she took a silver medal on the balance beam at the 1996 World Championships in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Coming to Atlanta, the blonde Bucharest native was expected to be a front runner for the coveted all-around title. She seemed to have it all- style, difficulty, the perfect body, the perfect age, the perfect gymnast. Only it never happened. Marinescu never even competed in the all-around competition in Atlanta despite having qualified to it. The Romanian team management decided to substitute her with team mate Simona Amanar, who went on to win the bronze medal. The same thing happened at the World Championships, held in the Swiss town of Lausanne a year later - Marinescu qualified to the all-around, only to be replaced by Amanar, who this time took the silver. "I am very grateful to Alexandra, " Amanar told the press in Lausanne, "because she let me compete and win this medal." Lausanne was to be Marinescu's last major competition as a back injury forced her out of the sport later.

Now Romanian journalist Andrei Nourescu is telling Marinescu's story, and he says it is not always a pretty one. "I have covered gymnastics for more than a decade and attended three editions of Olympic Games and seven World Gymnastics Championships," Nourescu says, "After all these years of witnessing the triumphs and, sometimes, even the disasters of the Romanian gymnastics, I thought that I had learnt enough and probably there weren't that many secrets that I couldn't reach. After having the privilege of writing the exclusive story of Alexandra Marinescu, I realised that I was wrong: I have understood nothing at all. What you see on TV or what you read in newspapers is a completely different reality." Nourescu has compiled Marinescu's memoirs, which are supposed to be published both in Romania and the USA in the future. He has provided Gymworld with excerpts of the book. It comes at a time when Romanian gymnastics is recovering from a difficult period which culminated in the dismissal of the senior team from the national training centre in Deva amidst allegations of abuse from gymnasts' parents and lack of discipline from the coaches. The reigning Olympic team champion was unable to field a team at the European Championships in April. It was revealed that former stars, Olympic champion Daniela Silivas and multiple world champion Gina Gogean, had received false passports to compete.

Marinescu says it didn't stop there: "No matter how rough, how painful, how horrible it may be. The time has come for the truth to come out, " she describes her motives, "Many people will ask themselves why I wanted this book to be published. To take my revenge? No, no way. For money? Why not? For people to finally find out the cruel truth about the Romanian gymnastics? Yes, definitively, yes! This is first of all! There have been decades of glory for Romanian gymnastics, and until now nobody has had the courage to move aside the curtain covering the dirty and phoney side, the violence, abuses and lies." Alexandra does honour the success of the programme: "This doesn't mean that there weren't superb moments of glory, well-deserved triumph and wonderful moments. But, " she concludes, " maybe the price paid for these is sometimes too great! I felt that I owed to tell all this to my fans, to my parents, who wanted their little girl to become a second Nadia."

After initially starting off as a swimmer, Alexandra was soon spotted for gymnastics and, under the guidance of coach Eliza Stoica, progressed rapidly. Her rise did not go unnoticed, and she says it was mid 1993 when her father was asked to the gym for a talk of a different kind. Coach Stoica and Nicolae Vieru, president of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation, were present. "Without asking for his permission, but rather communicating him their decision, they told my father that they had to modify my age by changing in the passport the year when I was born. Instead of 1982 they wrote 1981. They explained to my father that it was my only chance to get to the Olympic Games" .Her father accepted and Alexandra was later issued a passport with her new date of birth. "I remember how my coaches kept telling me, when going to contests abroad, not to forget my age and always to tell the false age, the one from the fake passport," says Alexandra.

One of the biggest pressures was to remain slim, and the gymnasts lived in constant terror of the scales. Marinescu soon found out there was more to keeping your figure than just a moderate diet and hard training. "The others used to introduce their fingers into their throat and voluntarily provoke vomiting, in order to eliminate the food from the organism. At the same time, the feeling of being hungry was somehow deluded." The gymnasts also used diuretics: "We took into consideration the fact that it might do us harm, but the fear of the scales was even worse. Afterwards, we found out that this medicine remained in the blood and it might have been traced at doping controls, which didn't really exist at that time. They had taken us to a medical control and the doctors were amazed when they read the analysis and they saw how much furosemide we had inside". If the gymnasts failed to reach the weight the coaches expected of them, the girls were punished both physically and psychologically by head coach Octavian Belu. Once, Alexandra recalls, he made the gymnasts put on five track suits and sit in the sauna. "We stayed in there until we were almost fainted."

According to Marinescu, the toughest punishment she ever received from Belu was being locked up in his room for three days. For the first twenty four hours, she says, she was given neither food nor drink. "I stayed there all day and only came out with an attendant, for training, and afterward he locked me back into his room." After training the second day, she was brought back to Belu's room, where he gave her an orange. "I squeezed it in my mouth in order to quench my thirst with its juice. He didn't even allow me to drink any water, because I was putting on weight." The same procedure followed the third day, in the evening she was allowed back to her room.

Before the 1997 World Championships in Lausanne, the coaches turned the heat on even more, and one day during training disaster struck. Alexandra's team mate Corina Unugreanu was struggling on her beam mount (a RO-rulfova) and was wincing from the blows it struck in the genital area." Octavian Belu started beating her. He was hitting her without any restraint, as if she were an animal. She kept failing and every time she was trying to repeat she was getting hurt even more in that area. Belu was looking at her coldly and he didn't care about her suffering. He only knew one thing: the exercise had to be perfect and anything else didn't matter. At one of the repetitions, Corina got so hurt that she started bleeding. None of us had the courage to tell Octavian Belu to stop hitting the gymnast. Everything went on like that until Corina, between two slaps, told Belu that she was bleeding. But his reaction was still icy: "What's wrong? You're bleeding? You deserve it! Move back on the beam and do it again!". In the end, Belu's co-coach Mariana Bitang came to Ungureanu's aid and stopped the beating.

After Lausanne, Marinescu was diagnosed with a fractured vertebra and announced her decision to quit gymnastics. A decision, she claims, that cost her dearly. Legendary Nadia Comaneci had offered to take her to the USA for an operation, but, according to Marinescu, when Comaneci approached Adrian Stoica, General Secretary of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation, he simply said: "There's no use making this effort. She's abandoning gymnastics anyway, so it doesn't matter". Stoica currently serves as president of the FIG's Men's Technical Committee. With her gymnastics days behind her Marinescu says she realised she was of no more use to the system that had created her. "They exploited me to the maximum, they ignored all my pains, which were proving that there was something wrong with my back, and here is what I became. And this only happened because they wanted to prolong to the maximum the time when I could have been useful to the team," she says.

Nora, Andrei Nourescu