Nadia Comaneci: Perfect 10
By David Bruce
Dedicated with Love to Tiffany
Copyright 2007 by Bruce D. Bruce
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Nadia Comaneci: Perfect 10
Perfect 10
At the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, Canada, Nadia Comaneci (pronounced NAD-ya koh-muh-NECH) was absolutely spectacular as she won five medals. On July 18, competing on the uneven bars, she became the first gymnast ever to score a perfect 10. In fact, the equipment that was set up to display the scores was not programmed to display a score that high. Therefore, the apparatus displayed a score of 1.00, which is a very low score.
Nadia’s coach, Bela Karolyi, was shocked by the low score, and he asked for an explanation. A Swedish judge held up 10 fingers to indicate a perfect score. Meanwhile, one of Nadia’s teammates told her, “I think it’s a 10, but they don’t know how to make a 10.” Nadia asked Bela, “Sir, is that really a 10?” He replied, “You bet it is, Nadia.”
Reflecting on her perfect score 25 years later, Nadia said, “Scoring the 10 was the biggest moment [of the Olympic Games] for me, but at the time I didn’t realize how big it was, and how everything was going to change after that.”
Everything did change for her. Nadia became an international celebrity, and her photograph appeared on the covers of Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and Time in the same week. This was the first time that a human being had appeared on the covers of these magazines in the same week. Previously, only a racehorse named Secretariat had achieved that honor. The Associated Press also named her 1976’s Female Athlete of the Year.
This is Nadia’s story.
Youth and Early Training
Nadia’s parents are Gheorghe and Stefania-Alexandrina Comaneci. He worked as a mechanic on vehicles used in the forest around his hometown, while she worked in an office. Her parents lived in Romania in a small village called Onesti, which is located in the Romanian province of Moldavia and nestled in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. In 1952, before Nadia was born, the first President of the Socialist Republic of Romania, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, decided to build a new industrialized city on the site of Onesti. In 1964, the city’s name became officially Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, in his honor, although residents continued to call it Onesti.
On November 12, 1961, Nadia Elena Comaneci was born in Onesti. According to Nadia, “It is a magical place, and I have always felt lucky that I was born there.”
Nadia is not a usual Romanian name. When her mother was pregnant with her, she and Nadia’s father went to a Russian film that they enjoyed. The name of the heroine of the film was Nadia—which means “hope”—and they decided to name their daughter after her.
Her father was happy with his new daughter although he had hoped for a son. Later, when young Nadia started tumbling rambunctiously around the house like the tomboy she was, her mother told Nadia’s father that he already had a son—Nadia.
Even as a two-year-old child, Nadia had the tenacity to get what she wanted. During the holiday season, young Nadia noticed a sweet hanging on the family Christmas tree. She grabbed the sweet, pulled, discovered that it was tied to the tree, and pulled harder, bringing the Christmas tree down on top of her. Her parents quickly rescued her, and they discovered that she had the sweet in her hand—along with part of the branch that it was tied to.
When Nadia was five, Adrian, her brother, was born, giving her father both a tomboy and a real son. When her mother brought Adrian home from the hospital after his birth, he was crying. However, when Nadia held him, he stopped crying. At first, Nadia believed that the stork had brought Adrian to the door of their home, but her parents told her that the stork had brought Adrian by way of the chimney—the soot in the chimney had made Adrian’s skin a little darker than Nadia’s.
As a young tomboy, Nadia enjoyed climbing trees. Her grandmother once asked her, “Why on earth do you spend all your time climbing trees?” Nadia replied, “Because they’re here to be climbed.” However, Nadia did grow annoyed when a young boy called up to her, “Hey, Comaneci, want some twigs to build your nest with?” Although Nadia occasionally fell out of a tree, she was never seriously hurt.
Young Nadia could be naughty. At a store, she tried on a pair of roller skates. Because she wanted the roller skates so much, she skated out of the store, forcing her father to pay for them. In addition, one day she stayed outside until after dark, playing, and her parents worried about her. When she finally came home, her father spanked her once, then made her kneel on cracked walnut shells for three hours—so she would be as uncomfortable as he had been waiting for her to return home.
Since the energetic young Nadia had an overabundance of energy—she had broken the springs of four couches in three years by jumping up and down on them—her mother enrolled her in gymnastics. Nadia started studying gymnastics at age three when she was in kindergarten. (Kindergarten starts early in Romania because mothers work outside the home.)
Nadia’s very first gymnastics teacher was Marcel Duncan, a master of motivation. When his young gymnasts did well, he would appear before them at the end of their exercises with his hands behind his back and ask, “Who thinks they did well today?” All the children would raise a hand up in the air, and Mr. Duncan would reveal the bag of chocolates he was hiding behind his back and allow each gymnast to have a chocolate. But if the young gymnasts did not perform well, then there were no hands behind Mr. Duncan’s back, and no chocolate.
