Nadia Comăneci’s Perfect 10
On 18 July 1976, 14-year-old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci scored a 10 on the uneven bars. It's a performance that broke the electronic scoreboard.
Prior to the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, Omega SA, the official timers, asked the International Olympic Committee how many digits it should allow for on the electronic scoreboard for the gymnastics events, and were told that three digits would be sufficient, as a score of 10.00 would not be possible – thank you very much.
On 18 July 1976, however, 14-year-old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci scored a 10 on the uneven bars. You can watch that history-making routine below or HERE.
Because the scoreboard was limited to three digits, it displayed her score as 1.00. This created some initial confusion, with even Comăneci unsure of what it meant, until the announcer informed the elated crowd that she had scored a perfect 10. An iconic press photograph shows a beaming Comăneci, arms upraised, beside the scoreboard.
This from Comăneci in a piece she wrote for the Daily Mail in 2019:
“I knew it was a big deal, but I hadn’t realised that no one had ever got a perfect 10 before me. I didn’t know I’d made history. It only sank in when I got back to Romania and there were 10,000 people at the airport. After that, my life went on as normal – going to the gym, to school. The only thing that changed was that people would point at me in the street and say, ‘This is the girl with a 10!’”
Comăneci scored a total of seven 10s at the 1976 Olympics – four on the uneven bars and three on the balance beam. Her main rival, the Soviet Union’s Nelli Kim, scored two 10s in the same competition, in the vault and floor exercise. At the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, Comăneci won two more gold medals and achieved two more perfect 10s. During her career, she won nine Olympic medals and four World Artistic Gymnastics Championship medals.
Did you know that if a gymnast can perform a routine that no one else has previously performed, it is named after him or her? Comăneci has two eponymous uneven bars skills listed in the Code of Points, the “Comăneci salto” and the “Comăneci dismount”.
Comăneci was called “the most iconic gymnast of the 20th century” by El País, and named one of the Athletes of the 20th century by the Laureus World Sports Academy.
After her retirement from competitive gymnastics in 1984, Comăneci’s life in Romania took a bleak new turn. She was subjected to round-the-clock surveillance at the hands of the Securitate secret police, and forbidden to travel outside the country. It seems that there was no longer any need to keep her happy, but a defensive desire to keep her at home in Romania.
That all changed on the night of 27 November 1989.
A few weeks before the Romanian revolution, Comăneci defected with a group of other Romanians, crossing the Hungary-Romania border around Cenad. Their journey was mostly on foot and at night. They travelled through Hungary and Austria and finally were able to take a plane to the United States.
Comăneci currently lives in Oklahoma, where she runs a gymnastics academy with husband Bart Conner, a former US Olympic gymnast. She returns to Romania five or six times a year to look in on a gym for children that she founded there called “GymNadia”.
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