Gymnastics · 1984 · Los Angeles, USA
America's First All-Around Champion
A 16-year-old from West Virginia, five weeks removed from knee surgery, needs perfect 10s on her final two events to win gold, and delivers both.
10.0 (perfect)
Winning vault score
0.05 over Szabo
Margin of victory
16
Age
Mary Lou Retton went into the final rotation of the 1984 Los Angeles all-around final trailing Romania's Ecaterina Szabo by 0.15 with two events left to compete, the uneven bars already behind her and the meet slipping away. She needed a 10.0 on the vault, gymnastics' rarest score, just to force a tie, and produced it. She then closed with a second perfect 10 on the floor exercise for good measure.
The final margin was 0.05, one of the tightest all-around finishes in Olympic history, but it was enough to make Retton the first American, man or woman, to win the Olympic all-around gymnastics title, and the first gymnast from outside Eastern Europe to do it at all. She had undergone arthroscopic knee surgery only five weeks before the Games.
Retton's grin and gymnastics on the vault podium became one of the enduring images of the 1984 Los Angeles Games and helped launch American women's gymnastics as a mainstream Olympic draw, a popularity the sport in the US has never really lost since.
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