Posted
on November 12, 2016
I
remember so well being impressed with the young Romanian gymnast
Nadia
Comăneci,
way back in 1976, when she became the
first gymnast in Olympic history to be awarded a perfect score of 10.
Apparently
such a score was thought to be impossible, especially in the Olympics. When
Omega was creating the scoreboard for the gymnastics events at the
1976 Montreal Olympics, they asked how many digits it should allow on
the electronic scoreboard. They were told just 3. The people ordering
the scoreboards “knew” that nobody could score over 9.95.
Then
Comăneci
scored a 10, and this is what the scoreboard displayed:
For
a few seconds, everyone was stunned and confused. This gifted
14-year-old athlete had done amazingly well – how could she only
earn a 1? Even Comăneci was confused at first. Then an announcement
was made that the score was a perfect 10.
The
crowd went wild!
That Olympics Nadia
Comăneci went on to earn six more perfect 10s and
three gold medals. Comăneci and other gymnasts occasionally earned
perfect 10s since then – but now scoring in gymnastics has changed
so that there is no one perfect score – it depends on the
difficulty level of the routine or vault.
(By
the way, in the 1967 European Championships, a woman from
Czechoslovakia earned some perfect 10s. I guess it was considered a
one-off and forgotten?)
Defection
Nadia
Comăneci's Romanian coaches, Bela and Marta Karolyi, defected to the
U.S. in 1981, and Comăneci's life got suddenly much more difficult.
Apparently, Romanian officials worried that she, too, would defect,
so she was watched constantly, her actions and strictly controlled,
and she was no longer allowed to travel outside of Romania except as
a spectator during the 1984 Olympics in the United States.
I would've thought that would be the last place Romanian officials would allow her to go, but they kept careful guard over Comăneci, and she wasn't even allowed to speak to her former coaches!
I would've thought that would be the last place Romanian officials would allow her to go, but they kept careful guard over Comăneci, and she wasn't even allowed to speak to her former coaches!
Comăneci
began to feel like a prisoner. So she decided to defect, herself. In
1989, just a few weeks before the Romanian Revolution, Comăneci fled
her country in a dangerous overland journey, mostly at night, mostly
by foot through Romania, Hungary, and Austria. Comăneci defected
with six other Romanians and was led by a former Romanian who had
become an American citizen.
If
they had been caught, they might well have been killed, like many
other Romanian would-be-defectors had been.
And
yet just two weeks later, a revolution started that ended with
Romania becoming a free nation!
Nadia
Comăneci ended up in the United States, as was her goal, but she was
still kept sequestered away from her former friends, the Karolyis and
American athlete Bart Conner. (The person who kept her away from them
was the man who had smuggled her out of Romania.)
Finally, Conner
managed to find a way to talk to her. Later, Conner and Comăneci
developed a long-distance friendship and eventually a romance. They
got married in 1996, and Comăneci became a U.S. citizen in 2001.
 |
| Nadia and Bart back in 1976, left, and as a married couple, with kids, right. |
Also
on this date
|
|
Plan ahead:
Check
out my Pinterest boards for:
And
here are my Pinterest boards for:
