“When he heads for his ranch on a rural highway north of Houston, in his four-wheel drive with Merle Haggard on the dashboard cassette deck and a day’s collection of bugs on the windshield, well, you would swear you were riding with a born Texan,” ABC’s Bob Brown says, narrating a video of Bela Karolyi driving his truck, tapping along to country music coming out of the speakers. “When Bela Karolyi defected to the West, he defected to the West.” This mid-eighties ABC News segment soundbite was produced just five years after Karolyi—the famed coach of Nadia Comaneci, the first gymnast to earn a perfect 10 score at the Olympics—defected to the United States with his wife, Martha, and Geza Pozsar, the choreographer for the Romanian…The post The Podcast ‘Heavy Medals’ Examines How the Karolyis Built a Texas Gymnastics Powerhouse appeared first on Texas Monthly.