Shannon Miller: My Child, My Hero by Claudia Miller

[irichluck21]

Yeah all the red flags.

Yikes. Nunno WAS legit crazy.

 

[rlayt]

He seemed fairly typical for those times when we lived through it. I’m glad coaches are learning better ways.

 

[Matilda23]

What was Steve’s background in gymnastics, was he a gymnast?

 

[rlayt]

Wasn’t he just a guy with a college sports degree who jumped into it? None of his other gymnasts made a mark. Jenny Thompson and the girl adopted from Korea?

Didn’t Kerri Strug’s parents pull her from his gym for making her compete with a torn muscle?

 

[QuietColours]

I can find very little about him from before the early 90s even. I can't find his college degrees or really anything beyond an interview that says he's from NY and the fact he knew Bart Conner well enough to be renting space in his gym when Shannon had to switch from Jerry's gym and he was well enough known he was able to go on the training trip to the USSR as a coach without an athlete. He seems to have had quite a few connections in the gymnastics world prior to Shannon's success, but according to the book she seems to have definitely been his first top gymnast.

How 'home grown' she was will depend on your take--it sounds like she was roughly working today's level 8-9 when she transferred. I don't think it's unfair to say that Jerry was responsible for her basics, but she was 9ish? when she went to him, so she'd been training with him for 5-7 years by Barcelona. That's a lot of time for him to have been refining her technique, and it sounds like Peggy was hired pretty much explicitly to refine Shannon's compulsories, with success.

 

[RedBirdie]

Heather Brink was a Nunno gymnast.

I don't think any of his other elites were homegrown. IIRC, all those little juniors he had following Barcelona were transfers.

ETA: I swear Nunno coached at Karolyis in the 1980s. But maybe I'm wrong.

 

[flappergirl]

Heather Brink was a Nunno gymnast.

I don't think any of his other elites were homegrown. IIRC, all those little juniors he had following Barcelona were transfers.

ETA: I swear Nunno coached at Karolyis in the 1980s. But maybe I'm wrong.

I remember hearing that Nunno coached at Karolyi’s and that he modeled his coaching after him and the Soviets.

 

[MaryClare]

Heather Brink was a Nunno gymnast.

I don't think any of his other elites were homegrown. IIRC, all those little juniors he had following Barcelona were transfers.

ETA: I swear Nunno coached at Karolyis in the 1980s. But maybe I'm wrong.

Yes he did coach at Karolyis but it can’t have been for very long when you consider the timeline of them opening their gym and Nunno beginning to coach Shannon in Oklahoma

 

[MaryClare]

I remember hearing that Nunno coached at Karolyi’s and that he modeled his coaching after him and the Soviets.

It makes me laugh how western gymnastics coaches of that era would refer to things as “Soviet” or even broader “eastern bloc” as if every coach did everything the same way

I am imagining myself going back to work on Monday and my boss saying “right guys, I spent a month at a summer camp in the Midwest and now I am going to model myself on the American coaches”