Nadia Comaneci, Historic Champion
Ahead of the opening ceremony in Paris, revisit the five-time Olympic gold medalist's interview from Mastermind 05.
At age 14, Nadia Comaneci made sporting history and cemented herself as a precociously daring athlete. But her bravery went beyond the gym walls, as she faced surveillance under Romania’s communist regime, before choosing to be free.
As a child, well before she became an Olympic champion, Comaneci did what many children do: She drove her mother, Stefania, crazy. So Stefania enrolled Nadia in a gymnastics club, with the hope her daughter would tire before bedtime. The life that Comaneci would come to lead – nine Olympic medals, the first perfect 10.0 score at an Olympic Games, routines that forever changed the sport of gymnastics – began then. From that gymnastics club, 10 minutes from her home in Onesti, Romania, Comaneci soon came to the attention of coaches, with her graceful movements and matter-of-fact personality. Nothing seemed to faze her, and that quality would prove to be essential in a challenging and, at times, dangerous life that followed.
I’ve been told your mom first enrolled you in gymnastics because you were a child full of energy.
NC Yes, but my mom didn’t enrol me with the idea that I was going to make a big deal out of that. It was just a happy coincidence. She was like, ‘I don’t know what to do with my daughter, she’s jumping around, destroying the furniture!’ I think a friend of hers in the same neighborhood said, ‘Sign her up for gymnastics, it’s like 10 minutes away and maybe she can consume some of her energy there.’ At that time, there were not that many sports for women. I was lucky that there was a gym, but it was not well equipped: There were some mats, there were some bars. It was a place where kids could roll and do some fun stuff.
How old were you when you started to think, ‘I’m pretty good at this?’
NC I didn’t. I was interested in how I could figure out and learn new stuff. I was like, ‘How do you do that? Can I learn this? Is it hard? What does it take?’ I was more interested in accomplishing things. I didn’t know anything about the Olympics. A year or two after I got into gymnastics – probably when I was nine – we started to do small gymnastics events, 20 minutes away, driving. And in my school, there was physical education and sports. At the time, they were offering gymnastics in schools twice a week.
How did you learn about the Olympics?
NC I learned about it when the Olympics was on TV in 1972. I believe if you had told me about it before then, I wouldn’t have quite understood what it meant. ‘What is the Olympics?’ It’s just a bigger competition with more people watching while more countries compete. But to me it was still the same, because I didn’t do different routines. If I prepare with the same routines for competition, then it doesn’t matter where I compete with them. I’m not sure how and from where I got that attitude. Maybe my child intuition.
In sport, it’s often good to be a bit ignorant rather than all-knowing, or having your parents pressure you.
NC Yes, and it’s also easier when you’re a kid. Before I went to the Olympics there was the entire Romanian team at the airport. I was 14 years old, and they asked me, ‘What do you think you’re going to do in the Olympics?’ And I would say, ‘I don’t know, I hope to win a medal. It’s a possible goal.’ So that was my attitude. I didn’t know if I was good, medium, very good – there was no information on that. People around me were saying, ‘That girl is good.’ But I overheard that and I didn’t know if they were saying that because, well, sometimes you tell people, ‘Oh, this is so great, you’re playing great!’ And it’s not quite the truth.
You got the first ever 10.0 – the highest possible score – in Olympic gymnastics. Did you even know there was such a thing?
NC No. I didn’t know anything about that. Remember, these were different times. There was not too much gaga about me because nobody knew about me. The gymnastics world knew about me, and the European world knew about me because I won the European Championships in 1975, when I was 13. But the world didn’t know about me. So when I came in the market in 1976, they were like, ‘Shhhhhhh! Did you see what she was doing?’ I was doing some moves that people hadn’t seen before. I was minding my business: This is what I know, this is what I’m going to do. My only thought was, ‘I hope I don’t mess it up.’
Can you describe a move that nobody had ever seen before?
NC I did the Comaneci salto, a type of somersault on the bars. Even now it’s called the Comaneci salto because I did it first, and it’s still a very difficult move after so many years. Not too many people do it because you can mess it up. It’s too risky.
Others soon followed your perfect score.
NC There was one other gymnast from Russia, Nellie Kim, who I still see a lot. I got the first 10, and she scored 10 a few hours after me, or the next day. And nobody talks about it. I said to Nellie, ‘I want to let you know that I always appreciated you getting a 10, because people remember who goes first to the moon but do they ever talk about the second person who went to the moon?’ For some reason, winning a silver medal seems like you have done something wrong: ‘Did you slip or something?’
You were much younger than previous champions. Did anyone tell you that you had a special body, with more flexibility?
