LORD KNOWS IT’S not easy being perfect, but at the Olympic games in Montreal in 1976, a 14-year-old gymnast from Romania achieved the seemingly impossible: she scored a perfect 10. Nadia Comaneci was the first athlete in the history of Olympic gymnastics history to achieve a perfect 10 score; when the judges found themselves unable to fault her performance on the uneven parallel bars, they had a problem: the scoreboard wasn’t configured to display a score above 9.99, so it showed 1.00. One of the judges held up 10 fingers to prevent confusion.
It wasn't a one-off, either: Comaneci went on to sweep seven perfect 10s in Montreal, earning three gold medals, a silver and a bronze. The world fell in love with this pony-tailed young gymnast whose graceful floor routine ended with a coquettish pose that has now become an iconic image in sports history. She graced the cover of TimeMagazine, accompanied by the simple headline, "She's perfect".
But when Comaneci returned to Romania, then under the rule of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, she was brought back to earth with a bang. After receiving a hero’s welcome in Bucharest, she found herself under constant surveillance from the authorities. Her worldwide fame seemed a universe away from the bleak reality of Ceausescu’s Romania. She returned to her fairytale world in 1980 to win more gold medals in the Moscow Olympics, but after her coaches, Bela and Marta Karolyi, defected to the West in 1981, the regime ratcheted up the surveillance, and she was closely guarded wherever she went.
Finally, in 1989, just a few weeks before Ceausescu was overthrown, she made a break for it, joining a group of young people being smuggled out of Romania, and making a gruelling journey through Hungary to arrive in Austria, from where she was flown to the US.
There, she became reacquainted with an American Olympic gymnast she had met in 1976, Bart Conner. In 1996, she returned in triumph to her home country once more – for her lavish wedding to Conner in the former presidential palace in Bucharest, which was broadcast live all over Romania. The couple now live in Oklahoma with their five-year-old son, Dylan, and are involved in several sports-related ventures, including a gymnastics academy and a sports gear company. They also publish International Gymnastmagazine.
Still supple at 50, Comaneci has modelled sportswear, and in 2007 she took part in a series of The Apprentice with Donald Trump. She is also on the panel of the annual Laureus World Sports Awards, and was one of several sports legends who attended the Awards in London last Monday, tweeting excitedly about meeting with the Awards host, Clive Owen.
Today, she is presenting the 2012 Nadia Comaneci International Invitational in Oklahoma City, featuring gymnasts from around the world competing in an Olympic-style podium.
Kevin Courtney
