Nadia Comaneci changed gymnastics. Nearly 50 years later, she says, "I look at that 14-year-old like it's not me"
As part of our series highlighting women who have transformed sports, we spoke exclusively with the five-time Olympic champion about her role in revolutionising gymnastics and the impact of another change-maker, Simone Biles.
Artistic Gymnastics
Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s first of seven perfect 10.0 scores at the 1976 Olympic Games came as a surprise to everyone – including the then 14-year-old herself.
“I was asked, ‘What do you think you’re going to do at the Olympics?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I hope to win a medal and, hopefully, it’s gold,” Comaneci recalled in an exclusive interview with Olympics.com. “There was no expectation. I knew I was good at what I was doing, but I didn’t know how good I was compared to others.”
Until the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, the opening round of artistic gymnastics competition at the Games featured compulsory routines where each competitor performed the same routines.
Comaneci was so far superior that it wasn’t some inventive element – though she had those later in the competition – that set her apart from the field, it was the way in which she performed each of the prescribed elements.
“Everybody had to do the same routine by the book,” explains Comaneci. “What does it mean to be better because everybody will do the same thing. Like, what can I add to that? I call it the Nadia touch. I added amplitude to every skill, so it looks like in the book, but I just added a little something. It was my personal touch.
“I didn’t even think about the score,” she said later. “I was more into not making a mistake because the Olympics are every four years, just trying to concentrate on what I have to deliver in that minute and 20 seconds. That was the only thing that was in my head.”
Nadia Comaneci: “Mistakes give you creativity”
The impact of Comaneci’s perfect marks had the very practical change of mandating scoreboards capable of displaying 10.00.
The ones used in Montreal, quite famously now, could only display three digits, forcing Comaneci’s historic scores to be shown as simply 1.00.
But beyond the technologic, Comaneci’s arrival changed the sport.
The lithe Romanian surely had her ‘Nadia touch’ that set her apart, but she also had elements no other gymnast could achieve, including the Comaneci salto – a kip to straddled front salto re-grab on the uneven bars.
It’s an element so difficult that it still bears an ‘E’ rating in the sports’ Code of Points.
It’s also something that came about accidentally, Comaneci says.
“By mistake,” she says of how she came up with the skill. “You’re making mistakes, you invent something.”
The five-time Olympic champion says that one time while she was attempting a straddled flip from the low bar to the high bar, she hit her heels and caught the lower bar by mistake.
“My coach said, ‘That’s very interesting. Do you think you can do that on the high bar and move it up?’” Comaneci recalls. “I’m like, ‘No, because I’m going to hit my heels.’ So, we wrapped my heals with foam, because I was hitting them all the time until I figured out what’s the good technique to avoid hitting my heels all the time.
“Mistakes give you a creativity and makes you go somewhere that… ‘Oh, that’s something that body has done before. Let’s try it,’” she concluded.
Comaneci’s groundbreaking acrobatics and style pushed the sport to new heights.
“I wasn’t quite aware in Montreal because once gymnastics was over, we didn’t stay through the end of the Olympics,” she says. “So, it didn’t sink in with me until we got home.
“Even now, I’m looking back – it’s almost a half century ago – and I’m thinking that the 14-year-old [version of me], the courage, the craziness and determination, I look at that 14-year-old like it’s not me.”
Nadia Comaneci on Simone Biles: “She’s the gymnast/athlete of this generation”
Few athletes have had the kind of impact on their sport as Comaneci, but the gymnastics legend seems another today: Simone Biles.
“She’s the gymnast, slash athlete, of this generation,” Comaneci said of Biles.
Like Comaneci, the American’s innovative skills of which she has five named in her honour along with her clean execution (Biles often has both the highest difficult and execution scores) have revolutionised the sport.
“She’s the one to show the power of women and the power of, ‘This is me. This is who I am and nobody’s going to stop me. I want to open doors, I want to show what I can do,’” Comaneci says. “I think it’s great for the sport because she motivated and encourages little girls to play sports.”
And while Biles – and Comaneci – made their once unthinkable accomplishments look easy, the Romanian legend says they are hard earned and with lessons anyone can learn from.
“You learn from challenges,” Comaneci told us. “Everybody celebrates success, but success doesn’t come overnight in sports. When you see somebody achieving something amazing,… then you look at their life and you realise that they started this at nine years old.
“It just didn’t, poof! Happen, you know?”
But in their own ways – Comaneci with a flash of a 1.00 on a Montreal scoreboard and Biles with any one of her gravity defying breakthroughs – each changed the sport in what feels like a split second.