The gymnast star, who was one of the best athletes of the 20th century, made the world gasp 48 years ago.
The world’s most famous hockey club, the Montreal Canadiens, won the Stanley Cup again in the 1975-76 season in its Forum arena. However, two months after the championship celebrations in May, an athlete stepped into the Forum, the likes of which had not been seen there until then and was hardly even seen.
The world gasped the 14-year-old by Nadia Comaneci in the face of skill, when the native of socialist Romania achieved three Olympic golds and one silver in the balance beam arena built in the Forum.
Mixed up the technology
Successfully defended his endurance running double gold for the Finns Lasse Viren was of course the biggest name of the Games, but globally the title went unspeakably to the 161-centimeter, feather-light Comanec, who messed up even the technical equipment of the Games with different level trees.
Display boards made by In its design, Omega had not even taken into account the possibility that an athlete would receive mercy from the strict judges for a full pot, i.e. 10.0 points.
When Comanec’s performance on the different level trees received four such quotes, the scoreboard showed the Romanian a score of 1.0. Comaneci took three full tens from the booms of his second parade stand.
Comanec’s top career, which gained feminine forms in four years, was practically over after the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, i.e. two golds and the 1981 Universiade in Bucharest. Comaneci graduated from the Bucharest Sports University as a physical education teacher and gymnastics coach.
– How has time gone by so quickly? the friendly legend sighed when Urheilu asked about his Olympic memories from 48 years ago at Charles de Gaulle Airport on Tuesday.
– Those memories still seem like yesterday, Comaneci says and asks the reporter with a smile if he remembers the startling fireworks display in Montreal.
Yes, I remember, I was already nine years old. Today, for Olympic gymnastics, it is required that the athlete turns 16 at the latest during the Olympic calendar year. In Comanec’s time, it was enough to be 14 years old on the opening day of the Games.
After his active career, Comaneci has been present at the Olympic Games in different roles almost all the time, VIP treatment awaits in Paris.
The agents were on fire
In 1984, agents of the Romanian security service Securitate watched the current honorary president of his country’s Olympic Committee and Gymnastics Federation like a shark ship at the Los Angeles Games, because the coach who beat Comanec Bela Karolyi had humiliatingly defected from Romania to the USA in 1981.
Comaneci later told about the training methods used by Karoly and her spouse terrible things. The price of success was physically and mentally dead.
In Los Angeles 1984, Comanec’s defection would have been a huge disgrace for Romania, which, unlike other socialist countries in Eastern Europe, participated in the games organized by the Americans.
Believes in Biles like a mountain
The greatest female gymnast of the 2010s and 2020s has been from the USA Simone Biles, which Comaneci knows intimately. Biles’ mental breakdown and suspension of the Games was huge news in Tokyo 2021, but the return of no fewer than four golds at the 2023 World Championships is convincing.
– Simone is having a great Olympic Games in Paris. I’ve seen her training and competing and I’m absolutely sure of it, says Comaneci.
Since 1989, he has lived mainly in the USA, where he ended up defecting from Romania illegally in November 1989. Just one month later, the hated dictator Nicolae Ceausescu Elena– his wife looked at the loaded rifles from the boring side of the barrels.
Male Olympic champion
In the United States, in 1996, Comaneci married an American who also won Olympic gold in balance beam gymnastics Bart Conner’s with; the couple has an 18-year-old son. For decades, the family business has run a coaching clinic, sports equipment business and media publishing for the gymnastics industry.