by Luminița Paul, photo: Gazeta Sporturilor
When she
stopped, she did it suddenly. The doubts had crawled already into her mind a
few months before that, sharp doubts like having effort cramps, but she tried
not to pay attention to them. She isolated the feeling, going on with her life
the same way she did before that, having the same strict schedule, calculated
up to the second. She would wake up very early in the morning; she would eat
breakfast to get her strength. And then she would run tens of kilometers,
sometimes all alone, at times with a sparring partner. Very often it was a man,
who would have to seriously use his legs to keep up with her. In the afternoon
she would rest, after having the lunch that would help her recover and
afterwards, she would start over, running more kilometers; the numbers were
always spinning on her personal stopwatch.
She used to
say: “I wake up at 7 a.m. I have breakfast. At 9:30 I go out to run. I run
16, 18, even 20 kilometers; and in the afternoon another 10 - 12. After that,
sometimes I do fitness or some specific training“. She would go to bed
early with her body twitching due to the effort, so she would be able to start
over the next day. Hundreds, thousand of beginnings; hundreds, thousand of days
that are almost identical.
But then,
during those difficult months of 2003, something had changed. It was in August;
the Paris World Championship was about to begin, but Gabi was no longer feeling
like herself. While preparing in the Izvorani training camp she felt tired,
fragile and her face was harsh from the burning sun and all the hard work. “I
am nervous. I left home on the 23rd of March. Now, I am 40 kilometers away from
my hone, but I didn`t have the chance to stop by. I am wearing the same clothes
all the time and I will be wearing the same clothes while being in France“,
Gabi confessed in an interview. “I am overstrained. I pushed myself so hard
for the trainings lately…I had days when I just didn`t want to run anymore.“
And she knew something else for that matter: the competition of her favorite category, 5,000 mm, seriously increased once many young and strong African women from Ethiopia and Kenya came into the picture. Gabriela Szabo`s trademark was the furious sprint in the last tour, the show at the end, the adrenaline boost of a long and usually strategic run. “It was hard for me to change something. And these girls are fresher than I am. Once, I would need 61 – 62 seconds in the last tour and I would win with 20 -30 m advance. There is a certain wear and tear, a fatigue that I got. The years passed by. My muscles don`t have the same elasticity they used to have before“, says Gabi in a reasoned and implacable analysis. And, her mind and body were not misleading. At the World Championship on the Stade of France, she finished the 5,000 m track race on the 11th place and three years before that she had been the Olympic champion. The world of athletics didn`t understand the fall. And the daily newspaper L’Equipe published some lines expressing general amaze. She came back home and had a general medical check; the diagnosis was “physical overstrain“. The recommendation was 6 months of pause.
The first and the last abandon of her career
But she was not
able to stay on the sideline for too long. After two months and a half she went
in the USA, in Albuquerque (New Mexico), for a training camp. She followed the
same draconic schedule, but the exhaustion was still in her body. For Gabriela
Szabo, triple times indoor world champion, the 2004 season would end after only
half of a race. The first and only abandon of her professional life happened in
Birmingham, during the 3,000 m race.
This was the
moment when she decided to stop. She decided to end her career while she still
had a winner`s aura. “I felt I would never be able to be Gabi Szabo, the
winner of the first place. I always told myself that whenever I would feel
that I am not able to perform anymore, I will step back. After all these years
when I always was on the first, second or third pace, all of the sudden to be
the last to finish the race, on the 11th place?!“
Once more,
everyone was astonished by her drastic decision of retiring in the middle of
the Olympic year: her manager, the national and international federation, other
sportspeople. Anyway, the Athens Olympics was supposed to be the last event of
her career; her last, but with a won medal. And this was not possible anymore,
so she decided to put a stop to things and to end her career in her own terms;
to explore, first and foremost, her physical condition, her health. The diagnosis
“physical overstrain“ came back after some more tests that she took at the
Institute of Endocrinology in Bucharest.
“I wasn`t
feeling good at all“, she confessed in the summer of 2004. “I was tired
all the time. Sleep wasn`t enough for me, no matter how much i slept. I would
go to bed at 9 in the evening; I would wake up at 10 in the morning and at 12 I
had to go to bed again. In the afternoon Zsolt was coming to take me out and I
would fall asleep in the car!“, Gabi remembers.
So she went to
a clinic in Rome, where she had some more complex medical tests, made on hair.
