Nadia Comaneci was just 14 when she became the breakout star of the 1976 Montreal Olympics. A 4’11” petite powerhouse, the Romanian gymnast scored a historic perfect 10 on the uneven bars at the Games.
The scoreboard was famously unable to display Comaneci’s achievement, as it accommodated only a single digit and two fractionals at the time. She later got a tattoo on her leg of the 1.00 that erroneously flashed up onscreen that day.
This week, at 64, Comaneci returns to Montreal for the 50th anniversary celebrations of the city’s big moment in the athletic global spotlight.
The impact of her performance there was felt well beyond her sport, into the worlds of celebrity and international politics. But Comaneci wasn’t aware of the excitement she was creating at the time. “I was competing, minding my routines, hoping I’m doing a good job and not to mess up,” Comaneci told the Star by phone, just before leaving home for her flight to Montreal. “I had no idea about anything going on outside.”
One of the main things she does remember is everything being free at the Olympic Village, the bounty on offer. “That was not something we had ever experienced.”
It wasn’t until she and her teammates got back to Bucharest, where 10,000 people met them at the airport, holding flowers and lining the roads along the way to her hometown of Onesti three hours away, that she realized the magnitude of what she had accomplished. “We were asked to put on our medals to step out of the plane,” she said. It was an overwhelming experience. “When I first saw so many people, I turned around.”
Still, it was not immediately life-changing for Comaneci. After the Games, she went back to life behind the Iron Curtain.
Communist block athletes were segregated and monitored by their home country secret police. In a Romania controlled by despot Nicolae Ceausescu, Comaneci endured years of state-enforced surveillance and was banned from international travel. She defected just before the revolution of 1989; hers is a harrowing saga of creeping across borders in the dead of night. She returned to Montreal, where she spent nearly two years in the early ’90s living among the Romanian expat community, becoming fluent in both English and French. “In the triangle of my history, there is Romania, Canada and gymnastics,” she said.
Now, she lives in Oklahoma, where she runs a company, Perfect 10 Productions, focused on gymnastics-related content, and co-owns a gymnastics academy with her husband, American gymnast Bart Conner, a gold medallist himself. The pair were married in 1996 in Bucharest, in a Romanian Orthodox ceremony broadcast across the finally-free country, with a reception hosted by the then-president. They share a 20-year-old son, Dylan.
When Comaneci returns to Montreal this week, there will be all kinds of celebrations. “Ceremonies, plaques, a doctorate from the Université de Montréal,” she said excitedly. One planned event particularly tickles her: “I am meeting 50 Nadias named for me! Hundreds signed up, but they had to cut the line at 50! Imagine!”
It’s not at all hard to imagine. In 1976, the whole world was watching her, rapt. I was a Toronto grade schooler with a dodgy aerial TV, glued to the Wide World of Sports’ slo-mo compilations of her routines set to a song called Nadia’s Theme that forever became associated with her. (It’s also the Y & R theme song.) She was such a childhood inspiration that tears came to my eyes more than once while she told me her story.
Comaneci made it feel possible for women to take centre stage; other than a handful of emerging tennis and figure skating heroines, 1970s sports stars were male. “There was no equality between women and men,” she said. But she wasn’t aware of the difference she’d made for a long time. “I didn’t realize what my teammates and I did until I got the States many years later and began talking to people.”
One young fan inspired by her achievements was Celine Dion. “I had a chance to meet her,” said Comaneci, who spent time with the singer at her Vegas show, and later met Dion’s mom at a TV show taping. “[Celine] told me she thought at the time, ‘If this little girl worked so hard, then I know I can be amazing.’
Comaneci went on to score nine perfect 10s over two Olympiads, and take home nine Olympic medals in her career. But what made her stand out was not just the perfection of her performances. It was the alchemy of her mental toughness, technical skill and artistry, amped up by a certain confidence and flair.
Back in the day, all gymnasts had to complete a compulsory program of specific, fixed routines. “The first time, I realized I can’t change anything,” she said. “There are eight skills. I thought, ‘What can I do to make mine be better than others? How can I make my impact?’” Her instinct was to go a little bit bigger with the required moves. “I call it the Nadia touch.”
Gymnastics today is very different. The compulsory routines are gone. The perfect 10 was abolished in 2006 by the International Gymnastics Federation. Scoring has become more difficult to follow as points are deducted for the tiniest wobbles and the numbers for difficulty and execution are aggregated in a rather opaque way. “It has become very complicated for regular fans of gymnastics,” Comaneci said diplomatically. Some things are much improved: “the equipment is so much better,” she said. “The mats in my day were so hard I would feel it in my brain.”
She was “discovered” at age 6 by her former coach, Bela Karolyi, who became a polarizing figure for his strict methods of dieting and corporal discipline. (Another point of controversy: Convicted sex offender Larry Nassar regularly worked at Karolyi Ranch training facility in Texas, in his capacity as a doctor for Team USA.) After Karolyi died in 2024, both Comaneci and another star gymnast, Mary Lou Retton, spoke about his positive impact on their careers.
Comaneci has channelled her energy into supporting athletes in North America and Romania, offering advice and perspective in her 2003 book “Letters to a Young Gymnast” and serving as vice-chairperson of the board of directors of Special Olympics International, among other roles.
At the end of our conversation, Comaneci, ever the mentor, called me back to make sure to voice her congratulations to Canadian gymnast Ellie Black on her historic second all-around title at the Commonwealth Games this week. The Montreal anniversary celebrations may honour Comaneci’s firsts, but 50 years later, she remains a vital part of the ever-evolving athletic community.