In 1968, Nadia began training with coaches Bela and Marta Karolyi. Bela discovered Nadia at her school. He traveled from school to school searching for children with the potential to become great gymnasts. At the schools, he would watch the children do tumbling and cartwheels in the playground, and if they showed gymnastics talent, he would take the children’s names so he could ask their parents to send them to his gymnastics school. At Nadia’s school, he noticed Nadia and one of her friends as they performed gymnastics tricks during recess. Unfortunately, the school bell rang before he could get their names or even see their faces, and the blond-haired children ran back into their school.
Because Bela had been so impressed with the girls, he went from room to room in the school searching for them, but he was unable to recognize them. After two trips through the school looking for the girls, he started asking all the children, “Who likes gymnastics?” The children didn’t know what the word “gymnastics” meant, so he started asking them who liked to do cartwheels. Whenever some children said that they liked to do cartwheels, Bela asked them to do a few cartwheels for him. Unfortunately, they weren’t the children he had seen during recess.
Finally, he saw a couple of blond-headed children in the back of a classroom. He asked if they knew how to perform cartwheels, they performed a few cartwheels for him, and Bela knew that he had found the girls who had impressed him so strongly. He enrolled them in his gymnastics school, along with 24 other young girls whom he would attempt to train to be world-class gymnasts. Nadia was six years old.
Nadia, of course, became a famous gymnast, but what became of the other little girl? Her name was Viorica Dumitriu, and she became a foremost ballerina of Romania.
Bela did have an entrance exam for his gymnastics school. Girls had to run a sprint of about 50 feet, perform a long jump, and walk on the balance beam. He said, “If they are afraid of the beam, we send them home right away.” Nadia wasn’t afraid. In fact, after the Montreal Olympics, when Bela was asked if Nadia had ever shown fear, his answer was short and direct: “No.”
As Nadia trained with him at his gymnastics school, Bela continued to be impressed with her. He was impressed with her for a very good reason. Whenever he asked her to do something, she never said “No” or “I can’t do that.” Instead, she tried to do what he asked her to do.
While Nadia was training with Bela, all of her expenses were taken care of by the Romanian government. Nadia’s entry fees, coaching, travel, leotards, room and board, and choreography expenses were all paid by the government. Romania was a socialist country, and the government subsidized sports. A stadium and an indoor sports hall were located in every town, and each sports center bore the Latin inscription, Mens sana in corpore sano (“A sound mind in a sound body”).
About a year after Nadia began training with Bela, at her first Romanian National Junior Gymnastics Championships, she placed thirteenth after some falls on balance beam. After she fell off the balance beam, she tried to get back on, but being excited because she was in her first competition, she immediately fell off on the other side. Fortunately, her team still managed to finish in first place.
To ward off the bad luck of Nadia’s number 13th finish, Bela gave her an Eskimo doll that he had bought in Holland, saying, “You must never finish thirteenth again.” Bela’s gift started Nadia’s hobby of collecting dolls. By age 14, she owned over 200 dolls, many of them given to her. One doll named Fragolina was so large that it sat on a sofa. By the time Nadia retired from competing in gymnastics, she had collected over 300 dolls.
Bela’s training of Nadia quickly paid off. She worked hard, and she finished first in the competition the following year, and she carried the Eskimo doll that Bela had given her to other important competitions. In 1971, after Nadia had finished in first place in the all-around in her age group, she became a member of Romania’s national gymnastics team.
During Nadia’s early years as a gymnast, the person who pushed her most was her teammate Teodora “Dorina” Ungureanu. Although their rivalry could have made them enemies, they became best friends instead. They competed at many events together, and Teodora was one of her teammates at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, where she won a silver medal on the uneven bars and a bronze on the beam, as well as a team silver. Often, people thought that Nadia worried about competing against such athletes as Nelli Kim, Olga Korbut, and Ludmilla Tourischeva, but she would say, “The only one that can scare me is Teodora.” As best friends, they shared similar interests, such as collecting dolls—and trophies and medals.
Nadia and Teodora played the kind of pranks that best friends play. One day, they held their hands together and threw Adrian, Nadia’s brother, all the way to the ceiling, where he left a couple of dirty fingerprints. Fortunately, he was not afraid.
The two girls also played soccer against boys, with the losing team buying chocolate bars for the winning team. Because Nadia and Teodora were good soccer players, they usually won the game and enjoyed chocolate bars afterward. After all, Nadia was competitive, and not just in gymnastics. In fact, she had won her very first athletic competition—a tricycle race. When Nadia was young, sometimes the mothers of the boys she played with used to complain that she played too roughly.
