Gymnastics · 1984 · Los Angeles, USA
America's First All-Around Champion
Five weeks out of knee surgery, a 16-year-old from West Virginia needs a perfect 10 on her final event to win the Olympic all-around, and produces two.
10.0 (perfect)
Winning vault score
0.05 over Szabo
Margin of victory
16
Age
Mary Lou Retton went into the final rotation of the 1984 Los Angeles all-around final trailing Romania's Ecaterina Szabo by 0.15 with two events left, the uneven bars already behind her and the meet slipping away. She needed a 10.0 on the vault, gymnastics' rarest score, simply to force a tie. She produced it, and then closed with a second perfect 10 on the floor exercise.
The final margin was 0.05, one of the tightest all-around finishes in Olympic history, and it made Retton the first American, man or woman, to win the Olympic all-around gymnastics title, and the first gymnast from outside Eastern Europe to do it at all. She had undergone arthroscopic knee surgery five weeks before the Games.
The grin on the vault podium is one of the images the 1984 Los Angeles Games left behind. American women's gymnastics became a mainstream Olympic draw from roughly that fortnight onwards, and it has not stopped being one since.
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