Nadia Elena Comăneci Conner is a retired five-time Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast. In the 1976 summer games in Montreal, she was the first gymnast to get a perfect score of 10.0. She was 14 years old at the time. She graduated from Politehnica University of Bucharest. She is 62 years old (November 12, 1961) and was born in Onesti, Romania.
At the age of six, Comăneci was selected to attend the experimental gymnastics school of Béla Károlyi. She was one of his first students. She won the Romanian national competition at the age of nine.
Comăneci rose to worldwide fame in the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. She won three gold medals. She won the Uneven Bars and Balance Beam as well as the All-Around. The scoreboard malfunctioned when she got the first perfect 10 in history on the uneven bars. She had a total of seven perfect 10s in Montreal.
A song named Cotton’s Dream was part of a 1971 film soundtrack. ABC Wide World of Sports used it in a video tribute to Comăneci in 1976. She did not perform the floor exercise to the song. It hit number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1976 following the Olympics. It was renamed Nadia’s Theme by the original composers. It is well known in the United States as the long-time theme song from the CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless and continues to be used today.
The United States and others boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. But she was still a member of the Romanian team at that point. She won two more gold medals and won the silver in the All-Around in the former Soviet Union. Romania did participate in the 1984 Games in Los Angeles but she attended only as an observer and was closely monitored.
In the middle and late 80s, Comăneci was generally prohibited from leaving Romania for fear that she would defect. She did defect in November of 1989 crossing into Hungary, then to Austria, and finally to the United States. Communism largely failed throughout the next year in Eastern Europe. She returned to her home country in 1996 for her wedding and the new government welcomed her back.
Comăneci has one son with fellow gold medal-winning gymnast Bart Conner (pictured in 2020). They have been married for 27 years. She initially moved to Oklahoma to help him run a gymnastics school. They continue to run that school today. They live in Norman, Oklahoma, near Oklahoma City.
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