Florida Romanians Demonstrate Little Sympathy for Nadia

The trail got cold just two weeks and a few miles from here. But if Nadia Comaneci fell off the end of the earth tomorrow, it wouldn’t be soon enough or too far away for some people.

Maria Panait for one. Her husband, Constantin, ran off with the recently arrived Olympic vixen, leaving behind four young children, two vans, no money and who knows how many headaches.

“I thought at least he would call for Christmas,” she said Tuesday, “but no.”

The tall palms on the narrow street sway gently as she struggles to push a vacuum cleaner across the front seat of an aging Buick parked in the middle of the front lawn. Two of her three daughters crisscross the grass pushing new toys.

She is angry. Constantin, a self-employed roofer, left for Romania Nov. 2 to visit his sick mother. The next time she saw him, he was standing next to Nadia at a news conference in New York. Maria actually believed that he was her manager and, as soon as she turned off the TV set, she began preparing a guest room in their modest home for the woman she thought would be their exalted guest.

“He called me once and that was it. If he has called friends, friends of his, they wouldn’t contact me. And so I have no idea where they are. And,” she added, “I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking.”

Sightings of the couple since they checked out of a Pompano Beach hotel and bought a flashy black Chevy convertible for $20,000 in cash would make Elvis green with envy. In Nadia’s short stay in the United States, she has already become a master of the disinformation campaign.

They were lovers, they were not, they were misunderstood. They were Mr. and Mrs. Michael Sweeney, or so they told the clerk in Pompano Beach.

They were in Disney World in nearby Orlando. Or maybe they left the state for New York. Or Cleveland. Or. . . .

“I heard West Palm Beach from one member of my congregation,” said Father Traian Pedrescu, pastor of Holy Trinity Romanian Orthodox Church in neighboring Miramar, a gathering place for many of the estimated 5,000 Romanians who have settled in south Florida. “Another told me they are staying at hotels around here, moving every two or three days to stay free from reporters.

“But honestly,” he continued, “with what is happening now in our country, most of them would say, ‘Who cares?’ Oh, when we first heard on TV she was coming, the Romanian people were very, very excited. Fifteen of us went to the airport to welcome her but we could not get near her.

“Then, after this shameful thing--the woman has four children and here, Nadia can meet lots of rich men--we made prayers in our church that they would change,” he continued. “That God would change their minds and they would change their ways.”

“But now, we are ashamed for her,” he said, “and we must pray for bigger things.”

A television set behind Pedrescu brings the day’s news from Romania into the rectory, at the same time casting a luminous glow on his white hair. He fingers a pair of eyeglasses and tries to explain the distinctly Romanian concept of pocainta, which translates loosely to the English penitence.

“A sinner will be received every time in church, so long as they are sorry for what they did. But she said, ‘There is not sexual relations between us.’ Is not possible,” he said, shaking his head.

Because the Panaits and their children were in his church a number of times, Pedrescu clung to the slim hope that he might be able to speak with Constantin or Nadia or both in person. He no longer harbors any illusions.

“If my English were better,” he said, “I would write an article and say: ‘Nadia, wake up. You are losing much love and much money. You are going the wrong way.’ ”

Mike Jacki, executive director of the U.S. Gymnastics Federation, is less emotional but equally puzzled. In the days after Nadia’s harrowing escape across the Romanian border into Hungary last month, the federation received more than a dozen offers for movies, books and personal appearances from corporations and individuals.

“And I’m almost willing to bet that to this day, she doesn’t know a thing about them,” he said. “We could never reach her to tell her, so we put it out through the media. The next day, Mr. Panait called and said to put them in the mail to him. I said no way.

“That’s the only contact we’ve had from either of them.”

Last Friday, Bela Karolyi, Nadia’s original coach who has since defected and opened a gym in Houston, and Jacki concluded that they weren’t on the couple’s mailing list either. They jointly released a statement, in effect saying best wishes and call if you regain your senses.

Nadia was a 14-year-old picture of perfection in the 1976 Olympic Games. She is regarded now as a rouged home-wrecker by most of her countrymen along the quiet streets in Hallandale and Hollywood where she would have been a hero. The irony is that she appears to be the only one for whom the picture is still out of focus.

“People who abandon their sport or their profession or whatever it is that brings them to the kind of pinnacle Nadia reached usually do one of two things,” Jacki said. “Either they eat a big slice of humble pie or they wind up working at a carwash.

“I think I’ll run into Nadia at a gymnastics meet in the future,” he added. “That’s if she can afford the price of a ticket.”