Nadia Comăneci's first perfect ten appeared on the scoreboard as 1.00
On 18 July 1976 in Montreal, a 14-year-old Romanian finished her uneven bars routine and the scoreboard flashed 1.00. Omega, which built it, had been told nobody could score a perfect ten, so it offered no way to show one. Nadia Comăneci had just earned the first ten in Olympic gymnastics.
Comăneci was born in 1961 in Onești, a small town in the Carpathians. Her mother signed her up for gymnastics because she had so much energy that she was hard to handle at home. At six she was turning cartwheels in a schoolyard with a friend when Béla Károlyi, hunting for young talent, noticed them. When the bell rang the girls ran inside, and Károlyi went from classroom to classroom until he found her. The friend, Viorica Dumitru, became a leading ballerina instead.
Training at the school Károlyi and his wife Márta opened in her hometown, she won the Romanian national title at nine, the youngest ever. At 13 she took the all-around and every event but floor at the 1975 European Championships. In Montreal she went on to collect six more tens, gold in the all-around, beam and bars, and a place in history as the youngest Olympic all-around champion. Because the minimum age has since risen to 16, nobody can undercut her unless the rules change.
Her fame spread in unexpected ways. A piece of film music called Cotton's Dream, played under slow-motion clips of her on American television, became a top-ten hit and was renamed Nadia's Theme, though she never performed to it. Her real floor music was a piano medley. At the 1979 World Championships she discharged herself from hospital against medical advice, where she was being treated for blood poisoning from a cut wrist, to score 9.95 on beam and help Romania to its first team gold.
At the 1980 Moscow Games she won two more golds, becoming the only gymnast to defend an Olympic beam title. In 1989 she defected from communist Romania to the United States, weeks before the December revolution. She later married the American gymnast Bart Conner, whom she had first met at a 1976 competition in New York and barely remembered, in a Bucharest ceremony broadcast live across Romania.
Source: Nadia Comăneci
