When Nadia scored her first 10, Bela was there with his bear hug.
When Mary Lou pulled off her perfect, gold medal-winning vault, Bela was there to envelop her in his arms.Bela Karolyi wrapping himself around a gleeful 80-pound sprite is as much a part of the gymnastics scene as chalk.
So is Karolyi screaming at a 15-year-old in practice, calling her "a pregnant goat."
He doesn't deny it.
"This is not for fun," he says. "This isn't golf."
This is the man who has hugged and harangued, cajoled and criticized more top gymnasts than any coach in history - 15 world champions and seven Olympic gold medalists.
Nadia Comaneci was the first, a 4-foot-11 child of Romania who scored the first 10 in gymnastics history at the 1976 Montreal Games. By the time those Games ended, Comaneci had added six more 10s and had won three gold medals, a silver and a bronze.
His list of gymnasts runs from Ecaterina Szabo in Romania to Mary Lou Retton and Phoebe Mills after his defection in 1981 to the United States.
It includes three of the seven girls on this year's U.S. team: Kim Zmeskal, Betty Okino and Kerri Strug.
And it includes Erica Stokes, who retired as a 100-pound 15-year-old shortly after the pregnant goat remark. Stokes has said she has an eating disorder because of her training under Karolyi.
Karolyi, 49, makes no apologies. There are about 500 girls who train at his Houston gym. The ones who want to become Olympians work 46 hours a week. They are off Sundays, July 4 and three days at Christmas.
"Let them talk," Karolyi says of Stokes, her parents and the parents of other gymnasts who have unhappily left his program.
"Let them eat their sour grapes and say whatever they want. This is a voluntary activity. Their parents are paying for it. They come in and out as they want and go as far as they want. It hurts the hell out of me when I hear former gymnasts complaining about me, that I injured them. It is their choice to be here."
Karolyi has as many believers as detractors. Many of his gymnasts have been brought from around the United States by their parents.
Okino, 16, left her parents in Elmhurst, Ill., with her grandmother to train with Karolyi.
"I would expect the parents to be supporting, positive and calm," Karolyi said, speaking in general. "They should watch with love and care but not interfere with the athlete's preparation."
When Okino missed the June Olympic trials because of stress fractures in her lower spine, Karolyi was unsympathetic.
"If that had happened to Kim, she would have competed anyway," he said. "Kim is tougher."
That was too much for Okino's mother, Aurelia, who told the Chicago Tribune that Karolyi "could not understand how Betty could be hurt and keep working through the pain. Now it is too close to the Olympics for anyone to reason in a cool manner."
Okino qualified for the team through a petition procedure.
Women's gymnastics in the United States was nowhere before Karolyi left the Romanian team during a competition in the United States.
Before his defection, the only Olympic medal won by U.S. women was a bronze in 1948. Since he began coaching in Houston in 1983, U.S. women have won nine medals.
It took two years working as a dishwasher and dockhand before he saved enough money to resume coaching gymnastics.
Retton's all-around gold in 1984 is directly traceable to Karolyi, but even his detractors among rival U.S. coaches - and there are many - concede his influence is partially responsible for raising U.S. women's gymnastics to a level competitive with world powers Russia and Romania.
The favorite this summer in the all-around is Zmeskal, the defending world champion. The U.S. women's team is favored to win its first gold.
Karolyi has talked about retiring to his cattle ranch outside Houston after these Olympics.
If this is it, he might be going out on top.