Tales from the vaults

Olga Korbut

As a 17-year-old she won international fame with two individual golds and one as part of the Soviet Union's team at the 1972 Olympics. But the gymnast from what is now independent Belarus later claimed that her coach, Renald Knysh, raped her before a competition. Korbut emigrated to the United States in 1991 and, in 2002, her house was ransacked by bailiffs after her mortgage was left unpaid. Her possessions were pitched into the street and her Olympic medals apparently stolen in the confusion. Soon after, Korbut was found guilty of shoplifting in Atlanta and fined $300, although she maintains that she was simply pushing her trolley to the door to fetch her purse from the car. As part of the investigation her house was searched and police found forged banknotes worth around £25,000, about which she was questioned but not charged. She now teaches gymnastics.

Dominique Moceanu

The 4ft 6in pixie who competed as one of the 'Magnificent Seven' US gold-medal winning team at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, Moceanu acrimoniously divorced her parents and attained legal status as an adult in 1998 when she was 17. She accused her father, who was an old friend of coach Bela Karolyi, of living off her £1.5 million earnings as a gymnast, although he claimed it was held in a trust for her. Although the case was settled out of court, her father became obsessive, stalking her and paying a private detective to follow her. Moceanu took out a court order to prevent him coming near her and during the case made accusations that he had physically and mentally abused her throughout her life, as well as leaving her in debt. Although she officially retired from the sport in 2000, she now hopes to make a comeback in 2006.

Julissa Gomez

In 1982, when their daughter was 10, the Gomez family moved to Houston so that Julissa could train under Bela Karolyi. In 1988, shortly before the US Olympic trials, Julissa attended the World Sports Fair in Japan. Attempting a vault, her right foot missed the springboard and she crashed headfirst at full speed into the horse. She was paralysed from the neck down and suffered considerable brain damage. Although it looked as if she might recover partially, she lost her oxygen supply in hospital one night and fell into a coma. Her parents brought her back to the United States and cared for her at home, but, in 1991, she caught an infection and died in hospital. She was 19.

Christy Henrich

When Henrich was 15, she weighed in at 90lb and was only 4ft 11in tall. Yet she was still told by an American gymnastics judge, one of the sport's officials, that she would have to lose weight to make the US team for the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Christy had been training for 20 hours a week since she was seven under coach Al Fong and by the age of 13 was putting in nine hours a day even during school term time. She described herself as numb, refusing to give in to hunger or even wear the brace she was prescribed for a broken vertebra in her neck. As a result, she fell several times during the 1989 world championship trials. Fong says he told her to put on weight and not come back to the gym until she did; Henrich claimed that he had abandoned her. She retired at 18 weighing under 80lb. She was in and out of hospital many times over the next few years, gaining weight only to lose it again, and finally died of multiple organ failure weighing less than 50lb in 1994. She was 22.

Erica Stokes

The gymnast, who had come second in the US junior championships in 1989, became bulimic after Bela Karolyi, who also coached Julissa Gomez, criticised her eating habits. Karolyi is alleged to have called Stokes a 'pregnant goat' and screamed at her after he found her eating a peach following a gym session: 'You're so lazy! You're so fat! You just come in and pig out after workouts. All you think about is food.' He then made her entire team train an extra two hours. 'I'm not dealing with this any more,' she said as she told her team-mates that she was walking out just nine months before the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, for which she had spent her life training. Susan Stokes, Erica's mother, said that Karolyi had left her daughter 'like a puppy dog that had been beaten'. She eventually recovered her health.

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