Gymnastics · 1976 · Montreal, Canada
The First Perfect 10
A 14-year-old Romanian gymnast scores a mark the sport's own scoreboards were not built to display.
7
Perfect 10s
3
Gold medals, 1976
14
Age
On the uneven bars at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, Nadia Comăneci produced a routine judged flawless enough to earn a perfect 10.0, a score gymnastics had never actually awarded at an Olympics before. The scoreboard, built on the assumption that a 10 was theoretically possible but practically unnecessary, could only display 1.00.
She went on to score six more perfect 10s at those Games and win three gold medals, becoming the youngest all-around Olympic gymnastics champion in history at the time. Her poise under a scoring system that had just been proven wrong about its own limits made her an instant global star.
The moment reshaped gymnastics scoring and expectations for a generation, and the image of the scoreboard reading '1.00' for a perfect routine remains one of the most quoted quirks in Olympic history.
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