Nadia Comaneci

Nadia Comăneci is a Romanian former gymnast who at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games — at age 14 — became the first gymnast in Olympic history to score a perfect 10.0. She was born Nadia Elena Comăneci on November 12, 1961, in Onești, Bacău County, Romania. She started gymnastics at age six under the coaching of Béla Károlyi at his Onești gymnastics school, where she trained alongside fellow future Olympic gymnasts Teodora Ungureanu and Marilena Neacșu.

Her Olympic breakthrough at the Montreal 1976 Games was unprecedented in gymnastics scoring history. The Olympic scoreboards in Montreal had not been programmed to display 10.0 because Olympic officials and the French electronic-scoreboard manufacturer Longines had assumed a perfect score was impossible — when Comăneci scored 10.0 on the uneven bars in the team competition on July 18, 1976, the scoreboard displayed "1.00" because it could only show three digits. She would go on to score six additional 10.0s during the Montreal Games, winning three gold medals (all-around, balance beam, uneven bars), one silver (team), and one bronze (floor exercise).

She returned to the 1980 Moscow Olympics — at age 18 and heavier and taller than her 1976 self — and won two additional gold medals (balance beam, floor exercise). Her career as a competitive gymnast continued through the early 1980s in Romania under increasingly difficult Cold War-era political conditions.

In November 1989, weeks before the December 1989 Romanian Revolution that overthrew Communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, Comăneci defected from Romania by walking across the Hungarian border at night with a small group of fellow defectors. She was granted asylum first in Vienna and then settled in the United States in 1990, where she has lived since. She married American Olympic gymnast Bart Conner in 1996 in a ceremony in Bucharest that was the first major public event held in post-Communist Romania to be broadcast internationally. She has continued to be a recurring American and Romanian gymnastics-cultural figure into her sixties.

Her name Nadia is from the Russian Nadya, the Slavic short form of Nadezhda, ultimately from the Old Slavic nadežda meaning "hope." Nadia has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for decades.