On Friday I met perfection. Her name is Nadia. Nadia Comaneci, who else?
Perhaps the only human being on the planet whose name is instantly and
always associated with perfection. She has been celebrated for perfection
over the past 33 years, yet seems to bear the burden lightly.
“Perfection? I don’t know if it exists,” she said. Look in the scorebook,
then, Nadia. For it was in the gymnastics hall of the Montreal Olympic Games
in 1976 that she scored seven marks of ten out of ten. Seven times, a bunch
of hard-boiled, acute, highly trained, hypercritical judges decided that
Comaneci was unimprovable.
She had done what no one else had done: she had taken her sport to its logical
limit, the point at which no improvement is possible. “Ten, ten, always the
ten,” she said. “It seems to matter more than the medals. I knew at the time
that it was big, but no idea that it was so big.”
But it wasn’t perfect. Comaneci is quite clear on that point. On that famous,
unforgettable — check it out on YouTube — beam routine, there were flaws. “I
remember that sometimes I was a bit off,” she said. “I felt it during the
routine. I told myself, ‘No, I can’t make a mistake, because this is the
Olympic Games.’ It was a mistake, but only I knew it. It didn’t show, you
can look at the routine now, you can see it doesn’t show.”
It was, perhaps, the ability to sense a potential error — and, better, the
ability to pre-empt it — that was a crucial part of those extraordinary few
days of sport. And so, again and again, the mark came up: the perfect ten.
Actually, that’s not what the scoreboard said. The scoreboards were not
ready for perfection, so they awarded her a perfect 1.0 instead. “It was not
perfect, I had done it better in training,” she said. “But I think I was
better than everybody, and they had just given the girl before 9.95, so what
could they do? At the time, I was so naive, I thought maybe the judges just
wanted me to feel better.”
She was, after all, 14 at the time. A child. She would not be allowed to
compete now, a matter she has strong feelings about. But as a child, as a
competitor, she had the gift of an otherworldly calm: competition was never
a torment, always a personal choice. She was only 14, but a remarkable
14-year-old, not just in her skill in performing a series of difficult
tricks, but in her ability to find calm and self-certainty in what is
supposed to be the greatest test of nerve that sport can offer.
Talking about this glorious past is easy for her. She has a near-photographic
recall of everything that happened, the people she met. She has a vivid
physical memory of every routine and talks as if it happened yesterday.
She has lived a lot since then, but she is neither in denial about her days of
greatness nor obsessively returning to them. Perhaps that is the greatest
achievement: to have achieved everything that is personally possible and,
with it, everything that is possible for anyone in your chosen form of
excellence, to have done so as a child — and then to live an adult’s life
without bitterness or nostalgia. She seems to have found balance, but
balance was always her strong point.
And she is wonderful fun to be with. We met at the O2 arena in southeast
London, where the World Gymnastics Championships are taking place, and she
is here in her role of being Nadia. How refreshing it was to interview
someone who answers the questions rather than examines them for traps, who
speaks her mind. She is 47, if you wish to be ungallant, and looks gorgeous
even straight off the plane from Chicago. And she still performs. She raised
her game for the interview; so sparkling, it was as if we were sharing a
glass or two of champagne.
She won three gold medals in Montreal and then took a couple of months off.
She decided she wanted to continue and won two more golds, at the Moscow
Games four years later. Everything was her decision. She is insistent on
that. She wanted to be the best and she was ready to do the work it took to
get there.
Her coach, Bela Karolyi, who later defected to coach the United States team,
used to give her a series of repetitions. “If he said ten, always I would do
12, 14,” Comaneci said. “It is my nature. Always. When I was 5, I was in a
tricycle competition. I wanted to win very much, and I won.”
She never found Karolyi oppressive or bullying. She always wanted to do well —
strive for perfection — and drove herself harder than her coach did. “To
achieve such a result, the only recipe is work, work, work,” Comaneci said.
“I look for easier ways, but there aren’t any. I learnt this from my father.
He worked as a motor mechanic. He had no car, so every day, he walked 1½
hours to work, every evening he walked home.”
After she retired as a gymnast, she lived in Romania. She was a national
asset, but on a small salary, and not allowed to leave the country. She has
always denied claims that she was raped by Nicu Ceausescu, the son of
Romania’s former dictator. Eventually she defected and went through some
hard times. Always, she plays them down. “It is the same for everybody, you
didn’t know what to say,” she said.
She is now married, coaches gymnastics and does charity work. She has teamed
up with a priest from Bucharest and recently they opened in Romania the
Nadia Comaneci Hospital for Children. “It is a project we worked on for 4½
years and I am very, very happy about it,” she said.
Comaneci goes back to Romania half-a-dozen times a year, but lives in the
United States with her husband and her son, Dylan, who is 3½.
She has survived perfection, survived the trauma of precocious achievement,
has lived through the fact that at the age of 14, you have already done the
greatest thing you will ever do. Strange, this person who performed with
such classical, such icy, formal perfection, is full of laughter and eager
to engage with the world.
Lord, she was good. That day in Montreal, when she performed her beam routine
as if she was on the floor, knowing that it was unthinkable to make a
mistake because this was the Olympic Games. She was perfect then. Now she is
merely fabulous, but that’s a pretty good result, too.
• Tickets for the World Gymnastics are available at
worldgymnsatics2009.com/tickets
Golden girl
• Born November 12, 1961, in Romania
• Took up gymnastics in nursery school and came thirteenth in Romanian
National Championships when she was 7. Was national champion a year later.
• In 1975, aged 13, won the all-around title at the European Championships
and gold medals in every event bar the floor, in which she took silver.
• A year later, she competed at the Montreal Olympics, where she received
seven scores of 10.0, a perfect result. Won gold on the uneven bars, beam
and all-around, with a silver in the team event and bronze on the floor.
• Had blood poisoning during 1979 World Championships but left hospital to
score 9.95 on the beam and help Romania to win their first team gold.
• Won gold on beam and floor at 1980 Moscow Olympics and retired the next
year. Became an American citizen in 2001 and had her first child in 2006.
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