A tiny 14-year-old girl who arrived in Montreal behind the Romanian "iron curtain" finished her performance on the double-height loom - everyone who followed her was amazed, especially the judges, and the scoreboard showed a score of 1.00.
Those were the times when a clean ten in gymnastics was considered unattainable, and anything over a total score of nine was perfection...
On July 18, 1976, at the Olympic Games, Nadja Komaneči changed everything - she convinced the judges that she was the girl for the perfect ten, she reset the scoreboard, since its system did not recognize the score of ten, so it somehow showed a historic 1.00.
"I never looked at the scoreboard, because I roughly knew whether I did a good or bad exercise. However, then I saw that it was 1.00 and in a moment I really thought that I was bad, I almost cried... I was a girl, I looked to the coach, and he just told me - it's a ten," Komaneči said later.
In the same year, she was declared the best athlete in the world, and in her homeland she received the greatest honors - even directly from the hands of the president and dictator Nikolae Ceauceski.
However, she often disagreed with the people in power, so a few weeks before the Romanian Revolution in 1989 and the fall of the regime, she fled to the United States.
Today, Nadja is 61 years old and still lives in the USA, and her Romania has always opened its doors wide for her for a long time... After the career of some new girl, she taught the secrets of gymnastics, and the "perfect ten", her art and grace even 48 years later leave you breathless. .
Bonus video:
