Day after day in a gym at the Olympic Training Center. Flips, jumps, twists. Aches, pain and muttering. Racing against time.
Alone.
Gymnast Dominique Moceanu, 17, works fiercely to return to the form that helped U.S. women's gymnastics win its first team gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.
Old for a female gymnast, she doesn't need the clock on the training center lawn counting down to the 2000 games in Sydney, Australia. She feels the passage of time in her wrists and knees.
She's fighting a four-month training layoff caused by a court battle last fall in which she won independence from the father she said exploited her and wasted her money - accusations he denied.
"It gets lonely," said the dark-haired athlete, a professional since age 10, whom a judge declared an adult a year before her 18th birthday. But now, she said, "I have control."
She's defying several norms.
Seven inches taller and at least 30 pounds heavier (she wouldn't disclose her weight), she's no longer the 4-foot-6 Olympic pixie of 1996.
Gymnastics is the realm of bouncy, pre-pubescent girls who, like Moceanu in Atlanta at 14, do amazing things with boyish bodies.
She's a woman now and still growing. And her layoff from training, just as her body is maturing, could not have come at a worse time.
"This will be one of the hardest things she does in her life," said friend Tom Forster, who has coached other Olympians and owns Aerial Gymnastics in Colorado Springs.
The California-born star also is going against an East European patrimony in which family shares everything and the father makes all important decisions.
Part of her split with her family was teenage rebellion against a controlling father, but she also was an American kid fighting Romanian family tradition, some observers say.
"Conflict . . . can be more severe where cultures are different," said Russ Curtis, a University of Houston sociologist who studies sports in society.
Dumitru Moceanu and his wife, Camelia, who still live in the comfortable north Houston neighborhood in which their Olympian daughter grew up, met a reporter politely at the door but declined interviews.
So did Moceanu's former coach, Bela Karolyi, now retired from Olympic competition. Found chain-sawing timber at his training camp north of Houston, he called the family's dispute a private matter.
With financial help from the U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Gymnastics, the sport's national governing body, Moceanu has been training in Colorado since late February.
The training center, a converted former military base, provides a secure environment. Media access is controlled, and she can focus, amid inspirational plaques and sculpture.
It's a picturesque setting, with Pikes Peak visible from the grounds, but Moceanu says she hasn't had time for sightseeing.
She's climbing her own personal mountain.
Grueling schedule
Six days a week, about 9:30 a.m., Moceanu and her coach, Luminita Miscenco, leave the training center dormitory room they share and walk to the gym for a three-hour morning workout.
Some days it's the beam and uneven bars. Others it's the vault. There's a a floor routine to choreograph. They do things in segments, working and reworking, fixing and polishing.
After a break for lunch, they return at midafternoon for three or four hours more.
It's grueling and tedious, partly because you're supposed to make it look easy, said John Macready, a member of the men's team that has had to make room for Moceanu.
"You're doing the same thing over and over again. . . . It's hard," Macready said.
Doing it alone makes it harder, he said.
"When I come in here and I'm tired, I've got . . . [team members] to pump me up," he said. "It's really hard to come in on your own with no one but your coach to tell you to get going."
Huffing and puffing through exercises, Moceanu is silent as Miscenco frowns at this move, gestures at that one, nods and smiles at a third.
The two don't talk much. They don't have to.
When they do, it's mostly Romanian, though Miscenco is working on English for interviews at events. Their soft voices don't carry far in the huge gym they have mostly to themselves.
Moceanu winces sometimes when she hits the floor. Pain, in a joint or muscle, is a constant companion. Hands and wrists take a beating on the uneven bars, despite handgrips and tape.
The white chalk she uses to reduce friction is everywhere by the end of a workout.
The repetition is deadening: the swoosh of her sweat pants as she jogs to warm up, the creak of the bars as she swings through an exercise, the same thwacks, bumps and thuds over and over.
To ease the monotony, Moceanu tunes a radio to the music every kid likes.
Occasionally, guided public tours wander through. The resident men's team meets at the other end of the gym before retiring to a workout room. They keep their distance.
Making progress
She seems to be making progress, said Ron Brant, the men's coach, who has his own team to train but observes Moceanu from afar.
"She definitely can help the women's team in the World Championships," he said. But whether she can repeat the success she enjoyed in the 1998 Goodwill Games "depends on what happens over the next couple of months."
Moceanu understands the personal significance of the national meet in August, the World Championships in October and the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. "It's my last shot," she said.
A lot has changed since last October, when she ran away from home and sued her parents for "emancipation," legal language for an early declaration of adulthood.
She had trained successfully the previous two years in a big, new gym built in north Houston by her father, taking a gold medal in the all-around last year at the Goodwill Games.
"It was the best gym. It had everything I needed," she said. "I miss that gym because I know that we won there."
Ironically, that gym, which reportedly cost $2 million but is valued by tax appraisers at $1 million, was a key reason she left home.
Friends told her it was a bad investment, but alarm bells already had been going off in her life. "I kind of felt like I was getting . . . kept in the dark a lot," she said.
She had reason to be suspicious that her assets were being wasted, Forster, her friend, said.
"Not many parents take [a fortune] . . . and blow it on a gym that's . . . in a bad location and has no chance of surviving," he said.
The gym is now closed, and sale of the building is pending.
Moceanu's lawyer, Ellen Yarrell, hopes to recover a big chunk of the assets the gymnast has earned since turning professional.
An undisclosed settlement early last month resolved Moceanu's financial differences with her parents and freed her father from a protective order to stay away from her.
Family matters
She never lost touch with her mother and 9-year-old sister, Christina, but she reunited with her father for the first time over Orthodox Easter in early April.
Reconnecting with her dad "was a little weird and awkward," said Moceanu, sitting on a mat, toweling off and sipping water.
The biggest problem wasn't the money. It was the fact that her father allegedly stalked and harassed her and, police said, threatened to kill her coach and friend, Brian Huggins.
No charges were filed, but the damage was done.
"I can tell that he realizes some things," Moceanu said of her father. "I don't know if you can change a person totally, but you can make them try to understand."
Her problems may be due in part to her parents' Romanian upbringing, she said. "But I don't blame it all on that," she said. Her father has been in the United States for 20 years.
Gymnastics involves "a very controlled environment because it's necessary for optimal performance," said Michael Meyers, an expert in sports performance at the University of Houston.
But Moceanu said her life was tougher than the lives of her gymnastic peers.
"I used to see my friends, and I'd be like . . . 'This is not fair,' " she said. "Their parents weren't as hard on them or as tough on them or controlling."
Forster discounts cultural stresses, arguing that Moceanu's father, a former used car salesman, was just misguided. "In my opinion, he was full of it," Forster said.
Moceanu is a pioneer in another way.
She and her coach are the first women gymnasts to live at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, opened on an old Air Force base in 1977.
There's a good reason they're the first, Forster said.
Elite female gymnasts peak while they're children, still living at home. Men don't peak until their 20s, when they're out on their own. They need a place to stay, he said.
The center has almost everything she needs: meals in the cafeteria, medical care, counseling, haircuts.
But the gymnastics area was set up for the men's team, resulting in occasional schedule conflicts. When that happens, she hops in her convertible and drives to Forster's gym to work out.
She rests on Sunday and has tried to live a semblance of a normal life outside the gym, going to the mall or a movie. Sometimes she hangs out with Forster's family.
She bought a long black dress and went to her first high school prom with Forster's son, Tyler, at Air Academy High, near the Air Force Academy.
"It was fun," she said, but "overwhelming" because all the other kids wanted to meet her or get her autograph.
"She looked awesome," said Forster, whose son was the only boy at the prom whose date flew to New York the next day for a photo shoot with Cosmopolitan.
But she doesn't always feel awesome, she said.
Sometimes the training seems too hard, the pressure too great, her family and friends too far away and her last chance too final.
"It gets hard lots of times," she said. She bucks herself up by remembering that "I've come so far; I don't want to give up."