NC No, because I was not flexible at all. I had to work on my flexibility. I think I was just – how am I going to describe myself? I was a kind of person that wouldn’t let go. If I want to do this, I’m not leaving until I’m doing it. I don’t give up very easily. It’s maybe something that comes from my family. I had amazing determination. If I put in my mind that I’m doing five out of five, then I’m not leaving until I do five out of five, not four out of five. It’s not enough. This is how I got ahead a little bit every day.
What was your childhood like outside of gymnastics?
NC Gymnastics was a little bit of entertainment for me and it expended my energy, but I had to be sure that I had good grades in school. You learn a lot of things from being on a team: Commitment, responsibility, being on time, to rest and to wake up and do your homework. Plus, I was a kid in a communist country. When I was 8, 9 years old, I was traveling to places that no kid my age would ever travel. Because of my gymnastics I was all over the world when I was 12. I could speak a little French, I could speak some English. So I was the coolest kid in the neighborhood. I would come home from competition for a week with bubble gum or cups, or other socks – things that you don’t find in your own country.
What were your coaches, Bela and Marta Karolyi, like?
NC Bela was teaching handball at some point, and then he decided to go to gymnastics. Marta had more knowledge at the beginning, and then Bela was a good spotter, a big guy who could stay under you when you did difficult moves. You felt safe. You needed somebody to be right there in case something went wrong, to catch you. He was also a great motivator. ‘Oh, come on, you can do it. You can do more than 10. I bet you can do that.’ If they were telling me to do 10, I did 11. I wanted to do extra.
You were 14 when you met your husband, Bart Conner.
NC I met him at an American competition. It was in March 1976, a few months before the Olympics.
Did you have a crush on him then?
NC No! I was 14, I was not interested in guys at all. We didn’t even come to watch the men’s competition. Later, in 1981, there was a gymnastics tour, and the Romanian team came and we did, like, 11 cities. With gymnasts from different countries, you just become bonded friends. We kind of connected. Right after I left Romania, I moved to Canada, and lived there for a year with a dear friend and his family. That friend died in a scuba diving accident. I reached out to Bart then, and I moved to Oklahoma.
When the Karolyi family defected to the U.S. in 1981, after a tour, your life changed terribly.
NC After that I was not allowed to travel anywhere. No passport, no travel, no anything. I had a job coaching, and I was traveling locally. Then I realized I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to be able to travel, I wanted to be able to experience new things. I needed to figure out something else, and eventually, in 1989, I left.
Did you encounter danger while leaving? Some people died while trying to defect.
NC I knew there was danger, but I thought I had to go, because I couldn’t advance. You can live there and try to make the best of what you have, which I had done, but there comes a time when you want to do more than that. I didn’t like that they were putting limitations on me. I thought, ‘This is never going to end, and I’m never going to get out.’ I didn’t think it was fair, just because Bela left, that I wasn’t allowed to do anything. I would have never left because I care for my family, but it was difficult to understand, ‘Why me?’
Many have said you tried to commit suicide at one point.
NC No, no. My teammates, we were washing our leotards. We put bleach in a little plastic glass and then in the middle of the night I picked up a glass and it was the wrong one. There was a little bit of detergent in there and I drank it. That’s not paying attention. It tasted terrible, but we went to the doctor to make sure nothing was happening. But it’s a story with no story, basically.
What was it like when you returned from the 1976 Olympics?
NC When I went back and saw 1,000 people at the airport, I didn’t understand why, because I had done this for the last seven, eight years. I didn’t realize what I had done, because I was just a kid. And two days after the celebration, I went back to the gym. Because this was not over for me, I was only 14. There’s no Disneyland.
You have a son, Dylan. Is he into gymnastics?
NC He’s into everything. Absolutely everything. He’s been in a gym since he was one or two years old, so he has this gymnastics base, which is the best base for any sport. Now he is doing ice hockey, he’s doing soccer, he’s doing cross-country. He did gymnastics a little bit until he figured out that we did that, and then he wanted to do something else. He’s 12. He does flips on a skateboard. Everything like that he does, I have to turn my head away. I’m like, ‘No! Please don’t do it!’
Did your parents treat you in a similar manner when you were young?
NC Yes. That’s exactly how I was. When I was his age or younger, I was climbing the tallest tree, the highest I could, and everybody would say, ‘Please don’t go there!’ And I was going for it. They would say, ‘Come down, you’re going to fall!’ Nope, I’m not going to fall. That’s what I used to say. It’s different now because as a parent, you know what kids put their parents through.
This feature was originally published in Mastermind 05 – buy all issues here.