Monday Milestone: Perfect Ten
In the spirit of London 2012, over the coming weeks the Monday Milestone will take on an Olympic flavour, as we examine some of the great moments in Summer Games history:
This Week in History:
1976, July 18
Fourteen year old Nadia Comaneci receives the first ever perfect score in Olympic gymnastics competition.
There it was. She’d stuck the landing. The routine had felt flawless. Breathing in deeply, the young Romanian tried to hide her excitement, and anxiously looked to the scoreboards…
The Delorean has been parked during the Games of the XXI Olympiad in Montreal, Canada this week as the Milestone celebrates one of the great moments in Olympic history.
Nadia Comaneci was a young eastern European gymnast who had been training ever since she turned cartwheels in the schoolyard when she was six years old.
In the classically communist Eastern European way of the 1970s and 1980s, she had been plucked from relative obscurity, chosen to attend Bela Karolyi’s experimental gymnastics program and over the next few years, she was trained mercilessly, to achieve success.
It worked. The program had Nadia winning the Romanian Nationals at the age of eight, and the next year she was winning international competitions. By 1975, Nadia had won the all-around and also gold medals in every event other than the floor exercise in the European Championships, and headed to her first Olympic Games in 1976. She was just fourteen years old.
These Games were the first Olympics ever held in Canada and of course they wove their own story. They also capture a wonderful historical snapshot of 1976. Political boycotts came from both China and Taiwan, and also half of Africa boycotting in protest of New Zealand’s fraternisation with Apartheid-riddled South Africa earlier that year. This was the height of the Eastern Bloc, a paradigm about to be further promulgated by these efforts of a young Romanian gymnastics prodigy at the Montreal Forum.
Nadia stood sweating her scores after her incredible routine on the uneven bars. It had looked good. It had felt good. But how good was it?
As scores of 1.00 appeared, there was confusion among spectators. It had surely been better than that? But then, as the understanding rippled across the crowd, that even the scoreboard had not expected perfection, and was ill-equipped for such a display, they rose in ovation as they realised they had just witnessed history. Nadia Comaneci, the young fourteen year old Romanian prodigy had just secured the first ever perfect ten, and a place in Olympic folklore.
A few days, three gold, one silver and a bronze medal later, Nadia had notched a further six perfect tens. Four years later, she would return to the Olympic stage and win another two gold medals at Moscow, cementing her legacy…
As students of history at the Milestone, much can be learned from the Games of the XXI Olympiad. Canadians are amusingly terrible at winning gold medals as Olympic hosts; and when Australia fails to win gold, like at these games, the government creates the Australian Institute of Sport;
But mostly – for those who have always said there is no such thing as perfect? Well, that year the young Romanian Nadia Comaneci on the uneven bars taught us otherwise.
Milestone Five: Highlights of the 1976 Montreal Olympics
5. With five silver and six bronze, the Canadians fail to win a single gold medal. The first time the hosts of the summer games had not won gold.
4. Relatively unknown Taro Aso would represent the Japanese shooting team. In 2008, he was elected Prime Minister of Japan. Princess Anne would also represent England in the equestrian and famously be exempt from submitting a sex test.
3. Alex Oakley became the oldest track and field Olympian when he represented Canada in walking at the age of 50, in his fifth Games.
2. Boris Onishchenko from Russia rigged his epee to register a hit when there wasn’t one, forcing the disqualification of the USSR men’s pentathlon team
1. Nadia Comaneci becomes the first gymnast in Olympic history to score a perfect ten in any discipline. IT would be the first of six perfect tens, in a performance that will never be bettered.
