Nadia Elena Comăneci Conner (November 12, 1961), known professionally as Nadia Comăneci, is a Romanian retired gymnast and a five-time Olympic gold medalist, all in individual events.
In 1976 at the age of 14, Comăneci was the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of 10.0 at the Olympic Games.
At the same games (1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal), she received six more perfect 10s for events en route to winning three gold medals.
At the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, Comăneci won two more gold medals and attained two more perfect 10s. During her career, Comăneci won nine Olympic medals and four World Artistic Gymnastics Championship medals.
Comăneci is one of the world's best-known gymnasts and is credited with popularizing the sport around the globe.
In 2000, she was named as one of the Athletes of the 20th Century by the Laureus World Sports Academy. She has lived in the United States since 1989, when she defected from then-Communist Romania before its revolution in December that year. She later worked with and married American Olympic gold medal gymnast Bart Conner, who set up his own school.
In 2001, she became a naturalized United States citizen, and has dual citizenship, also maintaining her Romanian citizenship.
More information: Bart and Nadia
Nadia Elena Comăneci was born on November 12, 1961, in Onești, a small town in the Carpathian Mountains, in Bacău County, Romania, in the historical region of Western Moldavia. She was born to Gheorghe (1936-2012) and Ștefania Comăneci, and has a younger brother. Her parents separated in the 1970s, and her father later moved to Bucharest, the capital. She and her younger brother Adrian were raised in the Romanian Orthodox Church.
In a 2011 interview, Nadia's mother Ștefania said that she enrolled her daughter into gymnastics classes because she was a child who was so full of energy and active that she was difficult to manage.
After years of top-level athletic competition, Comăneci graduated from Politehnica University of Bucharest with a degree in sports education, which gave her the qualifications to coach gymnastics.
Comăneci began gymnastics in kindergarten with a local team called Flacăra, with coaches Duncan and Munteanu. At age 6, she was chosen to attend Béla Károlyi's experimental gymnastics school after Károlyi spotted her and a friend turning cartwheels in a school yard. Károlyi was looking for gymnasts he could train from a young age.
In 1970, Comăneci began competing as a member of her hometown team and, at age nine, became the youngest gymnast ever to win the Romanian Nationals.
In 1971, she participated in her first international competition, a dual junior meet between Romania and Yugoslavia, winning her first all-around title, and contributing to the team gold. For the next few years, she competed as a junior in numerous national contests in Romania and dual meets with countries such as Hungary, Italy, and Poland.
Comăneci's first major international success came at the age of 13, when she nearly swept the 1975 European Women's Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Skien, Norway. She won the all-around and gold medals in every event but the floor exercise, in which she placed second. She continued to enjoy success that year, winning the all-around at the Champions All competition, and placing first in the all-around, vault, beam, and bars at the Romanian National Championships.
On July 18, 1976, Comăneci made history at the Montreal Olympics. During the team compulsory portion of the competition, she was awarded the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics for her routine on the uneven bars.
More information: Worldation
Omega SA, the official Olympics' scoreboard manufacturer, had been led to believe that competitors could not receive a perfect ten, and had not programmed the scoreboard to display this score. Comăneci's perfect 10 thus appeared as 1.00, the only means by which the judges could indicate that she had received a 10.
During the remainder of the Montreal Games, Comăneci earned six additional 10s. She won gold medals for the individual all-around, the balance beam and uneven bars. She also won a bronze for the floor exercise and a silver as part of the team all-around. Soviet gymnast Nellie Kim was her main rival during the Montreal Olympics; Kim became the second gymnast to receive a perfect ten, in her case for her performance on the vault. Comăneci took over the media spotlight from gymnast Olga Korbut, who had been the darling of the 1972 Munich Games.
Comăneci was the first Romanian gymnast to win the Olympic all-around title. She also holds the record as the youngest ever Olympic gymnastics all-around champion. The sport has revised its age-eligibility requirements. Gymnasts must be at least 16 in the same calendar year of the Olympics in order to compete during the Games. When Comăneci competed in 1976, gymnasts had only to be 14 by the first day of the competition. As a result of changes to age eligibility, Comăneci's record cannot be broken.
Comăneci was chosen to participate in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. As a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter declared that the United States would boycott the Olympics, several other countries also participated in the boycott, though their reasons varied. According to Comăneci, the Romanian government touted the 1980 Olympic Games as the first all-Communist Games.
The government did allow Comăneci to participate in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles as part of the Romanian delegation. Although a number of Communist nations boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics in a tit-for-tat against the U.S.-led boycott of the Olympics in Moscow four years before, Romania chose to participate.
The Romanian government continued to restrict Comăneci from leaving Romania, aside from a few select trips to Moscow and Cuba. She had started thinking about retiring a few years earlier, but her official retirement ceremony took place in Bucharest in 1984.
Comăneci moved to Oklahoma in 1991 to help her friend Bart Conner, another Olympic gold medallist, with his gymnastics school. She lived with the family of Paul Ziert and eventually hired him as her manager. Comăneci and Conner initially were just friends. They were together for four years before they became engaged.
She returned to Romania for their 1996 wedding, which was held in Bucharest. This was after the fall of the Communist regime and the establishment of a democratic Romania; the government welcomed her as a national hero. The wedding was televised live throughout Romania, and the couple's reception was held in the former presidential palace.
Comăneci became a naturalized US citizen in 2001, while retaining her Romanian citizenship.
More information: Twitter-Nadia Comaneci
I thought that belonged to the sport,
and somehow we gave it way.
Nadia Comaneci
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