Nadia Comaneci: Trials and Triumphs of the Perfect 10 Gymnast

Nadia Comaneci was born in 1961 in Onesti, Romania, a factory town. At 14 years old, she became a worldwide name when she won scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics history at the 1976 Montreal Summer Games. She won a total of 5 medals at those games (3 gold, 1 silver, and 1 bronze) and scored 7 perfect scores of 10 in all.

After those Olympics she came home to Romania a national hero. She continued to participate in the sport of gymnastics, but had more to face than just the competition on the floor. She also had to face a highly political interest in her sport achievements by the leader of Romania, who had fired Nadia's coach and pulled Nadia and the rest of the Romanian team out of the 1977 European Championships due to his disagreement over one of Nadia's scores on vault. These highly politicized moves convinced her coach, Bela Karolyi, to defect to the U.S. After his defection, Nadia was put under surveillance due to fears that she would also leave the country. She was no longer allowed to travel to the West after the 1984 Olympics. She had become a prisoner in her country.

Finally she couldn't take it anymore and defected to the U.S. in December of 1989, risking her life and walking to the Hungarian border for six hours in the dead of night. Her problems didn't stop with her arrival to the U.S., though. The media seized on the suggestion that Nadia was in a relationship with the married man who had helped her escape Romania, but nothing could have been farther from the truth. Nadia was once again prisoner to a man who wanted to use her for his own ends, and she didn't break free until a fellow Romanian ex-pat invited her up to Montreal. Unfortunately, in 1991 her savior died in an accident and she was left alone again.

Having no where else to turn, she called an old American friend and fellow gymnast she had met back as a teenager and was invited to Oklahoma to work in a gymnastics academy. That friend was Bart Conner, a fellow Olympic gold medalist and member of the 1984 U.S. men's gymnastics team. They started dating and got married in 1996 in Bucharest, Romania, approximately two years after she first returned to Romania since her defection. Since then, they've lived together in Norman, Oklahoma training young gymnasts and promoting the sport. And on June 3, 2006 they welcomed a new son into their life named Dylan Paul.

Nadia's hardships and her triumphs have helped define who she is today. But to the world, she will always be known as the perfect 10 gymnast from the Montreal Olympics who helped change the history of the sport.