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· 20 Jul 2021

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The Perfect 10

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On July 18, 1976, Nadia Comaneci, 14, managed to make history in gymnastics by achieving a score of 10 in the Olympic Games. The scoreboard was not ready for a perfect 10, as it had only three digits it showed 1.00. She said it herself in an interview with the Olympic Channel documentary Legends Live On: “When I did the compulsory in parallel I thought I had done a very good exercise but not perfect. I didn't even look at the scoreboard. Then I heard a big rumble in the stadium, turned to the scoreboard and the first thing I saw was 73, which was my bib number, and then 1.00 below. I looked at my teammates and they made a gesture with my shoulders not to understand. It was all very fast. The fact that the score could not show the 10th made the situation more dramatic”.

The thing is that the problem was already coming, or at least the technicians of Omega, the company responsible for the official Olympic Games scoreboard, saw it coming. You had already seen how the young Romanian woman got the perfect 10 at the Copa America gymnastics held in March of that same year at Madison Square Garden in New York. When the IOC members, the International Olympic Committee were warned, they assured them that there was nothing to worry, that getting the perfect 10 at the Olympics was virtually impossible. Look: During the rest of the Montreal Games, Comaneci won another six tens.