STRONGSVILLE: Dominique Moceanu was nine months pregnant with her first child. Her father was dying from a rare eye cancer.
Studying for a degree in business management at John Carroll University, she had just come out of a statistics final, her first of five that week.
Then the gold-medal-winning Olympic gymnast went to pick up the package.
It was December 2007, and the enclosed letter delivered a bombshell.
She didn’t have one sister, but two.
Jennifer Bricker, the middle child of her Romanian-born parents Dimitry and Camelia Moceanu, had been born without legs and given up for adoption because the family couldn’t afford her medical care.
Moceanu saw the documents bearing her parents’ signatures and the photos. Jennifer looked like a twin to her sister Christina. Moceanu was floored, but also knew there wasn’t any doubt.
“I’m usually very cautious with believing things people say because they try to get close to you,” Moceanu said. “But I knew, with the way she had packaged everything … it was chilling. There was a part of me that was overcome with emotion and I didn’t want that emotion to adversely affect my unborn baby.”
Moceanu coped with the biggest shock of her life with the same toughness she’d shown at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta as a 4-foot-4, 75-pound 14-year-old. Moceanu competed with a stress fracture in her right leg that hurt her chances for an individual medal, but was part of the “Magnificent Seven” that captured Team USA’s first gold in women’s gymnastics.
The second wouldn’t come until 2012, when the “Fierce Five” prevailed in London. Moceanu remains the youngest American gymnast to win gold.
“I felt like I’ve had to be tough my whole life. I felt like I had to be the adult my whole life, even as a child when I had to step up and try to make decisions that were probably way beyond my years,” Moceanu said during a July 21 interview at a Strongsville coffee shop. “I look back and can’t believe I was put in those situations and how did I deal with it? How did I come out OK on the other side?”
Family life
Now 34 and living in Hinckley with her husband, Dr. Michael Canales, and their two children, Moceanu travels the country speaking to groups. A Cleveland-area resident for 15 years, she gives private lessons, consults with parents of area gymnasts about training options and choreographs routines.
Eighteen months ago, she and a partner started a jewelry business, Creations by C & C. Among the items they sell is a pendant of a gymnast in Moceanu’s signature pose from the Goodwill Games in 1998, when (under a new coach) she became the first non-Russian to win the all-around title in the now-defunct competition.
Her daughter, Carmen, 8, displays talent as a painter, but her son, Vincent, 7, could follow in his mother’s footsteps. She and Canales, a former Ohio State gymnast who specializes in reconstructive foot and ankle surgery at Cleveland’s St. Vincent Charity Medical Center, will try to guide their son through the competitive fire and politics of a sport that could have broken Moceanu’s spirit.
“Vincent is the whole package. He could be the future of U.S. men’s gymnastics. He could change the game if he wants to,” Moceanu said. “But it’s all up to him. Right now he loves it, but he knows he has to work hard to achieve his dreams. He’s like, ‘Mommy, I’m going to win more gold medals than you.’ I’m like, ‘One is hard enough but, OK, if you want to.’ ”
Subject of movie
A documentary on Moceanu’s life, based on her 2012 New York Times best-selling memoir Off Balance, is in its infancy. Moceanu believes she’s finally found the right group to give her almost mind-boggling story the proper perspective.
Enrolled by her parents in gymnastics at age 3, Moceanu was accepted into the program of Bela and Martha Karolyi when she was 10 and the family moved to Houston. Moceanu hid injuries from the well-known Olympic coaches. In a discussion of her Atlanta performance, where she fell on both of her vault attempts on the final night, she said that her stress fracture was from “overuse.”
“Every gymnast has it to a degree; Karolyi gymnasts had it the worst,” Moceanu said. “Before every Olympics they were always injured, stress fractures. That was a big pattern since the ’80s and it never changed.”
Even after the gold medal triumph, capped by Kerri Strug’s stunning vault despite tearing two ankle ligaments on her first attempt, Moceanu’s world would soon be turned upside down.
At age 17, she filed for emancipation from her parents. She obtained a restraining order against her father, who died in 2008. Between 1996 and ’98, she grew 10 inches and gained 20 pounds, leaving her struggling to regain her strength. Injuries eventually ended her competitive career and she began to speak out about extreme training measures of the Karolyis.
Gathering strength
Then, of course, was the package from her unknown sister.
“When you find out life-changing things, you gather up your strength and you find a way to move forward and find a way to do the right thing,” said Moceanu, a former University of Akron student. “I feel really, really proud that I was able to have the wisdom to handle it the way that I did. When you get dropped a bomb like that in your life, it’s really testing.
“It was a roller coaster of emotions for a long time.”
Moceanu kept that part of her story secret until her book was released. She said she took a yearlong hiatus from writing it so she could get to know Bricker, along with adapting to motherhood.
Bricker lives in Studio City, Calif., where she displays her gymnastic talents as an aerialist. She also does speaking engagements and is releasing a book in September, Moceanu said.
“It’s truly a nature-versus-nurture type of story,” Moceanu said. “When we get together, our mannerisms, certain things in our voices, our inflections, the way we sometimes speak with our hands — it’s interesting that when somebody has grown up in a completely different environment and there’s still those natural things that you have in common.”
With the 2016 Rio Olympics opening Friday, Moceanu also found time to fete the 20th anniversary of her gold medal. In May, five of the “Magnificent Seven” reunited at the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame in Norman, Okla.
At the recent U.S. Women’s Olympic Trials in San Jose, Calif., all seven gathered, the first time all were together since 2008. On July 16, Atlanta staged an anniversary celebration, also attended by Carl Lewis, Janet Evans, Amy Van Dyken-Rouen and former U.S. men’s basketball coach Lenny Wilkens.
When they went inside the soon-to-be torn down Georgia Dome, the gymnasts remembered entering it for a training session to chants of “USA!” from a sellout crowd of 33,000. They recalled their post-Olympic tour that hit nearly 100 cities, a surprise party thrown for them at Planet Hollywood by actors Bruce Willis and Demi Moore and how President Bill Clinton and his family were the first to greet them coming off the medal stand.
They laughed over members of the Dream Team, including Shaquille O’Neal and Penny Hardaway, asking for their autographs at a photo shoot and the massive O’Neal picking up the diminutive Moceanu.
“I had some personal things going on in my life where sometimes I felt like I couldn’t enjoy it as much as I should have,” Moceanu said of 1996. “But regardless of my situation, I’m forever grateful to have been a part of that Olympic team and have made history with my teammates. We changed the landscape of gymnastics in our country forever.”
Marla Ridenour can be reached at mridenour@thebeaconjournal.com. Read her blog at www.ohio.com/marla. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MRidenourABJ.