On 18 July 1976, in the Montreal Forum, a 4ft 11in Romanian schoolgirl dismounted from the uneven bars, and the scoreboard announced her mark as 1.00. A murmur of confusion ran round the arena — until it dawned on the crowd, and then on the watching world, what the machine was trying to say. Nadia Comăneci, aged 14, had been awarded 10.00, the first perfect score in Olympic gymnastics history, and the scoreboard, built with only three digits, simply could not show it. The number that meant flawless had crashed the display: 1.00, the lowest-looking score imaginable, for the greatest routine yet performed.
The glitch was foreseeable — and had in fact been foreseen. Before the Games, the scoreboard manufacturer Omega had asked the organisers whether four digits might be needed. The reply, in essence, was that a perfect 10 was impossible; no Olympic gymnast had ever received one. The machines were duly built to a maximum of 9.99, and Comăneci broke them on the first full day of competition.
The girl from Onești
Comăneci had been found a decade earlier in the town of Onești by Béla Károlyi — the story goes that he spotted two small girls turning cartwheels in a school playground, lost them in the crowd at the bell, and combed classrooms until he found them again. Under Béla and his wife Márta, in Romania's new centralised training system, she was European all-around champion by 13, at the 1975 championships in Norway, beating the great Soviet gymnasts who had owned the sport for a generation. The Károlyis drilled a gymnastics of daring and precision — harder elements, steelier landings — that made the balletic Soviet style suddenly look like the past. Montreal — the Games of the half-finished stadium and a sweltering July — was her first Olympics, and the bars score was no isolated miracle: across the week she was awarded seven perfect 10s, taking gold in the all-around — at 14, the youngest Olympic all-around champion ever, a record now frozen for eternity because the minimum age has since been raised to 16 — plus golds on beam and bars, a team silver and a bronze on floor. Days later the Soviet Nellie Kim also recorded perfect 10s, on vault and floor, a fact beloved of quiz setters because history has room for only one name.
Television did the rest. The waif with the ponytail and the unsmiling concentration became the face of the Games, and in a single remarkable week appeared on the covers of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated simultaneously; an American network set her montages to a lush instrumental from the soap opera The Young and the Restless, and the tune was rereleased as "Nadia's Theme", winning a place in the charts that the composers had never planned. Behind the fairy tale stood the Ceaușescu dictatorship, which decorated her, monitored her and displayed her as socialist achievement.
After perfection
At Moscow 1980 she won two more golds, on beam and floor, giving her nine Olympic medals in all, five of them gold. Retirement brought darker years: the Károlyis defected to the United States in 1981 and became titans of American gymnastics — coaching Mary Lou Retton to America's first all-around gold at Los Angeles 1984 — while Comăneci lived under the increasingly paranoid surveillance of the regime, her mail read and her movements restricted. In November 1989, weeks before the revolution that toppled and executed Nicolae Ceaușescu, she escaped on foot across the Hungarian border by night, eventually reaching America. She later married the American gymnast Bart Conner, himself a Los Angeles 1984 gold medallist, and the pair became gymnastics' first couple, running academies and good causes from Oklahoma.
The perfect 10 itself did not survive her sport. Scores inflated, tens multiplied, and in 2006 the international federation abolished the capped mark altogether in favour of an open-ended system that separates difficulty from execution — meaning no gymnast can ever again score a perfect 10 at the Olympics. The record books thus preserve a closed universe: it began on the bars in Montreal with a number the scoreboard could not print, and its owner — the girl the scoreboard could not comprehend — will be 14 years old in it forever.
Quiz nuggets
- Nadia Comăneci scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics on the uneven bars, 18 July 1976; the scoreboard displayed 1.00.
- Omega had asked before the Games about a four-digit display and was told a 10 was impossible.
- She scored seven 10s in Montreal, winning all-around, beam and bars golds at age 14 — the youngest all-around champion ever, a record protected by today's minimum age of 16.
- Nellie Kim of the USSR also scored perfect 10s (vault and floor) at the same Games.
- Comăneci defected in November 1989, weeks before Ceaușescu fell; the open-ended scoring system of 2006 abolished the perfect 10.