In 1972, Nadia competed in her first international competition: the Friendship Cup. She won the gold medal in the all-around, and the Romanian team won the silver medal. This was the start of an international reputation in gymnastics for Romania, a reputation that is still strong today.
Of course, during these years of early training, Nadia was small, but size can be deceptive. At an exhibition in Italy, very few people showed up to watch the Romanian team, because they thought that since they were little girls, they wouldn’t be able to do much. Bela was angry when he saw that only 1,500 people had shown up in an auditorium that could seat 10,000. However, the news spread by word of mouth that the Romanian girls could do very impressive gymnastics, and on the second and third days of the exhibition every ticket was sold, leaving standing room only.
In 1974, Americans Rodney and Debbie Hill brought their Denver School of Gymnastics team, the Hill’s Angels, to compete in Romania, and they were amazed that the Romanian team appeared to consist of little girls. Rodney even considered asking his wife to not compete because she was an Olympian, and he wanted to make the competition more even; however, the Romanians said that would not be necessary. In the competition, Debbie won only the balance beam—13-year-old Nadia Comaneci won the other three individual apparatus events.
One evening after 10 p.m., when they would normally be in bed, Nadia and Teodora visited Debbie Hill. She was surprised to see them and asked, “How did you get away from home?” They replied, “We snuck out of the dorm.” As talented gymnasts undergoing intensive training, Nadia and Teodora lived in a dorm with other gymnasts, instead of at home with their families.
In 1974, Nadia and Teodora also took part in an exhibition in Paris, France. The gymnastics authorities were expecting to see 1972 Olympian Alina Goreac at the exhibition, but instead the Romanians sent Nadia and Teodora. For this trip out of Romania, Nadia’s mother baked a batch of her daughter’s favorite cookies and packed them for her to take to Paris.
Unfortunately, once Bela and his two gymnasts arrived in Paris, the exhibition turned out not to be well organized. First, no one met them. When a translator finally arrived, Bela, Nadia, and Teodora found out that the gymnastics officials weren’t expecting such young gymnasts. Instead, they were expecting an Olympian. Furthermore, the gymnastics officials thought that Nadia and Teodora were just little girls, and so they didn’t want them to take part in the major exhibition. Therefore, they sent Bela, Nadia, and Teodora to a minor exhibition.
As asked, Nadia and Teodora performed at the minor exhibition, but then Bela took his gymnasts to the major exhibition. When they arrived there, a guard asked him for a pass. Of course, Bela didn’t have a pass because no one had given him one. Therefore, Bela used his prowess as an athlete—he had thrown the hammer in track and field, boxed, and played rugby. He told Nadia and Teodora to stick close to him, and he simply barreled his way into the exhibition hall past the guard.
Once inside the exhibition hall, Bela told Nadia and Teodora to hide behind a pile of mats, then he waited for a chance for them to display their gymnastics skills. A chance occurred after Soviet gymnast Ludmilla Tourischeva performed a vault. After she made her vault, Bela told Nadia to take her place at the starting point of the vault runway—she would vault next.
Nadia performed a perfect Tsukahara vault, astonishing the crowd. Cheers poured from the audience, and the French gymnastics authorities suddenly became very happy to allow Nadia and Teodora to display their gymnastics skills in the main exhibition. A highlight occurred when the two gymnasts performed a floor exercise together. This exhibition provided valuable international experience for Nadia and Teodora.
As a gymnast competing internationally, Nadia often flew. She enjoyed visiting the cockpit when she was allowed, and since she was a celebrity, she was sometimes allowed. She once visited the cockpit of a British Airways Boeing, where she impressed the pilot by questioning him about the complicated instruments he used to fly the plane. A year or two later, the pilot had good reason to remember her visit to his cockpit. He watched her score a perfect 10 during her first day of competition at the Montreal Olympics, and later he said, “I can’t tell you how proud I was. My little girl! I could scarcely believe it!”
In 1975, Nadia became eligible to compete at the senior level in international competition. Previously, she had competed at the junior level. In Skien, Norway, she competed at the European Championships, where in an upset victory over Soviet gymnast Ludmilla Tourischeva—who showed good sportsmanship by kissing her on the cheek—she won the gold medal in the all-around. In addition, Nadia won gold medals in balance beam, uneven bars, and vault. She also earned a silver medal in the floor exercise. When the Romanians returned home, crowds of people met them. Members of the Young Pioneers, a group similar to the Girl Scouts, carried a sign that read, “Bravo Nadia! Tot inainte!” In English, that means, “Bravo, Nadia—once again!”