Olympic milestones: Nadia’s perfect ten

Nadia Comaneci Montreal 1976 Gymnastics
Nadia Comaneci Gymnast
Steve Redgrave14 May 2012

The only thing Nadia Comaneci and I have in common is that we were both 14 in 1976. In her case, she was at the Montreal Olympics scoring the first-ever perfect 10 in gymnastics. I was at home, climbing into a rowing boat for the first time with a bunch of my schoolmates. My first Olympics was eight years away. Nadia’s career would be over by then.

This picture is amazing, proof of how flexible and controlled the body can be through endless, rigorous training.

I suffered, like most rowers, the miserable, cold grind of it all on winter mornings. But at least I was there because I wanted to be. In Nadia’s case, being such a young girl from a totalitarian country that brooked no rebellion, the toll was far greater. She seldom smiled, they say she never cried, and at 15 she allegedly tried to commit suicide by drinking bleach, though she subsequently claimed it was shampoo and a “cry for help”.

She was the youngest Romanian to be awarded The Gold Medal of the Hero of Socialist Labour by then-president and communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Her whole career appears to have involved the repression of her freedom.

She actually attended the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics but only as a spectator, under the scrutiny of her guardians. I certainly didn’t come across her there, competing at my first Olympics. To be fair, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

In my view, gymnastics is a different type of sport. It doesn’t come under the heading of Citius, Altrius, Fortius (faster, higher, stronger). I have a problem with any sport that’s judged. I don’t see how human judgment, with all the politics and prejudice involved, can produce universally acknowledged champions. I accept that Comaneci was a brilliant performer. You can see that with the naked eye. But there are too many fine lines and suspected instances of bias to be sure of the results in general.

If we are going to get into this discussion, and I appreciate it’s controversial, I also have a problem with sports that allow weight categories. Lightweight rowing?

My argument against that is you don’t have four-foot-tall basketball players. Olympic sport should surely be about the best. So in a sport such as boxing, there should be only one weight. By my reckoning, the winner should be the last man or woman standing.

At least Nadia’s story has a happy ending. The name remains synonymous in Olympic history with perfection. Few athletes can lay claim to being perfect at their sport and I am certainly not one of them. I can only say there were moments when I felt I came close. It felt easy, like “poetry in motion” — or a dream.

It would be interesting to know whether Comaneci felt the same when she was achieving her perfect 10s at Montreal. Her subsequent history would suggest that, if so, it was not enough to trade for such a disciplined childhood. In the winter of 1989, she defected from Romania across the Hungarian border, wading through mud and ice to begin a new life in America.

Great Olympic Moments by Steve Redgrave is published by Headline, £20.

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