At the 1976 Montreal Olympics, Nadia Comaneci, all of four feet and 11 inches and weighing 86 pounds, stunned everyone, including the judges to score a perfect 10 on the uneven bars. The petite Romanian vaulted into Olympics folklore for the first perfect 10 score. She then notched up six more 10s in individual and team events.
As televisions around the world beamed images of Nadia’s breath-taking performance, the viewers discovered a new meaning for beauty on the bars. The 14-year-old Romanian, a picture of intensity going through her gymnastic routines, became an object of attention and fascination the world over. She had seven perfect scores in all, four of them coming on the uneven bars, two on the balance beam and one in floor exercise.
When she produced the magic moment for the first time on the uneven bars, Nadia took everyone by surprise. The scoring equipment, not programmed to display four digits of 10.00, showed 1.00. The crowd waited in silence for the judges’ marks to flash on screen and broke into stunned applause after the announcer explained the significance of the strange scoreline — 1.00 out of 10 was actually 10/10.
As the first gymnast, male or female, to get there, Nadia also became the youngest all-around champion at 14. Four years later, at the 1980 Moscow Games, having grown taller and heavier, she won two gold medals but lost the all-around title to Soviet gymnast Yelena Davydova in a controversial decision.
Nadia retired in 1984 and the same year she won the Olympic Order. Nadia, who was inducted into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 1993, enjoyed running and jumping as a child in Onesti, a factory town in the Romanian mountains. She was spotted by Bela Karolyi, the gymnastics coach of a sports school in Onesti. The coach then convinced Nadia’s parents to let the six-year-old train at his gym.
In 1975, Nadia, aged 13, won the all-around title at the European Championships.
Montreal 1976 offered her the world stage and under Karolyi’s guidance, the little girl from Onesti vaulted to fame.
In 1989 Nadia made news again, this time for defecting to the United States. In the US, she started a gymnastics academy with American Bart Conner, who was also an Olympic gold medallist in gymnastics, before marrying him in 1996. Both are joint owners of the Bart Conner Gymnastics Academy. Nadia, who returned to Romania for the first time after her defection for the wedding ceremony, is also a motivational speaker.
Nandakumar Marar
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