Gymnastics’ top score from Nadia to Simone

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Dvora Meyers’ “The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics’ Top Score — From Nadia to Now” begins, appropriately, with the carefully set scene onto which 14-year-old Romanian wunderkind Nadia Comaneci exploded in 1976.

Every move is described in precise, technical detail before climaxing, not on the dismount, as gymnastic routines tend to do, but on Comaneci’s score: a 10.0. Competing in a sport that had never before seen a gymnast combine artistry and technical proficiency as Comaneci did, the diminutive Romanian had scored the first perfect 10 in the Olympics.

Ms. Meyers returns to Nadia several times throughout her book, which explores the evolution of “Perfect 10” as the defining concept of its sport and neatly traces the history of gymnastics from the acrobatic-less dancing of the 1930s to the modern sport on display in Rio earlier this month.

A former gymnast herself, Dvora Meyers leverages her access to former elite gymnasts, coaches and officials to craft a detailed and thorough account of how and why gymnastics changed when it did. She takes her readers through every iteration of the scoring system, highlighting the competitors who were benefited or harmed by each adjustment, and presents the current method as a work-in-progress that has emerged from 40 years of tinkering.

As gymnasts began to throw harder and harder tricks in the 1980s, judges struggled to differentiate the challenging routines that pushed the boundaries of the sport from the simpler routines that were done more cleanly. Thanks to an increasing emphasis on difficulty, the lithe dancers that allowed the Soviet Union to dominate the sport gave rise to the stockier, more powerful gymnasts that have graced Wheaties boxes for the past 30 years. Gradually, athleticism took its place alongside artistry.

After opening with Comaneci, Ms. Meyers ends on Simone Biles. Biles, who competes tumbling passes that some male gymnasts cannot do, has won the past three All-Around titles at World Gymnastics Championships and won four Olympic gold medals at Rio.

“Comaneci had come to symbolize the Perfect 10, so her rivals were chasing the athlete, a score, and the idea that the score represented,” Ms. Meyers writes. “Without a symbolically meaningful score, it’s just Biles herself that everyone is chasing.”

Comaneci and Biles are, in many ways, perfect representatives of the sport Ms. Meyers so lovingly chronicles. Seething beneath