The tests revealed that her adrenal gland, the one that manages effort, and
also the thyroid were functioning at their minimum levels. And this is where
the fatigue was coming from. She followed a treatment and her condition
improved quickly and visibly. At first she thought to wait another six months
to see if she still wants to come back on the runway. But, on the other hand,
she felt and she knew her decision was taken then, at Birmingham after that
unique and painful abandon.
The first mornings were the most awkward. She wondered what to do because she was used to following a very strict schedule. Together with her husband Zsolt Gyongyossy, her trainer during her entire career, she was faced to a new life. All of the sudden, things were not supposed to happen according to the same patterns. “Before, we knew the exact time to wake up, when to go out for the training, when to eat, when to go to bed“, Zsolt explained. But, it stopped being this way. They have discovered together that it is possible to feel god and to enjoy the new life without any guilt.
The inheritance of her sports life
However,
Gabriela kept something form her sports life and that is order. “If I am
organized and serious now, it is because Zsolt made me this way“, the
former sportswoman tells about her husband and her trainer. “He inspired me
to be like this. All I have ever obtained was because I worked tremendously,
without any artifices. I was more punctual to my trainings than the trains
arriving at their station. This left an imprint also on my day to day life, I
always like to be on time“, Szabo explains.
After putting
aside professional athletics, she chose this field again but this time it is
about studying it in detail, with a scientific approach. “I got into this
world so quickly that I didn`t think I was able do anything else“, Gabriela
confessed. “I was in the eighth grade discussing with my master teacher,
Liliana Andreescu, - a sports professor -, about getting into college, about
how many people in our class had succeeded, and about how fierce the
competition was. I didn’t have anything else in my mind.“ And, maybe,
opposite to what most people think about sportsmen, she has always liked to
study, she never ran away from classes although she ran in life, on the track
and on the training routes.
“I never
begged for my grades. I would spend time with my professors to get the
explanations I needed and after that, I did the study. I never liked being
rebuked by anyone. During high school, I had spent long hours in my room,
studying“, Gabi added.
After
graduating from university, she signed up for a PhD in sports, and she got in
with an A in the fall of 2009. In February 2010 she obtained a Masters Degree
in Propellant Anthropology, and afterwards she got closer to the field
marketing; again, by studying. There were days when she would come at the
Federation with her books; she joined them after retiring, thus combining
work and study. Therefore, she has discovered a new life for herself, starting
from the old life; she says about this life that she kept in a suitcase all
this time, during her sports career. The suitcase that she would take with her
in training camps for months and months in a row and at tournaments. When she
came back home, the washing machine was on without cease, several times and
then things would get back into the suitcase, for a new journey.
Because of her
sudden retirement, but of the close connection she currently has with the world
of athletics and sports in general, the shock was slightly felt by Gabi Szabo,
like through a feathered pillow. She started to enjoy more and more reading,
going out with her friends to restaurants and the time spent with her husband,
yet maintaining an active life. There were times when she didn`t run at all,
but she returned to this also but only for maintenance purposes, a few times
per week and not daily for tens of kilometers as she used to do before. She
added to all this swimming, fitness sessions and riding the bicycle; the care
for self, the hairstyling, having nice clothes but not necessarily going to
Paris to refresh her wardrobe.
The nostalgia
for sports is still in her and it will always be there. “I liked the
trainings because it made me feel free, but I equally liked the competitions.
I always wanted to prove that I am the best one, that I win the next race. I
had this ambition. I didn`t even like to see my sparring partner one step ahead
of me“, says Gabriela. Maybe this is why, whenever she dreams of running,
not very often tough, she always wins.
“I dream that I must go to a competition and I only have three weeks to train myself. I tell Zsolt: How will I take my clothes off? I had put on weight; my muscles are not the same as they used to be. Then, someone hands me a pair of leggings, so I don`t have to run wearing shorts. The end of the dream is me winning the race. With difficulty, but I win it.“ Some things never change. Not even when your entire life has changed.
Gabriela
Szabo
- Born 14th of November 1975.
- Olympic champion: 5.000 m – Sydney 2000; Silver medal
– 1.500 m, Atlanta 1996; Bronze medal – 1.500 m, Sydney 2000.
- World champion – 5.000 m: Athens 1997 and Seville
1999; 1.500 m – Edmonton 2001.
- World champion indoor – 3.000 m, Paris 1997 and
Maebashi 1999; 1.500 m, Maebashi 1999; Silver medal – 3.000 m, Lisbon 2001.
- European champion indoor – 3.000 m, Valencia 1998 and
Gent 2000.
- Vice-European champion – 5.000 m, Budapest 1998; 1.500
m, Munich 2002
- The International Association of Athletics Federations named her in (IAAF) „The best athlete of the year“.
