Gymnastics · 1976 · Montreal, Canada
The First Perfect 10
A 14-year-old Romanian gymnast earns a score the sport's own scoreboards had not been built to show.
7
Perfect 10s
3
Gold medals, 1976
14
Age
Nadia Comăneci's routine on the uneven bars at the 1976 Montreal Olympics was judged flawless, and the panel gave it a perfect 10.0, a score never awarded at an Olympics before. The scoreboard had been designed by people who treated a 10 as theoretically possible and practically irrelevant. It displayed 1.00.
She added six more perfect 10s before the Games were over and left Montreal with three gold medals, the youngest all-around Olympic gymnastics champion there had been to that point. She looked entirely unbothered by a scoring system that had just been shown the limits of its own imagination, and within a week she was famous everywhere.
Scoring and expectations in gymnastics were rebuilt around what she had done, and a generation grew up chasing it. The scoreboard reading 1.00 for a flawless routine is the detail that outlived the rest.
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