Comaneci remains Olympic icon

Gymnast became legend with 10s in 1976 Games

Hearing the crowd roar, Nadia Comaneci gave a quick glance at the scoreboard and saw the 1.00. Thinking it reflected a deduction, she turned her attention back to the competition floor and her next event.

Little did the 14- year- old know her life had just changed. Forever.

By scoring the first perfect 10 in Olympic history, Comaneci became an icon, a cultural touchstone who transcended her sport, her country, even the Games themselves. Forty years later, the words “Nadia” or “Perfect 10” can mean only one person.

“I am surprised, because I didn’t know how much this would last,” Comaneci told USA TODAY Sports. “The ... I don’t want to say older, but the more experienced I get, I treasure and I honor what I’ve done much more. You know what I mean? It becomes much more important and I appreciate it because I understand from a different view what it takes to do that.”

It was 40 years ago last Monday that Comaneci scored her first 10, on the compulsory uneven bars. She’d duplicate the feat six more times in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.

She’ll return to Montreal on Thursday for a celebration to commemorate the anniversary of the Games. Though she has been back before and has visited the Olympic Stadium, Comaneci said this time will be different. Special. Personal.

“This is the time I’m going because they’re celebrating the Games,” said Comaneci, who has been asked to give a speech during the celebration. “I know it’s going to be emotional, but I don’t want to think about it because I don’t want to get nervous.”

Comaneci won five medals in Montreal, and her three golds included the coveted one for the allaround. But it’s the 10 that resonates.

“To be honest, we never thought it at the time. Later on, yes,” said Bela Karolyi, who coached Comaneci with his wife, Martha. “Before the Olympic Games, we never even thought about medals or gold. Competing well? Yes. Doing it very, very well? Yes. But to say she was going to be the perfect 10? No.”

The 10 meant perfection, that elusive ideal that everyone chases. To see Comaneci achieve it was momentous, because though everyone knows it doesn’t exist, that doesn’t stop us from striving for it, whether in competition, the classroom or daily life.

And here it was, right in front of us. Even if the scoreboard didn’t know what to do with it.

“If the scoreboard would have been OK to show the 10, would the impact have been the same? Even an electronic thing was not able to show that,” Comaneci said. “It probably made the story a little bigger.”

That the 10 is no longer attainable probably plays a role in Comaneci’s long- standing mystique, too. Gymnastics abandoned the 10- point scale in 2006 for an open- ended scoring system.

Many people don’t realize it, but Comaneci had scored 10s before. But it was one thing to do it in the European Championships or the American Cup and quite another in the Olympics, when the whole world is watching. She graced the covers of Time,

Newsweek and Sports Illustrated in the same week. The theme song for the soap opera The

Young and The Restless was renamed Nadia’s Theme because it was used as the background music for a montage of her performances. Thousands waited to greet her plane when she returned to Romania.

Yet Comaneci didn’t understand the fuss at the time.

“I did what I used to do every day in the gym. It’s not like overnight I’d done something to surprise myself,” she said. “It was a magic day, but it wasn’t a magic day because I did something I didn’t know I was going to do. I’d done those things in training.”

She gets it now and is humbled and touched that what she did still means something. It might be 40 years, but perfection never gets old.

PAUL VATHIS, AP Nadia Comaneci dismounts during one of her Olympic performances in 1976 that earned a 10.