Presented by TRI STATE ELECTRIC.
This Day In Sports…November 12, 1961:
The birthday of the teenager who changed the sport of gymnastics. Nadia Comaneci of Romania was just 14 years old when she became the first gymnast to earn a perfect 10.0 at the Olympics. Comaneci’s routine on the uneven parallel bars at the 1976 Montreal Games was flawless, but that was only the beginning. She totaled seven 10.0 scores in those Olympics, winning three individual gold medals (bars, balance beam and all-around), plus a bronze on floor exercise and a team silver.
Comaneci became the youngest Olympics all-around champion in history. That led the sport to later raise the minimum age requirement to 16. Her first perfect 10.0 is famous for the scoreboard that wasn’t built to handle such a thing. The official Omega board was never programmed to show a “10.0” because the International Gymnastics Federation thought that score was impossible. So when Comaneci nailed her bars routine, the board flashed “1.00” instead. She instantly became a pop culture icon (as did the scoreboard).
In fact, ABC edited a montage of Comaneci’s routines to the theme from the soap opera “The Young & The Restless” at the end of the 1976 Games and kept airing it afterward. It was a phenomenon, and the song was retitled “Nadia’s Theme” and released as a single. It peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard charts. I played it locally on KFXD in my disc jockey days.
Comaneci supplanted the Soviet Union’s Olga Korbut as the premiere trail blazer in women’s gymnastics. Korbut had taken the 1972 Munich Games by storm, performing back flips on the beam and from the top of the uneven parallel bars (a move that was banned shortly thereafter). Korbut replaced the sport’s traditional elegance with high-flying acrobatics. Comaneci further inspired future gymnasts to innovate with higher-risk moves and dismounts, revolutionizing the sport.
The Communist regime in Romania immediately seized on Comaneci’s popularity. And after she won four more gold medals at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and then retired in 1984, the government kept her under constant surveillance by the secret police, tapped her phone and banned her from international travel. Comaneci finally escaped Romania in 1989 and defected, claiming political asylum in the U.S. She reconnected with a fellow 1976 Olympian, American gymnast Bart Conner, and the pair got married. The short version of the story is that the couple has lived happily ever after. Nadia Comaneci…65 years old today.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
